One of my longtime problems with internet publishing has been the challenge of being spread too thin and being in too many places. At any given moment over the last 25 years, I’ve had more than one internet property. Maybe the only time this wasn’t the case was from 2000 to 2005 when I didn’t have much of an internet presence. At some points it was mostly social media driven, but over the last ten years it has been an awful combination of Substack, single-page websites, social media platforms, and other random little plots of digital land.

With the advent of Substack, which I started using about six years ago before you or anyone else had ever heard of it, it became very easy to publish and launch new Substacks. I probably started 20 different ones. Most of them never saw the light of day, but there are some which are public and out there. There’s Speak Up, there’s my personal blog, there’s a Shaw family blog, there was one called Full Pursuit for a while. There are also Substacks that I’m an admin or collaborator on, like York County Prayer.

And then earlier this year I started back up again with indie publishing on self-hosted WordPress blogs. This has been an absolute joy. I’ve been able to reclaim the beauty of the unique web, reclaim the quirkiness of every element custom-designed, and I’ve been able to start to get away from the soul-sucking, toxic, hope-eroding, lifeless, limp, navel-gazing, mirror-worshiping social media feed morass of awfulness that Substack has become, even though I’m still using Substack a little bit. So with WordPress publishing, I’ve launched site after site after site, mostly the exploration of ideas, experiments, trying different things.

I’m in too many places on the internet.

And part of what that does is it allows very siloed versions of me to show up. Because really nobody sees what I’m posting or knows what I’m posting, which is actually a downside of this ability to be diffused in so many places. Because I have these outlets, mostly private and mostly unseen by the larger world, it allows for an easier compartmentalization. And while I’m not being false anywhere, there is a falseness by omission on certain platforms because I’m releasing that content elsewhere.

All this to say I’m carrying a burning to start consolidating, to start bringing myself to just a couple places on the internet. And I think in the process of doing that, I’m going to reclaim some moral authority that I’ve lost and reclaim some clarity of purpose.