Adding Slices

I have always had social media. I got a Facebook account in 2011 and Twitter shortly after. I made a Reddit account in 2013. A lot of my interactions with my friends in my mid-teens were via Snapchat. And for nearly 10 years from 2014 my most used app was Instagram.

If I was asked whether my time on social media over the past 15 years was mostly positive or negative I don’t think I’d be confident in my answer. If I was asked that same question about the previous 5 years the answer would be confidently negative.

Instagram is a feed of adverts and scripted influencer nonsense. Twitter is a cesspit of racism and hate. And aside from a few good communities, Reddit basically serves as an aggregator for videos from TikTok and Instagram.

This isn’t to say that social media was always perfect, far from it. But it at least served the purpose for which it was built.

This decline in the usability of social media, as well as it being used as a tool by governments to influence elections or private parties to control narratives, has meant that I have all but given up on it.

I believe the counter to this is creating my own. I’ve recently come across several personal sites where the authors have built their own twitter-style feeds to post small updates. These feeds let the author control the content, style, and form of the posts. They are casual or technical or fun. By building it themselves they are not limited to posting just text or pictures. They can include any hypermedia they want, with any styling they want, and any extra functionality they want.

So I’ve decide to add Slices to my site. Slices because a slice in Go allows access to the underlying array, and these posts will allows access into my current thoughts, ideas, and updates.