Start a blog. Start one because the practice of writing at length, for an audience you respect, about things that matter to you, is itself valuable. Start one because owning your own platform is a form of independence that becomes more important as centralized platforms become less trustworthy. Start one because the format shapes the thought, and this format is good for thinking.
A short piece of speculative fiction.
Matthias responds to my pondering about the point of “likes” and “shares”:
I like to think of Webmentions not as a measure of popularity. To me, they measure connection. Connection to individual people and connection to the community as a whole. Webmentions let you listen into the constant noise out there and, just like a radio telescope, pick up scarcely audible echoes of connection.
I had a very pleasant experience last week while I was reading through the RSS feeds I’m subscribed to. I came across two blog posts that were responding to blog posts of my own.
Robin Sloan wrote a post clarifying his position after I linked to him in my post about the slipperiness of the term “AI”.
Then Jim Nielsen wrote a deliciously satirical piece in response to my pithy little parable about research.
I love it when this happens!
Elizabeth Spiers recently wrote a piece called What Made Blogging Different?:
And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. The effect of this was that there were few equivalents of the worst aspects of social media that broke through.
It’s so true. I feel like a response from someone’s own website is exponentially more valuable than a response on Bluesky, Mastodon, Instagram, or any other social media platform.
Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely love the way that Brid.gy will send those social-media responses right back here to my own site in the form of webmentions. It also pings me whenever someone likes or shares a post of mine. But I’ve noticed that I’m not that interested in those anymore.
Maybe those low-investment actions were carried over from the old days of Twitter just because that’s the way things were always done, without us really asking whether they serve much purpose.
Right now I accept these likes and shares as webmentions. I display a tally of each kind of response under my posts. But I’m not sure why I’m doing it. I don’t particularly care about these numbers. I’m pretty sure no one else cares either.
If I cared, then they’d be vanity metrics. As it is they’re more like zombie metrics. I should probably just put them out of their misery.
- Support open source software
- Support open web platform technology
- Distribution on the web should never be throttled
- External links should be encouraged, not de-emphasized
I left Twitter in 2022. With every day that has passed since then, that decision has proven to be correct.
(I’m honestly shocked that some people I know still have active Twitter accounts. At this point there is no justification for giving your support to a place that’s literally run by a nazi.)
I also used to have some Twitter bots. There were Twitter accounts for my blog and for my links. A simple If-This-Then-That recipe would poll my RSS feeds and then post an update whenever there was a new item.
I had something something similar going for The Session. Its Twitter bot has been replaced with automated accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky (I couldn’t use IFTTT directly to post to Bluesky from RSS, but I was able to set up Buffer to do the job).
I figured The Session’s Twitter account would probably just stop working at some point, but it seems like it’s still going.
Hah! I spoke too soon. I just decided to check that URL and nothing is loading. Now, that may just be a temporary glitch because Alan Musk has decided to switch off a server or something. Or it might be that the account has been cancelled because of how I modified its output.
I’ve altered the IFTTT recipe so that whenever there’s a new item in an RSS feed, the update is posted to Twitter along with a message like “Please use Bluesky or Mastodon instead of Twitter” or “Please stop using Twitter/X”, or “Get off Twitter—please. It’s a cesspit” or “If you’re still on Twitter, you’re supporting a fascist.”
That’s a start but I need to think about how I can get the bot to do as much damage as possible before it’s destroyed.
Now, more than ever, it’s critical to own your data. Really own it. Like, on your hard drive and hosted on your website.
Is taking control of your content less convenient? Yeah–of course. That’s how we got in this mess to begin with. It can be a downright pain in the ass. But it’s your pain in the ass. And that’s the point.
Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren’t immune to any of this—the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.
I went to FFConf on Friday. It did me the world of good.
To be honest, I haven’t much felt like venturing out over the past few days since my optimism took a big hit. But then when I do go and interact with people, I’m grateful for it.
Like, when I went out to my usual Wednesday evening traditional Irish music session I was prepared the inevitable discussion of Trump’s election. I was ready to quite clearly let people know that I didn’t want to talk about it. But I didn’t have to. Maybe because everyone else was feeling much the same, we just played and played. It was good.
The session on Thursday was good too. When we chatted, it was about music.
Still, I was ready for the weekend and I wasn’t really feeling psyched up for FFConf on Friday. But once I got there, I was immediately uplifted.
