Writing Fragments

If you’re a regular reader of my site, you’ll have noticed that in the
last few months I’ve been making a number of “fragments” posts. Such a post
is a short post with a bunch of little, unconnected segments. These are
usually a reference to something I’ve found on the web, sometimes a small
thought of my own.

A few years ago, I wouldn’t have covered these topics with posts on my
own site. Instead I would use Twitter, either retweeting someone else’s
point, or just highlighting something I’d found. But since the Muskover,
Twitter has effectively died. I’m not saying that due to any technical
issues with the site, which has mostly just been fine, nor directly due to
any of the policy changes there. The point is that lots of people have left, so that
the audience I would have reached with Twitter is now fragmented. Some
remain on X, but I see more activity on LinkedIn. There’s also the Fediverse/Mastodon
and Bluesky.

What this means for short posts is that I can no longer just post in one
place. When I announce new articles on martinfowler.com, I announce now on
four social media sites (X, LinkedIn, Fediverse, and Bluesky). It makes
sense to do this, but I don’t want to go through all this hassle for the
kind of micro-post that Twitter served so well.

So I’ve started to batch them up. When I see something interesting, I
make a note. When I have enough notes, I post a fragments post. Initially I
did this in a rather ad-hoc way, just using the same mechanisms I use for
most articles, but last week I started to put in some more deliberate
mechanisms into the site. (If you’re observant, you’ll spot that in the URLs.)

One benefit of all of this, at least in my book, is that it means my material is
now fully visible in RSS. I’m probably showing my age, but I’m a big fan of RSS
(or in my case, strictly Atom) feeds. I miss the feel of the heyday of the
“blogosphere” before it got steamrolled by social media, and these fragment
posts are, of course, just the same as the link blogs from that era. I still use my
RSS reader every day to keep up with writers I like. (I’m pleased that Substack
makes its content available via RSS.) It bothered me a bit that my micro-founts
of Twitter knowledge weren’t visible on RSS, but was too lazy to do something
about it. Now I don’t need to – the fragments are available in my RSS feed.