After a year without Twitter, I found myself mostly happy with the decision. The level of ephemeral brain noise in my life had plummeted: No more passing outrage I was never going to act on, no more confusing news updates to misconstrue, no more worrying about how to behave or what to say on a public forum.
But I did find myself missing updates from a couple key people, and I would sometimes find myself Googling people’s twitter profiles and scrolling through months worth of updates. The habit started to become a time suck, and pointed to a problem in need of a solution: how do I stay caught up with people who share their life on Twitter, while not giving my time & attention over to the Twitter algorithm & culture?
The answer turned out to be Mailbrew. Mailbrew is a super cool service that allows me to collect daily updates from various sources across the web (including Twitter profiles), and configure a digest of updates to be sent to me on a daily basis. I’ve blogged previously about how using HEY as my email service has made it easy for me to subscribe to & read lots of interesting blogs & newsletters in their own dedicated feed; adding a daily Mailbrew digest to the HEY feed has supercharged that ability.
One delightful thing about Mailbrew is I can choose to subscribe not just to the Tweets but to the likes of certain Twitter accounts; this lets me see what someone is seeing (& enjoying) online, regardless of whether they’re actually posting… and it gives me my own hand-picked daily feed of funny tweets & memes from my friends.
The Mailbrew digest started as a way to get the tweets from just a handful of accounts: my siblings, a few friends, and a few interesting tech folks. But it’s ended up expanding into a longer digest with lots of other stuff - I get the daily Dilbert, XKCD, and SMBC web-comics put into my digest, along with local news, and updates from a few fun blogs, like Waxy.org. If there’s anything you want emailed to you that doesn’t have it’s own email subscriber list… it’s likely that you can find a way to get it to your inbox with Mailbrew.
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Another problem I found myself pondering was how to share my own smaller, day-to-day updates with the people I care about (my mom, mostly) without embroiling myself in the cultural affairs of mainstream social media. thombehrens.com started as a Wordpress blog, which was good for longform writing, but that feed (succeeded by this feed) goes silent for months at a time… usually because I’m just humming along enjoying myself. How to share that enjoyment?
Micro.blog. Micro.blog is a web service that lets me host my own feed of photos from daily life, interesting articles, book reviews, and more casual writing without needing to operate within the paradigm of any social media. No expectations or complications, just my updates for the world to see. My Micro.blog has been serving as the new homepage for thombehrens.com for a number of months, and it’s a service that’s fun and easy to use. At the top of the feed you’ll see a form to subscribe to the feed… that subscription is handled by the aforementioned Mailbrew, configured to send out a week’s worth of updates every Friday!
And: Micro.blog has the ability to mirror my posts onto Twitter! So folks who would rather get my Micro.blog updates from Twitter rather than email (or from navigating to the site) now have that option, by following the Twitter account @thom_again. The bio reads “This feed is a mirror of http://thombehrens.micro.blog. If you contact me on here (DM, mentions, replies)- I won't see it. Instead, send me an email.”
The combination of Micro.blog and Mailbrew has created a quarantine bubble around my Twitter presence: I can send updates to Twitter, and get updates from Twitter, without doing any actual interaction with Twitter, or subjecting myself to any content I’m not interested in. No trending topics, no ads, and — since I get updates in an email only once a day — there’s no infinite scroll or chance of distraction.
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Getting to this setup wasn’t really *about* finding a way to have quarantined access to Twitter: the most fun parts of Mailbrew (pulling in tons of interesting blogs and news) and the most fun parts of Micro.Blog (tracking & blogging about everything I read) have nothing to do with Twitter at all. But thinking of my web presence in terms of Twitter proxy is a fun way to think about things… and possibly a good angle to consider for folks looking to migrate off the platform.