It was so nice to see so many people I hadn’t seen in quite a while. I had the chance to reconnect with people that I had only been hearing from through my RSS reader:
“Terence, I’m really enjoying your sci-fi short stories!”
“Kirsty, I was on tenterhooks when you were getting Mabel!”
(Mabel is an adorable kitty-cat. In hindsight I probably should’ve also congratulated her on getting married. To a human.)
The talks were really good this year. They covered a wide variety of topics.
There was only one talk about “AI” (unlike most conferences these days, where it dominates the agenda). Léonie gave a superb run-down of the different kinds of machine learning and how they can help or hinder accessibility.
Crucially, Léonie began her talk by directly referencing the exploitation and energy consumption inherent in today’s large language models. It took all of two minutes, but it was two minutes more than the whole day of talks at UX Brighton. Thank you, Léonie!
Some of the other talks covered big topics. Life. Death. Meaning. Purpose.
I enjoyed them all, though I often find something missing from discussions about meaning and purpose. Just about everyone agrees that having a life enfused with purpose is what provides meaning. So there’s an understandable quest to seek out what it is that gives you purpose.
But we’re also constantly reminded that every life has intrinsic meaning. “You are enough”, not “you are enough, as long as there’s some purpose to your life.”
I found myself thinking about Winne Lim’s great post on leading a purposeless life. I think about it a lot. It gives me comfort. Instead of assuming that your purpose is out there somewhere and you’ve got to find it, you can entertain the possibility that your life might not have a purpose …and that’s okay.
I know this all sounds like very heavy stuff, but it felt good to be in a room full of good people grappling with these kind of topics. I needed it.
Dare I say it, perhaps my optimism is returning.
I described using my feed reader like this:
I would hate if catching up on RSS feeds felt like catching up on email.
Instead it’s like this:
When I open my RSS reader to catch up on the feeds I’m subscribed to, it doesn’t feel like opening my email client. It feels more like opening a book.
It also feels different to social media. Like Lucy Bellwood says:
I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram.
There’s also the blessed lack of any algorithm:
Because blogs are much quieter than social media, there’s also the ability to switch off that awareness that Someone Is Always Watching.
Cory Doctorow has been praising the merits of RSS:
This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface.
Like Lucy, he emphasises the lack of algorithm:
By default, you’ll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.
Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.
The only algorithm at work in my feed reader—or on Mastodon—is good old-fashioned serendipity, when posts just happened to rhyme or resonate. Like this morning, when I read this from Alice:
There is no better feeling than walking along, lost in my own thoughts, and feeling a small hand slip into mine. There you are. Here I am. I love you, you silly goose.
And then I read this from Denise
I pass a mother and daughter, holding hands. The little girl is wearing a sequinned covered jacket. She looks up at her mother who says “…And the sun’s going to come out and you’re just going to shine and shine and shine.”
I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram.
This rhymes nicely with Mandy’s recent piece on POSSE:
Despite its challenges, POSSE is extremely empowering for those of us who wish to cultivate our own corners of the web outside of the walled gardens of the major tech platforms, without necessarily eschewing them entirely. I can maintain a presence on the platforms I enjoy and the connections I value with the people there, while still retaining primary control over the things that I write and freedom from those platforms’ limitations.
While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context. Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.
Mandy’s writing positively soars and sings in this beautiful piece!
Obviously I’m biased, but I very much agree with Sophie.
I like this framing:
If you’ve ever corrected a typo in an Open Source readme, or added alt-text to an image, or tidied up some broken references in Wikipedia - you’re doing Digital Litter Picking. You’re cleaning up after others. And I think that’s a marvellous way to spend a little time.
Craig and Jason are walking the walk here:
- Build your own damn platform.
- Treat social media like the tool it is.
- Build your technical skills.
This is a wonderful service! Pop your Mastodon handle into this form and you can see which of your followers have websites with RSS feeds you can subscribe to.
Posting in a space I control isn’t just about the principle anymore. It’s a kind of self-preservation. I want to preserve my attention and my autonomy. I accept that I’m addicted, and I would like to curb that addiction. We all only have so much time to spend; we only have one face to maintain ownership of. Independence is the most productive, least invasive way forward.
This looks like a handy RSS-to-Mastodon service.
If you care about the indie web growing, by all means write, by all means create, by all means curate. But most of all, just read. Or listen, or experience. Spend an afternoon clicking around, like everybody used to. The more people who do that, the more everything else will slot into place without even having to think much about it.