Seems like as good a time as any to wrap things up here — in my copious spare time over the past year or so I’ve been determined to make my content self-hosted (or at least self-archived).
This year my actual social posting shifted to a mix of linkedin, bluesky, and mastodon, but I occasionally ducked in here.
Come 2024, my tweets, my conference talks, my posts to fallow tumblrs, and so on will be going up on http://eaton.fyi.
Initially it started as “I should archive my tweets before this place reaches its final form as some combination of MySpace, Daily Stormer, and Post-Acquisition Delicious” but it turned into an exercise in normalizing my “stuff” from about 30y of writing.
Then it turned into an obsessive quest to find archived versions of every site I’ve ever worked on — triple digits with a lot of “that domain no longer exists,” as it turns out.
Then I started building vector embeddings for everything, which has been really fascinating.
And at that point it seemed natural to automate wikidata queries and random spreadsheets full of stats for cultural context. (“What ubiquitous startups did this post predate? How many web-capable smartphones existed when this talk came out?”)
It’s been fun/horrible to read my own crap takes, evangelical cringe, tech asides, and occasional on-point predictions dating back to the pre-web era. Usenet was a hell of a thing.
It certainly prompted a lot of reflection and soul-searching, which I guess counts as scope creep.
Among other things, it helps put Twitter in context. I’ve been consistently active here longer than almost any other platform on the Internet, shitposting and arguing and talking shop and meeting you all.
But it’s just one particularly temporarily popular place on the Internet.
If I haven’t connected with you on one of those other places yet, I totally want to. My social links are listed on my site, and if you want to drop me a line the info’s there too.
What made this place what it was for that stretch of time is dead — or at least in the throes — but there’s a big internet out there. More fragmented, less accelerated, but still filled with people who make it worthwhile.
Happy 2024, friends.
You’re amazing.