If you’re a regular reader of my site, you’ll have noticed that in thelast few months I’ve been making a number of “fragments” posts. Such a postis a short post with a bunch of little, unconnected segments. These areusually a reference to something I’ve found on the web, sometimes a smallthought of my own.A few years ago, I wouldn’t have covered these topics with posts on myown site. Instead I would use Twitter, either retweeting someone else’spoint, or just highlighting something I’d found. But since the Muskover,Twitter has effectively died. I’m not saying that due to any technicalissues with the site, which has mostly just been fine, nor directly due toany of the policy changes there. The point is that lots of people have left, so thatthe audience I would have reached with Twitter is now fragmented. Someremain on X, but I see more activity on LinkedIn. There’s also Fediverse/Mastodonand Bluesky.What this means for short posts is that I can no longer just post in oneplace. When I announce new articles on martinfowler.com, I announce now onfour social media sites (X, LinkedIn, Fediverse, and Bluesky). It makessense to do this, but I don’t want to go through all this hassle for thekind of micro-post that Twitter served so well.So I’ve started to batch them up. When I see something interesting, Imake a note. When I have enough notes, I post a fragments post. Initially Idid this in a rather ad-hoc way, just using the same mechanisms I use formost articles, but last week I started to put in some more deliberatemechanisms 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 isnow 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 fragmentposts are, of course, just the same as the link blogs from that era. I still use myRSS reader every day to keep up with writers I like. (I’m pleased that Substackmakes its content available via RSS.) It bothered me a bit that my micro-fountsof Twitter knowledge weren’t visible on RSS, but was too lazy to do somethingabout it. Now I don’t need to - the fragments are available in my RSS feed.