First post

There are a lot of good reasons to not get too invested in making a first post perfect, or even good.

For one thing, there's the ever-present worry that the platform won't work the way you expect it to. You press the "post" button, but you were supposed to know that "post" actually means "delete" my post, and now you have several paragraphs down the drain. Or you write a post that looks good but immediately reads extremely bad once it's uploaded because of evil internet psychological magic. I don't know.

This is my first ever post on Dreamwidth, a platform I've never posted on before, and barely even know how to browse on. But I'm interested in learning.

And now I will hit the "post" button and hope that it doesn't destroy the world

Second post

True to my predictions, I did experience a minor hassle getting my first post published. Turns out I never verified my email and Dreamwidth was not happy about that. So then I had to find the old verification email, click the link, get told that the link had expired, ask Dreamwidth to send me a new email, wait for the email to come in, click the verification link in the new email, and then hit the post button.

I'm saying all this not to complain but just to illustrate that every new platform you set up an account on has its own hiccups. I think it's good to sign up for new platforms as the old ones die (like Cohost) or turn evil (like Twitter), the process of signing up for new platforms is a task that we trivialize at our own peril. If we pretend it's easy, then we unnecessarily discourage people who are not techy, or who are facing barriers we don't know about (maybe they only have access to a library computer, maybe they're doing everything through their phone). And then we miss out on the diversity of voices that our online communities *could* be supporting.

Anyways, I'm here. I'm posting. It's less scary than I thought.