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Comment by pocketarc | Hacker News Reader

> Other platforms like Twitter have captured the space of short form writing

Does this ever feel like a waste? Are there good thoughts, ideas, and quips you've written and shared, that were then essentially lost to time? Since those thoughts are not archived on your website, when (if ever) do you (or anyone else) ever get to see them again?

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I remember talking with a dev and they had posted a tutorial or how to on a thing on twitter.

It was nearly impossible to find. Search didn't work. No good direct link or easy way to find it.

I ultimately spent 2 hours scrolling past (thanks infinite scroll nightmare) to several years ago to find it.

There was no good way to jump to a given year

Yes. That's why I have "microposts" on my blog's home-made SSG. I add an entry to a JSON5 file with the text, the RFC 3339 date, and a GUID (for permalinks) and it gets built into the site as a Tweet-like entry.

This reduces the friction in sharing things, since building a whole new page takes a few minutes.

I actually archive any sort of short-form writing that I think is valuable in my site :) In fact, I compose Twitter threads first as a regular post where each paragraph fits in a tweet, then copy/paste those onto Twitter, and then share the link to the "real" post at the end (to avoid my content being slurped into "thread reader" apps).

But there are lots of short, one-off random-thought tweets that are not worth archiving other than for downloading a copy of your data from these services and saving it offline.

Do conversations you have throughout the day with people in your neighborhood feel like a waste?

If I know I’m going to like them later, I post them to my blog first and let it crosspost to Mastodon for me. If I post to Mastodon first and it catches more interest than I expected, I’ll pull it back to my blog and maybe expand it into a bigger post.

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