The real threat isn’t AI using open knowledge — it’s AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free
give the brain a lil break today by hacking on the microblog. my books now show up in the activity feed and the reading list RSS feed.
now i'm going to go read my goofy dungeon crawler book
Yet my — and I'd imagine your — frustration isn't borne of a hatred of technology, or a dislike of the internet, or a lack of appreciation of what it can do, but the sense that all of this was once better, and that these companies have turned impeding our use of the computer into an incredibly profitable business.
We can build the web that we want to see. Watch the recording of my talk from XOXO!
Some weeks ago, I quietly shipped a new content type on A Working Library, such that I am now writing short, social-shaped posts on my site and then sending them off to the various platforms. This is not a novel mode of publishing, but rather one borrowed and adapted from the POSSE model (“publish on your site, syndicate elsewhere”) developed by the IndieWeb community. 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.
A simple technique offers the best of both worlds: total control over your own work, while still maintaining a presence on third-party platforms.
Really cool to see Casey Newton's update on how things are going over at the Platformer newsletter after they left Substack. A lot of it resonates with my own experiences:
It also feels like more honest, durable growth than we saw in 2023. ...
First and foremost, we have an honest-to-goodness website now. One where we can easily modify the design, add new features, and grow our offering over time. One reason why I write so often about the decline of the web is that I love websites as products. And our new setup gives us almost unlimited flexibility as Platformer evolves. ...
Another key benefit of leaving: We’re much less vulnerable to platform shifts than we were before. I had long worried that Substack’s unprofitable business would eventually lead it to make decisions that were not in the best interest of our readers or our business. (Besides not removing literal 1930s Nazi content, I mean.) I still have that worry for my friends who choose to build their businesses on Substack anyway. But whatever happens, it will no longer affect Platformer, and that gives me me real peace of mind. ...
It’s a decision I’m proud of — because it’s a decision we made as a community. ... Having principles can be annoying and expensive. (And make you insufferable to talk to at parties.) But it beats the alternative.
It's also cool to hear that Platformer has enjoyed solid growth, which I know a lot of people worried about when leaving the promised network effects of the Substack ecosystem:
I’m proud to report that despite leaving Substack, revenue was up about 11 percent year over year.
Not many newsletters operate on the scale of Platformer (mine certainly included), so I'm sure their experience is unique in many ways, but it's great to have another success story from a newsletter choosing to go the even more independent route.
We can fight back by bookmarking a web page or sharing a piece of art unsanctioned by our For Your Page. To do that we must get out there and raw dog that open web.
In a recent article of mine about a better web, I wrote: “We often forget: that world is still out there.”
Here’s a great example:
The open web is still there. It's still being built, and thanks to the good services, it's still growing, and it's still accessible and it's still cool. If we can realign these search engines, or maybe there is a future Google competitor (it is not SearchGPT), I think that, I don't know, we could find it again. I think that there could be if these companies were realigned so that they could actually, I don't know, index the Internet. There is plenty of original, human-created content out there. It's just that Google and Being and all of these sites have kind of defaulted on that position of showing us it and we have to search for it through social networks. It's why as an independent journalist it's tough to build a following because all of the algorithms people are built to rely on are broken now.