At Numeric Citizen’s recommendation I downloaded the Ulysses app for iPadOS, as it has built-in micro.blog integration. Lo and behold, I had already used Ulysses for posting to my old Pelican blog, back in 2016. I know this because it still had unpublished drafts, forgotten and abandoned in its iCloud sync folder. Here is one from February 8, 2016, title as above:
This is why post-2010 Internet is dangerous. Buzzfeed, 9gag, etc. are in an arms race for clicks via overproduction of worthless garbage that gives you illusion of knowledge and/or understanding. The battlefields are Facebook, Twitter, and your mind. Only one of those is likely to survive without significant collateral damage.
The sentiment still stands.
Beside the point but interesting nevertheless is that I would easily have published it as is — well, let’s pretend that last sentence turned out better — had micro.blog existed back then. But when posting to a blog is this whole production: is the header OK; is the markdown file in the right folder; make the blog; commit to git; push; oh no, there’s a bunch of typos; why is it throwing these error messages… when there is that much overhead, you are kind of incentivised to write the kind of long treatises I backhandedly mentioned yesterday. So that meger paragraph above obviously wasn’t enough for me to cross the activation energy treshold for publishing.
Which is too bad: I could have planted a flag for digital minimalism years before Cal Newport.