I taught courses on social software and media, web presence and culture, etc., for years. And I maintained (and periodically destroyed) a complex web of different sites and services for many years. Pictures here. Short posts there. A big topic in another place. A wiki for this and another for that. You get the idea.
And my penchant for order carried itself down to a lot of hand-wringing about categories vs tags, nesting and hierarchies, etc.
But I look back now and almost all of that was wasted time and energy. Not just intrinsically, but also because it provided a convenient procrastination station, a place for me to spend a lot of time preparing and planning for work instead of creating those works.
What I wish almost every individual making web stuff would do is: choose a web bucket that provides an RSS feed and put everything there. If it makes sense, perhaps another bucket or two for specific kinds of media, or masses of media, such as a place for all of one’s pictures if you take a lot of them. And that’s it. No need for endless conversation about organization, constantly moving from site to site looking for perfection, and trying to tweak every post for dozens of streams or purposes.
If this sounds a lot like the old web, that’s because it is a lot like the old web. And if it sounds like a plea for more people who talk less about the mechanics of hosting and sharing creative work and more creative work, that’s because it is also that.
Perhaps it was the sheer mass that allowed for topical communities that were more about the topic than the platform, but I was part of many groups on X/Twitter/TheBirdSite that spent very little time talking about X/Twitter/TheBirdSite: poets talking about poetry, typewriter people geeking out about typewriters, coffee enthusiasts arguing about coffee…on Mastodon and Micro.Blog those communities are exceedingly difficult to find (if they exist at all).
I get that some of the difference is because the first adopters of new platforms—especially those platforms that may be less initially user-friendly than popular social media sites—tend to be technically-minded, but I suspect there is a large, mostly untapped demand for topical groups that rarely, if ever, talk about the platforms they are on.