Naz Hamid • Your Site Is a Home

Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected (Interconnected)

Ah, this is wonderful! Matt takes us on the quarter-decade journey of his brilliant blog (which chimes a lot with my own experience—my journal turns 25 next year)…

Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s algorithm, which may not have your interests at heart. Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you like it or not. And they roach-motel you by owning your audience, making you feel that it’s a good trade because you get “discovery.” (Though I know that chasing popularity is a fool’s dream.)

Writing a blog on your own site is a way to escape all of that. Plus your words build up over time. That’s unique. Nobody else values your words like you do.

Blogs are a backwater (the web itself is a backwater) but keeping one is a statement of how being online can work. Blogging as a kind of Amish performance of a better life.

On Transient Slash Pages • Robb Knight

This is a great idea that I’m going to file away for later:

I like the idea of redirecting /now to the latest post tagged as now so one could see the latest version of what I’m doing now.

For Love of God, Make Your Own Website - Aftermath

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.

The Free Web - The History of the Web

I am going to continue to write this newsletter. I am going to spend hours and hours pouring over old books and mailing lists and archived sites. And lifeless AI machines will come along and slurp up that information for their own profit. And I will underperform on algorithms. My posts will be too long, or too dense, or not long enough.

And I don’t care. I’m contributing to the free web.

Please publish and share more - Jeff Triplett’s Micro.blog

It’d be best to publish your work in some evergreen space where you control the domain and URL. Then publish on masto-sky-formerly-known-as-linked-don and any place you share and comment on.

You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

Also, developers:

Write and publish before you write your own static site generator or perfect blogging platform. We have lost billions of good writers to this side quest because they spend all their time working on the platform instead of writing.

Designers, the same advice applies to you: write first, come up with that perfect design later.