I’m seeing a trend that I want to encourage. People are dusting off their old blogs and websites and starting to write on them again.
One reason for this is the changes in social media usage. People I used to follow on Twitter are now using different social media platforms like Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, Farcaster, Discord, Telegram, micro.blog, LinkedIn, and some have even quit social media altogether and moved to blogs. So, I need to find out where I can interact with them now.
My virtual voyages through some of these blogs helped me discover the IndieWeb (via Jatan Mehta). It was here that I was introduced the concept of Publish (on your) own site, syndicate elsewhere (POSSE). It would be great if everyone did it, but not everyone does. So, I am left with following people I like following in the places where they publish.
This doesn’t work well for me, though.
This is why I love the trend to move to blogs (or anything that I can read on a feed reader). This allows me to read on a feed reader rather than on a browser or an app.
Maggie Appleton, in her essay, A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden, talks about the concept of the garden and the stream. Many of the places that I follow people are streams. These are timeline based feed of activity.
A feed reader is still a stream but one where the curation is mine and not an algorithm’s. I want to allow the algorithm to help me discover people whose work I would like based on my previous activity. But, I would like to follow and consume them at my own pace, perhaps in my own feed reader or inbox.
Newsletters (especially Substack) hold a place in between. These seem to be an implementation of the solution I talk of above. The Substack algorithm seems to help you to find people you may like following. You also get to consume them at your own pace in your email client or on their app.
You will notice Substack’s attempts to push you to read on their app. You have had a history of other apps changing ownership or their algorithm in ways that are outside your control. This is how Substack diverges from my expectation above.
Substack is a good temporary solution for my problem. But, I have no control over how long they will stay good. If a feed reader closes (like Google Reader did), alternatives will emerge or I have the option to use other feed readers like Thunderbird.
Feed readers also let me easily move to another service. If Substack shuts down, I will have a hard time finding the people that I followed on Substack on other platforms or blogs.
There were two brilliant essays that I read recently on why we must move on from newsletters to elsewhere, that I think of as part of this trend that I see. I hope these two essays will encourage people to POSSE.
- Newsletters; or, an enormous rant about writing on the web that doesn’t really go anywhere and that’s okay with me – Robin Rendle
- Getting too good at the wrong thing – Nat Eliason
Parallel Spirals 