Heya there, and welcome to the first post on a website that, at the moment, contains almost nothing. So naturally, let me explain why I built it.
I’ve been thinking about my relationship with social media for roughly as long as Tom has been my friend on MySpace. Over the last twenty-plus years, I’ve accumulated accounts across more platforms than I care to count, from MySpace and Facebook to LinkedIn, Instagram, Substack, Bluesky, and whatever else I probably signed up for and forgot about.
Somewhere along the way, I started noticing how each platform slowly turned me into a different version of myself. LinkedIn gets professional Minh. Instagram gets travel, food, and random-life Minh. Facebook mostly gets uncle-of-six-nieces Minh. Substack gets the version of me who apparently has thoughts requiring 1,500 words. None of those people are fake. They’re just incomplete. And honestly, LinkedIn Minh by himself is kinda boring. He needs a little Instagram Minh mixed in every once in a while.
The other thing I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with is the little attention economy we’ve built around likes, reposts, followers, and subscribers. I completely understand why people care about those things. For creators, founders, writers, and plenty of others, social media is part of the business model. For me, though, I started questioning my own motivations. Am I sharing something on LinkedIn because I genuinely think it’s interesting or useful, or because some tiny part of my brain thinks it might perform well? Am I writing something because I actually want to think through it, or because I’m wondering whether anyone will subscribe? I didn’t love having to ask myself those questions.
So this site is my little experiment in anti-social social media. The idea is pretty simple, put everything under one roof and see what happens when I stop separating myself into different platforms. A thought about AI geopolitics might sit next to a photo of me struggling to put up a tent, a semiconductor rabbit hole next to learning how to make jerky. Professional Minh, nerd Minh, uncle Minh, travel Minh, and whatever other version happens to show up.
I also wanted to remove some of the machinery around social media altogether. There’s no like button, no comments, no follower count, no subscription box, no algorithm trying to decide which version of me you’re most likely to engage with, and no email announcing that I have once again developed an opinion about something nobody asked about. If you’re curious about what I’m up to, you’ll have to do something painfully old-school and actually visit the website.
And if something here makes you want to respond, you’ll have to text me, email me, or, God forbid, call. Basically Web 1.0 with better fonts.
So yeah, this is my attempt to break down some of those digital silos and put the pieces back together in one place. I built it with AI, my own rules, and no particular ambition to grow an audience. Just a social network with a membership of one.
Come back sometime. Maybe by then this social network of one will have a few more things worth lurking on.
Roll credits.