Category: 2024
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This is why my heart still belongs to Mastodon. It’s completely decentralized and servers are maintained by individual admins. This environment does bring onboarding, usability and discovery challenges, however. ↩︎
Your Bluesky Posts Are Probably In A Bunch of Datasets Now (via 404 Media)
#GivingTuesday Short List
Today is #GivingTuesday, a campaign designed to maximize contributions to mission-based nonprofits during the traditionally-corporate holiday shopping season. I always try to make a point to give if I am able. This year the independent web and independent journalism are top-of-mind for me. My short list for organizations to support includes the following:
This is an insightful perspective from Benjamin Sandofsky that’s part history lesson about dying networks and part analysis of the three-way race between Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads to pick up the text-based social network baton.
#OptOutside 2024
While most people know today as Black Friday (the retail industry’s busiest shopping day), those who work at REI know it as #OptOutside day. Every year on the day after Thanksgiving, all stores and offices are closed, and employees are encouraged to get outdoors, connect with nature and avoid consumerism.
Most days are #OptOutside days for me personally — it’s why I work for REI — but I absolutely love this statement even years after joining the co-op. To me it continues to demonstrate values that nature and the outdoors are more important than revenue.
So today, instead of shopping or sitting on Teams calls, I will take my kids, niece and nephews bouldering and get to show them one of the outdoor activities I’ve grown to enjoy over the past few years. It’s sub-zero here in Pittsburgh today, so we will be hitting up Iron City Boulders, but hopefully they will like it enough to give it a go outside next time.
Fresh air forever. Outdoors for all. #OptOutside
For the love of God, make your own website:
I have my own website, and it is mine, and I get to own it completely. I hope someday soon I can visit your website.
I love this thoughtful take and internet history lesson from Gita Jackson at Aftermath.
This is crazy. 404 Media is reporting that X has filed a legal complaint against The Onion’s purchase of InfoWars, claiming they have ownership of the InfoWars X accounts. A great reminder that unless it’s decentralized and portable, you don’t own anything you post online.
There was so much great music released last Friday! Lucky for me, I roadtripped to Baltimore this weekend, so I got a good chance to really digest the new albums from Kim Deal, Father John Misty and Kendrick Lamar during eight hours behind the wheel. Three very different, but very solid records.
John Gruber piling on the anti-Substack thread by focusing on the platform’s homogeneity & lock-in:
I really don’t get why any writer trying to establish themselves independently would farm out their own brand this way. It’s the illusion of independence.
Perplexity is entering the ecommerce space and offering merchant tools:
Merchants will have access to Perplexity’s API to refine how their products appear in search results and use a custom dashboard to offer insights into search and shopping trends.
This is interesting; I’ll be following.
Robin Pecknold (Fleet Foxes) covered Elliott Smith’s Pitseleh at his NYC show last weekend and it is awesome. One of my favorite Elliott songs and he does it justice.
A Shield Against Enshittification
I’ve noticed a lot of talk about hyperlinks lately. A post from Nilay Patel initially caught my attention yesterday and it was followed by a wonderful article from Anil Dash about the ways corporate social media platforms like Substack work hard to co-opt open protocols and keep users inside their respective walled gardens. Key to his argument is the fact that people are now referring to their email newsletters as “their Substacks.” Dash writes:
We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to promote their film by saying “click on my Max”. That’s how much they’ve pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as “my Substack”, there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification.
Email is email. Writing is writing. Personally, I’ve worked hard to establish a POSSE approach to publishing my thoughts on the internet. The way it works is this: I publish everything on this website, where I own the domain and the content that lives here, and then I choose how and where that content gets delivered. You like email newsletters? Cool, that’s an option. Are you old school and want to subscribe via RSS? Yup. Do you spend your time on Mastodon or Bluesky? Posts hit those platforms as well. I even do this for shorter, in the moment posts that appear as if I’m posting from within the platform itself. This way of working is my attempt to shield myself from the eventual enshittification that is inevitable on any platform that needs to create a return for investors1.
A lot of folks are really enjoying their time on Bluesky right now. They’re harkening back to their glory days of early Twitter when the firehose still existed, reverse chron was the only feed, influencers hadn’t been born yet, and the social web was like the Wild West. I’ll admit, I am caught up in the nostalgia a bit too.
Bluesky is is a corporation, however, and it’s raising a lot of money from private equity. Eventually the platform will need to generate revenue and there are really only a few ways to do that in the context of social media. All of those ways will typically make platforms worse for users.
Hopefully I’m wrong and Bluesky becomes a social platform that honors its users at scale. Let’s enjoy it while it lasts, but I’m not holding my breath. If and when enshittification does come to Bluesky, and there is a mass exodus to the next big social platform, at least the POSSE philosophy will have served me well.