Great piece on BlueSky and enshittification by Cory Doctorow. “I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.” I also really appreciate his point that it’s not the blockchain venture capital that leads to enshittification, it’s the venture capital.
Cory is a fellow POSSE-er (and major inspiration to me when I adopted the practice), and has opted not to use Bluesky. Personally, I’ve gone the route of using the platforms that interest me, even the enshittification-prone ones like Bluesky and Threads, but hedging my bets by plugging them into my POSSE system where they can just as easily be unplugged if need be.
I'm not on Bluesky and I don't have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.
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On "What I learned in year four of Platformer"
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.
Ever since Platformer left Substack in January, readers have been asking us how it’s been going. Today, in keeping with our annual tradition of anniversary posts (here are one, two, and three), I’ll answer that question — and share some other observations on the state of independent media over the past year.
To reinforce and encourage Mastodon as the go-to place for journalism, we’re launching a new feature today. You will notice that underneath some links shared on Mastodon, the author byline can be clicked to open the author’s associated fediverse account, right in the app. This highlights writers and journalists that are active on the fediverse, and makes it easier than ever to follow them and keep up with their future work—potentially across different publications. Writers often work with different publishers over the span of their careers, but Mastodon is the perfect platform to amass a loyal audience that you, as the author, truly own, and can take with you across the fediverse.
I think to have journalism with integrity, you have to have technology with integrity. And in my mind, open source is the way to have technology with integrity. And I want the best journalism to win because it's the best journalism, not because they have the best platform.
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I had such a great chat with Mike McCue on his Dot Social podcast, where we talked about the future of the web and why I'm a web optimist, why everyone should be a blogger, digital ownership, and decentralized social media.
The full episode is available here and on PeerTube/YouTube/the usual podcast feeds!
In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new.
In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new.
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So excited to hear that the Ghost blogging software is going to support federation via ActivityPub! https://activitypub.ghost.org/
If you sign up for updates, they have a survey where they're asking for feedback. Now's your chance to get your suggestions in!
Cool to see Ghost taking this step, while Substack is over there trying to build walls around their product to trap people in.
Ghost's post is also how I learned that Buttondown is working on ActivityPub support! 🙌 Exciting times.
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RSS is dead, lol
This is awesome. paulcuth made a site where you can enter your fediverse handle and it identifies RSS feeds produced by the people you follow! The site URL is a great touch, too.
![At various points we revisited our old idea for networked publishing in Ghost and tested a few prototypes, but we were never sure how to make it scale; nor how many other platforms would ultimately adopt it. For all its promise, ActivityPub (like many open standards) seemed to generate products with user experiences that were often confusing and convoluted. But something else happened in the intervening period between 2016 and 2024: People became increasingly fed up with the behavior of centralized platforms, and increasingly hungry for alternatives. The motivation for exploring and understanding new technologies, rough edges included, meaningfully increased. In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new. In the past week alone, we've had conversations with Mastodon, Flipboard, The Verge, Buttondown, WriteFreely, and several co-authors of the ActivityPub spec. There's a palpable feeling that this just might be the year of [begin strikethrough] the linux desktop [end strikethrough] the open web.](https://storage.mollywhite.net/micro/1d5eb382a3faf17a0c4d_Screenshot-2024-05-10-at-12.36.00---PM.png)