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Comment by revx | Hacker News Reader

I started a meme newsletter for my friends. I publish it occasionally - not on any schedule, and with whatever content and style I feel like. It's like publishing a small, private website from time to time. And it's completely decentralized, and responses come back straight to me, so there's no fighting in the comments. I almost never post on social media anymore.

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It was similar for me, as I want to follow what is 'happening' in the UNIX/BSD/Linux/Hardware world I often sent links to my friends with 'interesting stuff' ... so I created Valuable News to make it available for everyone.

The latest one is available here:

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/valuable-news-2019...

> "The tailflix is replacement for tail -F that asks you if you are still watching."

This made me laugh out loud.

Me too :)

I made a choice early on in my newsletter that I don't publish them anywhere. If you weren't subscribed when I sent it out, you miss it. I think that's a cool piece of email newsletters - there's not necessarily an endless archive.

Er, that said, I think it's good to do archives for useful emails like yours. Mine is just memes which go stale pretty quickly :)

> I publish ... it's completely decentralized

What do you mean by decentralized in this context?

I think they're saying they have a mailing list set up for communication between friends, and it's "decentralised" in the same way email is (rather, it's federated).

@revx wrote: responses come back straight to me, so there's no fighting in the comments

This makes it sound like revx is the single point of failure.

The whole thing reads to me like the locus of centralisation lies entirely with revx.

I get that email is decentralised / federated.

I imagine that the mailing list is Bcc:, with themself as the To:. This would allow for such a setup. Of course this isn't "socially decentralised" but I doubt that's what most people are referring to when they talk about decentralisation.

An author posting original content is always a single point of failure. That's a problem based in the physical world and has nothing to do with the computer-based system by which they distribute their content.

If revx email host gets shutdown, he can find a new one easy peasy. revx can just update his domain's DNS records to point them to a new server.

The federated nature of email prevents any individual email host from being a single point of failure, which I would believe is the point when comparing publishing via email to publishing content via a social network platform.

Yeah, I probably used the wrong word. I meant that the mechanism of publishing/consuming isn't centralized globally - anyone publishing a newsletter can choose (or build) their publisher, while publishing an instagram post would necessarily be produced and consumed via instagram.

Right yeah, true. Also, I probably wasn't adhering to the HN guideline please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1]

My bad, sorry about that.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

No problem. Thanks for the apology.

Are you using tools like mailchimp or plain old e-mail ? Templates ? Fancy graphics ?

The Thunderbird add-on that lets you compose directly in HTML is fun for this kind of thing. You can also abuse those signature-maker site HTML signatures into full emails, tightly composed.

I also think PDF newsletters are cool if you're doing anything people might like to store. I have been trialing Textmaker 2018 for this in Linux and it will do most desktop publishing stuff like linked text frames really easily, plus export to HTML, pdf, and epub.

I use mailchimp but probably could get away with plain old email (I have about 45 subscribers). I just use the HTML editor that mailchimp provides and write some inline CSS. It's all "handcrafted" which is what I want. Hope this helps :)

I will say that their free tier (I think it's 10k emails per month?) is way more than enough for my use case. I'm not affiliated with mailchimp.

A meme newsletter?...

Yeah, I send out memes (a lot of screenshots from twitter and tumblr, honestly) and content from imgur/reddit. I curate the content and send it to people who are interested in that kind of thing. It's obvs not for everyone but I have subscribers that seem to enjoy it :)

I also sometimes send out essays about things I've been thinking about. My last email had about 1k words about millennials (I am one, ftr) and what the media was saying about my generation.

It's not for everyone but that's something I enjoy about the email newsletter medium - you can always unsubscribe.

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