On March 22, 2026, Andreas at 82MHz published a blog post titled Mastodon (Bluesky/X/Instagram) is not the right platform for posting long-form content (a blog is). As a threshold matter, I am glad he wrote this as a blog post instead of a social media thread, not least because I would have almost certainly not read it had it been posted as a social media thread. The other reasons why I am glad to see this published as a blog post instead of a social media thread are explained by the post itself.
Andreas describes a microblogging phenomenon that began with the former Twitter and then spread to Twitter-like (now X-like) “microblogging” platforms such as Mastodon and Bluesky. It consists of creating long “threads” of connected micro-posts to create a longer narrative, or in olden parlance, a blog post. As Andreas opines, and I agree, “[t]his is not a good way to present a long-form article.” Why not? He lists several reasons, all of which I find agreeable:
- “It makes it unnecessarily difficult to read…”
- “It’s cognitively exhausting…”
- “[B]y splitting [an article] up into 14 tiny little chunks of information which are interrupted by a block of useless pictograms which have no relevance to the article, you’re making it way more difficult for the reader to actually engage with your writing than it needs to be.”
- “It also makes rediscovering this content almost impossible.”
I encourage everyone to read the original article. My short summary is no substitute for the real thing. I presented the above quotes to give readers an idea of some of Andreas’ general arguments against using microposting social media platforms and servers to present serialized (so to speak) blog posts and articles.
Of course, it is one thing to offer a critique and another to offer a solution. Very much in the spirit of my somewhat-recent essay on defining good things in tech in a positive way – that is explaining what makes them good in and of themselves before presenting them as alternatives to other things – Andreas offered an alternative to fracturing articles for publication in a microblogging format:
I’m in no position to tell anyone what to do, so I’d merely like to make a suggestion: Get a website. Start a blog. Create a place where your long-form writing feels at home. It’s not as complex as it sounds. You can write, you can make an account on social media. You got this. Put your writing in a place where it can live long-term, rather than just throwing it on social media where it will disappear into the [a]ether a few days, if not a few hours after you wrote it.
I agree in full. I am in no better position than Andreas to tell anyone how to live his or her life, but I too would recommend starting a writing website (blog or non-blog) and giving your writing a home. While I do not think everyone needs to write articles and blog posts on the internet, this advice is being presented to people who are otherwise turning 500-word articles and blog posts into social media threads. I would alternatively suggest moving one’s long-form writing to a hosted writing platform such as Substack, WordPress.com, Buttondown, Bear, Blogger, or even Medium (Medium is terrible though) before stringing together threads (pun unintended).
While reading, I had in mind some additional reasons why articles are best presented on websites for articles and blog posts instead of social media (note again before continuing that I agree with Andreas’ post in full, so consider the foregoing my personal addendum).
I do not dismiss microblogging as a format entirely. This is evinced by the fact that I started The Emu Café Social as a short-form writing companion site to this humble online writing magazine after originally separating short posts into this site’s Leaflet and Leafbud sections. It is possible to be an adroit “poster” on X. But while one can post effectively, the microposting platforms are not broadly conducive to generating good “content,” as I opined in March 2021 in Murakami on Bad Social Media Content. While some of the issues are particular to the big tech social media platforms (my 2021 article focused on former Twitter), most of the “alternatives” incorporate by reference the formats of the proprietary platforms, as I discussed in Fediverse Clone Wars and Decentralized Social Media and Substack Notes’ Twitter Clone War (see also On the Matter of TikTok Alternatives on The Emu Café Social).
In July 2025, I published an article titled On Online Reader Expectations. There, I tackled a quote about bland trends in travel articles suggesting with concern that “[readers] just want to be told where to go and what to eat.” I suggested that while it may be the case that readers are looking for instructions instead of inspiration, that may well be because search engines and social media platforms promote a certain format of travel article (do X, Y, and Z) over other formats ( presenting ideas or inspiration instead of instructions). If someone views the internet through the prism of Google, Facebook, and other social media platforms, his or her expectations for a category of article may depend on what is surfaced by those platforms.
Now let us come full circle and bring all of these ideas together. Focusing solely on micrblogging social media platforms (X, Threads, Bluesky, Truth, and Minds) and servers (Mastodon and other ActivityPub servers), people who peruse these sites will have expectations about what they will find based on the general tenor of the sites. While articles-as-threads are a known phenomenon, the platforms are conducive to one-off posts which get to the point (or some semblance of the point) within the confines of a short character limit. Someone scrolling one of these sites are usually not going in with a deep-thinking and deep-reading mindset, because that is not what these websites are designed for. To the extent they are conducive to profundity, that is best expressed in a short quip or cartoon which makes one think, not in a 15-post thread comprising an article.
People with a decent number of social media followers may garner more impressions (or views) for a thread-as-article on a social media site than an article on their own site. But “impressions” are not the same as meaningful engagement, by which I mean someone taking the time to read and think about what he or she read instead of “engagement” in the social media sense of views and platform-internal interactions. The aforementioned social media websites are not conducive to deep reading. A website is. It is entirely possible that while fewer people may see a blog post or article than a blog-or-article-as-thread on social media, more people may nevertheless read and consider it on the former.
It should come as no surprise from the fact that I post many long articles here on The New Leaf Journal and shorter articles and posts on The Emu Café Social that I am firmly in the camp of preferring articles and blogs, sometimes in conversation with one another, to social media, even granting that the popular social media formats can be used to good effect. I generally do not “post” on social media beyond sharing writing from my own sites, and to the extent I read the posts of others, I read them for specific purposes (usually staying on top of fast-breaking events or occasionally seeing links to good writing outside those platforms). My purpose here is not to tell anyone to use one and not the other in a general sense, but instead to think about the best or most natural place for one’s own writing and media depending on what it is. If you have enough to say for a long social media thread, perhaps you have enough to say to write the same thing on a website (preferably, but not necessarily, one you fully control) where the potential audience is looking to sit with it, engage in deep reading, and perhaps save it for future reference.
