Hewwo, and welcome!

If you're at all familiar with my Internet presence, which you most likely are, you'll know that I usually post updates on Mastodon as well as my website.

So why in the world do I need a newsletter?

Great question! There's actually a lot of reasons why, but the short answer is that it's a very healthy and simple way for people to stay updated on how I've been and what I'm up to.

Mastodon is great but it has three issues:

1. I frequently need to step away from it for various reasons.
2. The vast majority of people who follow me only end up seeing my silly animations and memes, and posts about projects and site updates get easily swept away on the feeds of many of them.
3. Not everyone who's interested in my stuff is even on Mastodon to begin with.

I also post updates on my website, which I will absolutely continue to do, but that has issues too:

1. Most people don't use RSS feed readers. (I currently don't use one either.)
2. There are certain things that just don't make sense to have website update posts for. Those posts also end up being more like "wrap up" posts where I'll aggregate all the changes I've made since the last post, rather than being realtime notifications.
3. Sometimes, like right now, I'm not even able to make posts on my site because of a major overhaul that's being worked on.

And literally any other option has its own load of issues I'm not gonna get into. Suffice it to say, I could make use of a newsletter.

I definitely can't wait to see where this newsletter goes! I have some initial plans for how I'm going to use it, but who knows, I wouldn't be surprised if it evolves over time to something a little more interesting.

Anyway, I hope you have a good rest of your day! And, of course, the next newsletter will contain real updates :P