Welcome. What is this?

I’ve grown weary of social media. I like sharing things with you, but I’m not comfortable with all of our interests and attention being swallowed up as “content” for the billionaire class to harvest and profit from. They’ve managed to take something simple and beautiful like showing each other the view from a neighborhood walk at sunset or sharing a book we found fascinating and turn it into a warped influencer dystopia.

I’m old enough to remember a time when the internet was real people just finding ways to connect over shared interests. We had message boards and blogs and geocities websites hand-coded in HTML. It was nice. I even had a “News” page (before the rise of blogs) and a message board on this very website at the turn of the century (told you I’m old). I decided a few years ago that I wasn’t going to join any new social media sites except to possibly secure a username and point it back to my own website. I started posting The Poet every day on Substack because I liked that it worked as a simple daily distribution spot for the comic - I could schedule them ahead of time and the strip automatically gets emailed at 8am every morning, arriving in your inbox like a newspaper comic would on your front steps. I also liked that it didn’t require you to have another app that would suck you down the rabbit hole of trends, ads, comparisons, and doom-scrolling that we’ve all unfortunately become victims of.

But, I still wanted to be able to share stuff with you that might not be comics stuff. I just didn’t want to do it on Instagram. I’m not interested in building a following. I’d rather just have a spot you can CHOOSE TO VISIT when you think of it. That’s how I’m thinking of this space. Instead of posting stuff onto Instagram, where an algorithm chooses where your attention goes, I’ll post stuff here on my site - so you can reclaim your attention. If you’d like to keep up with me, just visit toddbot.com every now and again, and I’ll fill you in on what I’m up to, or what I’m looking at, listening to, or whatever.

The Poet will continue via Substack, and in its various book collections (The Poet Quarterly and the big annual Volumes are my favorite printed forms), and anything else social-media-ish will be right here.

I hope you’ll come visit.