Back in the day, I used to dance. Not professionally or anything; I was involved in a “scene”. I co-produced a club night in a venue off Oxford Street (London), and religiously attended a few other nights that catered to similar tastes, pitched somewhere between broken beat and jazz-dance music. It was a relatively small, tight-knit scene and on more than one occasion I went out for the night on my own (or “on my Jack Jones”), knowing that I was there for the music, and that there’d always be a few people I’d recognise in the venue— the DJs, people on the door, random people in the crowd I knew simply because we’d shared the same space so often that there was some sense of connection— to the extent that I never felt alone.

Returning to Micro.blog this week has felt something like I’d imagine (or hope?) it might feel like if I returned to that same music scene after a few years away. I thought I’d fire up my old account, slip in quietly, figure some things out, make a few awkward missteps on the road to establishing some sense of how things work now. Within a few hours of logging in and posting a tentative first message, I had a smattering of “welcome back” messages. Those welcomes have warmed me— some from people I interact with elsewhere on the internet, some from people I started to connect with when I first dabbled with Micro.blog back in 2018, and others just welcoming me back to the neighbourhood.

It’s early days yet, but with so much cynical and exploitative activity going on elsewhere in the world of social media, Micro.blog already feels like a good place to be.