How I Internet Now
I'm coming up on almost 30 years of being a citizen of the internet. The shape of the web has gone through some wild changes in that time. A lot has also stayed the same! I thought I'd take a moment to document how connected I am to the WWW in 2024. And apparently I'm not the only one taking stock of this. Chris Glass posted something similar recently, in response to another blogger he follows. A lot is changing online in 2024. I think many of us are rethinking our relationship to all of this.
Reading
Most of my reading online takes place in two places: Feedly and Instapaper. RSS is the heart of it. A few times a day, I run through the feeds, either reading posts and articles then and there or saving them to Instapaper to read later. It's a ton of personal websites, a bunch of current event mags like The Atlantic, Vox, New Republic, or The New Yorker, and also your general newspapers like the NYT, WSJ, Guardian, Washington Post, Le Monde. And then dozens of other blogs/sites focused on design, home and decor, tech, culture, art, etc.
I rarely watch videos online, but I do save some things to my Watch Later tab on YouTube. I mostly forget that exists.
Personal Website(s)
With the latest iteration of this site, I've made a significant change. I've separated my personal life from my professional. My design work can now be found on a separate domain: brianfeeney.design. I chose this for two reasons. First, I wanted a more direct link to my portfolio which could be 100% my work. And second, I wanted my personal site to better reflect my personality outside of the office. I'm the same person whether at work or home. But as for design and presentation, there is a distinction.
This website is intended to be a repository for all the things I make for fun. It's also where I post in lieu of social media sites. Having grown up in the era of personal websites — weblogs ... blogs — that's the internet I most cherished. It's the internet I'd love to see flourish again. RSS is the social media I most appreciate; it's the purest form of posting and sharing. Everything which came after may be more advanced, but it isn't better. It may be easier, but it's not quite as personal. At this URL, you'll find my writing, my photos, my music (when I eventually post some), my shared links and favorite media, etc. I love seeing what other people share on their own sites, and, in a way, having a personal website is a way to repay the favor, should anyone care to stop by.
BrianFeeney.design is my professional portfolio, my online resume. As such, it's designed to be a bit more buttoned up. That's to reflect the kind of work I do. At least, the work I've done so far and expect to continue to do. When you hire me, you're getting design that's human, colorful, empathetic, joyful.
After the 2020 election, I was pretty much done interacting with posts on Twitter. I was still addicted to reading it, but I stopped tweeting, retweeting, liking things, etc. That was my way of weening myself off of it. I think it worked, because when Musk bought the thing in October of 2022, I was able to log out and walk away cleanly. As the site crumbled and curdled into its worst possible self, I missed it less and less. The night before Twitter became X (July 2023), I exported my 16 year old account and nuked it. @bfeeney was empty for about a month before a teen (or bot) named Brandon reactivated it. He's following 1 person and has not yet posted.
Mastodon
This is the better Twitter replacement. Or, to be more precise, the Fediverse is, running on ActivityPub. It feels the most natural, somehow. You can find me there at [email protected], an account I created while at the XOXO conference in Portland in 2018. In the months following the death of Twitter, most of the web-making folks in my circles moved to Mastodon; developers and designers, but mostly developers. It's stayed mostly an engineers space due to it's geeky internet-edness. That's a shame, but perhaps Threads joining the Fediverse will give it some life. I don't really post there, but I'd like to. Maybe one day I will start that up.
Bluesky
On Bluesky, I found most of the journalists, writers, lawyers, and shitposters I had once followed on Twitter. It seems poised to become the Global Town Square which Twitter aimed to be, if anything ever will. It's biggest drawback is that it's built on a different protocol than ActivityPub, and so I suspect it to devolve into another Social Media Company like all the rest. Maybe that's ok? I don't know. But I don't really feel like posting there. I'm just lurking. I'm feeney.bsky.social.
I'm there and I'll connect with you if we're friends or have worked together. Not once have I enjoyed browsing that site's feed. Not once have I posted. It has a really weird culture. Business!
Still such a great site. I really love it. I kinda wish it was more social somehow, but perhaps if they did pivot that way I'd hate it. I like saving visual stuff that inspires me. Art, illustration, photography, furniture and architecture, graphic design, etc. My account is here.
I peruse my account there maybe once a month via iOS Safari. I stopped posting in 2018. Nearly all but a few of my friends stopped posting there, as well. It was the best social media site for awhile. Now it feels abandoned to the Influencers.
I deactivated my account there in maybe 2018? It was falling into the same hole Instagram had, which leads one to think its issues come from management at the top. Bad decisions somewhere by Zuck and his C Suite. At one point, I was really disgusted by Facebook's gross misuse of data, which is one reason I closed my account. These days it's clear that everyone everywhere is abusing your data, so holding it against Facebook feels like a fools brigade. I think a lot of my family is still there, which makes me think one day I might go back. My principles stand against it is feeling less effective now. So we'll see.
Tumblr
It's great. I barely use it at all. But it's great. Some people still use it like it was 2014, spinning up specialty blogs sharing art and memes and other highly directed subgenre/fandom stuff. I mostly read Tumblr blogs via RSS, though. I've kind of been using my account to post funny images I come across, stuff i want to share but don't feel like putting on my own website. You can follow that junk at briancfeeney.tumblr.com.
Slack
I'm also in six different Slack communities. My participation in those (non-work Slacks) is minimal, but far more active than any other social social media. The private nature of those is comforting, and I'm more free to be goofy or more myself. For awhile there, it seemed like Slacks were growing to replace all social networks for most of us, but that time came and went. I’m appreciative to be a member of the ones I’m in. There’s something nice about that. Human.
