I still blog, because I want control over my own archives, so that I can link back to my own posts to provide context (such as this 2004 post on the emerging SHU blogging community, or this 2011 post on the switch from MovableType to WordPress). Your past pretty much doesn’t exist if you post it to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, because those communities are built around the now.
Facebook and Twitter posts, as we know all too well, force you to sacrifice subtlety for space. (Medium has the opposite problem—it’s always existed as a venue for longform; now it’s trying to build a bigger audience.) Platforms have figured out how to monopolize their attention; in a way, bloggers should be glad that they’re now getting more tools to command that attention for themselves without having to compress their thoughts into an arbitrarily small box. Yes, you give up a degree of independence when you commit your content to someone else’s site. But you also become much easier to discover.Such are the tradeoffs of a post-web world. The blog—a shortening of “weblog” is on its way out. Now we’re blogging on platforms. We are—yes, we’re going to say it—plogging. –Wired
Have you tried implementing open graph tags? That should prevent it from stripping any of your preview context and give you the ability to customize what shows in Facebook preview boxes.
The circle is now complete. When you left me, you were but the learner. Now you are the master. (Okay, that’s a paraphrase, and I’m paraphrasing Darth Vader, and Obi-Wan’s response is “Only a master of evil,” which is not the point I am trying to make, which is that I had never even thought of that and it’s a great idea.)
Haha. Glad to help. There are a lot of free plugins that you can use to automate it. I like the Yoast SEO plugin a lot. It lets you customize your meta tags and adds a ton of og tags for you. Lets you use a different title, description and image specifically for social.