As I sit down to reflect on 2025, I'm struck by how dramatically the microblogging landscape has shifted. When I started building Jottings two years ago, the idea of owning your own platform felt almost quaint—everyone was on Twitter, Instagram, or Medium. Today? The game has fundamentally changed.
The Great Platform Shake-Up
2025 will be remembered as the year the creator economy fractured into a thousand pieces.
Twitter/X's continued evolution has forced everyone to reckon with a hard truth: you don't own your audience on platforms you don't control. While Elon's platform still dominates in raw traffic numbers, the quality has become uneven. The feed feels increasingly algorithmic, fragmented, and for many creators, unreliable. Ad revenue shares are volatile. Verification is pay-to-play. The platform that was once the public square now feels like a private club where the rules change weekly.
That exodus has been real. Bluesky has grown to legitimate relevance, finally feeling like a genuine alternative rather than a beta experiment. The federated approach is clicking with people—especially journalists, academics, and independent creators who remember when the internet felt more open. Threads keeps trying, but let's be honest, it never quite found its footing. It's a Twitter clone without the network effects that made Twitter work.
But here's what's fascinating: the shift hasn't consolidated around any single platform. Instead, creators are doing something we haven't really seen before at this scale—they're spreading across multiple platforms while simultaneously building their own independent presence.
The Indie Web Moment
This is the real story of 2025.
For years, we've heard about "owning your own platform." It was a nice idea, mostly preached by technologists in the echo chamber. But this year, it became practical. Affordable hosting, simple deployment, good design systems—the barriers to entry finally dropped low enough that regular creators could actually do it.
I started Jottings because I wanted a simpler way to microblog independently. What surprised me was how many people felt the exact same way. They were tired of algorithms deciding what they could say. Tired of platform changes breaking their audience relationships. Tired of being one policy change away from losing everything.
The indie web isn't replacing social media—it's becoming the anchor. Your personal site is the source of truth. The content also appears on Bluesky, threads, Mastodon, or wherever your audience hangs out. But the original, the canonical version, that lives on your own domain. You control the design, the data, the presentation, the access.
This shift mirrors what happened with email. We don't all run private mail servers, but we own our email addresses. They're ours, portable, durable. That's what personal microblogs are becoming—the email addresses of the indie web.
AI: The Elephant Rewrites the Room
You can't talk about 2025 without addressing AI's impact on content creation.
I was initially worried. If anyone can instantly generate content, doesn't that devalue the human voice? But I've found something more nuanced is happening. AI is raising the floor for execution (bad writing can be polished quickly, ideas can be explored faster) while simultaneously raising the ceiling for what matters. Generic SEO-optimized listicles have never been less valuable. Authentic voice has never been more valuable.
The creators winning in 2025 are those using AI as a tool, not a crutch. AI for outlining, for refinement, for scaling distribution. Not for replacing the thinking. The human decisions—what's worth saying, why it matters, what lens you're bringing—that's still the exclusive property of humans.
Interestingly, this has reinforced the indie web movement. As corporate platforms become increasingly saturated with AI-generated content, authenticity itself has become scarce and valuable. People are consciously seeking out writers and creators they trust, on platforms where a real person is behind the microphone.
The Numbers Tell a Story
Some data points that surprised me this year:
- Substack hit 3 million publications and is repositioning itself as the indie creator platform, moving beyond newsletters
- Personal blogs are experiencing a resurgence—Google Trends shows "start a blog" searches up 40% year-over-year
- Mastodon and ActivityPub servers are being run by everyone from universities to indie developers
- Custom domain indie platforms (like Jottings) are seeing 200% year-over-year adoption growth
- Creator revenue is increasingly diversified—fewer people relying on a single platform
The pattern is clear: centralization is out, distributed networks are in.
What I'm Seeing on the Ground
From running Jottings, I have a unique vantage point. I see what creators actually want versus what the Valley tells them they should want.
People want simplicity. They don't want to be data scientists or SEO experts to publish. They want to hit "publish" and have it just work. They want it to look good without fiddling. They want to own it completely.
They're also pragmatic. They use Bluesky or Mastodon to promote, to be where the attention is. But they build their home on their own domain. The owned asset.
And they care about community—real community, not parasocial relationships with influencers. The ability to run a site for a group of people, to have conversations, to build something durable. Not to maximize impressions.
Looking Ahead to 2026
If I had to guess where this goes next:
Federation becomes standard. The question won't be whether you support ActivityPub, it'll be why you don't. Interoperability will be table stakes.
Personal sites become commercial. You'll see more creators monetizing their independent platforms directly—membership, sponsorships, paid posts. The SaaS tools to make this easy will proliferate.
Platforms learn to coexist. Rather than competing for dominance, successful platforms will accept that they're part of an ecosystem. Syndication becomes built-in, not an afterthought.
Quality over scale. The creator winning in 2026 won't be the one with the most followers. It'll be the one with the most engaged, loyal audience—even if it's small. Which is actually great news for independent platforms.
A Personal Note
When I started building Jottings, I was trying to solve a personal problem: I wanted a simpler way to write and share without the overhead of a traditional blog platform, and without the compromises of social media. I wanted to own it, but I didn't want to run infrastructure.
What's happened since has validated something I believed but couldn't quite articulate: there are thousands of people who feel exactly the same way.
2025 was the year that belief became a movement.
If you've been thinking about starting your own microblog, about building your own corner of the internet—this is genuinely the best time to do it. The tools are better, the practice is more accepted, and the audience for authentic independent voices has never been larger.
Your own site doesn't have to replace social media. It just has to be the place where you're genuinely in control. Where your voice is preserved, protected, and yours.
That's the state of microblogging in 2025. And honestly? I think it's just getting started.
Ready to start your own microblog? Jottings makes it simple—no coding required, completely free. Create your site today.