> This take makes it sound like people who tweet or have a blog are narcissistic or something.

Only if you make the value judgement that having hobbies that are centered around one's self is intrinsically narcissistic and therefore bad. If you think of "self-centered" simply as "centered around one's self," then there's no doubt that writing in a place that people visit with the specific aim of reading your writing is more "self-centered" and writing in a place where people visit to participate in a wider community, and are thereby exposed to your writing, is less so.

I don't even understand the claim that asserting that your writing could be interesting to a wider community is more "self-centered" than not asserting that your writing could be interesting to a wider community, and therefore should be in a place all to itself where people would only visit if they were specifically interested in you.

I think the words for the feeling you're describing are "self-important" or "egotistical." Let's instead assume that neither choice is a moral failure.

See the top definition here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/self-centered

"Egotistically obsessed with oneself."

Using "self-centered" in a neutral way is significantly less common than using it in a derogatory way, hence the previous poster's response to the phrase.

Perhaps there’s been an error in phrasing. I did not mean self-centered quite to the point of obsession, in fact neither of those categories were intended to lie at extremes—IMO the divide between them can be very nebulous actually.

You can say the opposite as well though. On forums, as you say, “there's an implicit assertion that this thing I'm posting should be interesting to that community,” which is less self-centered. I certainly know that I only post stuff on HN that others would find interesting as well. Compare this to Twitter or a blog where, also as you say, you just say whatever comes into your head which is decidedly more self centered and encourages more navel gazing because rather than take part in a larger conversation you have this digital “space” that’s all yours. I certainly think that encourages a narcissistic self-fascination and preoccupation where you are more sheltered from diverse opinions.

> This take makes it sound like people who tweet or have a blog are narcissistic or something.

Not everybody is narcissistic on Twitter and some people add value with their expertise, but a lot of people are seriously self centered.

>On the other hand, if I tweet or post on my own personal blog, then I'm not making any assertions that my writing is valuable. It's entirely up to other people to choose whether to follow me or unfollow me depending on whether they get any value out of it. This makes me feel much more comfortable posting random thoughts.

If all you wanted to do was write down your random thoughts and truly didn't need for anyone else to see them, then you could journal them on a piece of paper instead.

Picture a world where your the only user of twitter. Posting your personal thoughts would still enables a timeline and searchable permanent recording of your thoughts that’s accessible on any device more or less forever.

Being public means you can still access old posts even if you get locked out of your account.

I've been "sending myself messages" long before Telegram officially acknowledged it as a feature. It's great. I tag every "message" with its context.

But I do copy everything to local, backed-up storage.

What I haven't done yet is make it public. I expect this to be easy as I'm a full-stack dev with a custom CMS already.

There's two obstacles to that happening, however: 1) I don't believe anyone cares (yet), and 2) I'd need to check literally the entire archive for anything I don't want to publish, because I occasionally paste secrets there.

This is what I use IG for and it's pretty great. I basically just use my profile as a timeline of fun things I did. I can also point family at it for general life updates in-between major holidays.