Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks

When Twitter, MySpace, and FaceBook came along, they were initially considered 'microblogs' that had the potential to democratize personal publishing (no need for complicated mechanics) and foster better discourse by getting people out of silos onto a common platform where there would be a greater diversity of opinion.

Of course, you could have said the same thing about gopher v usenet, web pages v blogs, blogs v social media, social media v defederation etc. A new medium becomes available that is less centralized, early adopters hop onto it (either to gain a voice or amplify an existing voice in a new space), followings/fandoms/communities emerge (and often clash), and eventually a meta-tribal identity develops around the new medium as being in tension with the old one.

Over the longer term there's a huge move away from centralized mass media publishing and the huge capital pools required to establish and compete in that market. This increases autonomy and opportunity and fosters greater diversity, but in the absence of clear market signals rhetoric is often substituted for reliable information, and influence by capital (political or financial) persists while being less visible or accountable.

Very few did. And some of those that did in that era are still around, and they don't allow that now.

I don't think it had anything to do with walled gardens, it had to do with the fact that political polarization wasn't quite complete yet. It's getting there.

Usenet was limited to nerds and nerd-adjacent people who were shown, on a one-to-one basis, how to use it. My uncle logged me into the local university's mainframe when I was a kid in the mid-80s, absent that influence I would've jumped onboard with everyone else in the late 90s, probably.

After the extreme efficiency of desktop Usenet clients, where I could traverse and keep up with many communities in one easy interface, with exactly the text size and font I wanted, I never really joined any web forums to speak of. I would've had to create an account on a different site for every single interest, most web forums had appalling crayon interfaces with zero sorting options or anything like that, they were all functionally corrals rather than intersections. There was no way to efficiently cover that many communities anymore, and the act of engaging had become detestable, but only in the context of what was lost; for those just arriving it was brilliant.

I wish there was a word for the expression on my face right now. Once you've been on the internet for any length of time, you start looking back to a better one in the past. It's probably one of those internet laws, like Moore's.

This is the exact reason I started working on Satellite. To be a platform where I could have a blog that talked to other blogs. If you have feedback I'd love to hear it.

https://satellite.earth/

If you create tour own channel where only you can post, you can effectively have a blog.

And its privacy features (who can see your phone number, who can add you to groups, who can see your profile picture etc) are very good.

I basically only keep whatsapp around for my family, otherwise I’d be 100% on Telegram.

(Also IRC, some nerdy university friends)

Maybe go old fashioned with mailing people about this dilemma and interested in remedying it

Blogs have a permanence about them. I think that permanence make people hesitate to write - almost like the posts are academic papers.

I prefer "newsletter" instead because it sounds more ephemeral and personal. You can delete or hide them in the future.

(For Postcard specifically - I'm working on the ability to add better privacy controls to individual posts - so that they can be public, unlisted, or private.)

I just ran a query, and 93% of email signups on Postcard have completed the email confirmation step. A quick look at the incomplete signups shows a lot of obvious fake emails, too.

I'm trying to minimize my reliance on big tech, so I want to avoid Google's captcha product. But, hCaptcha and Cloudflare both seem to have more privacy-focused alternatives that I'll check out.

Where it isn't illegal, it is still scummy.

(Postcard, which I discuss in the submitted post, does support both.)

If it were round-robin, you'd have to mail it to the next person on the list, just like a chain letter. ...minus the dramatic consequences if you failed, although perhaps familial disappointment is both stronger and more likely!

But now I have 20ish people who are interested and that is enough to me.

It doesn’t seem people have a problem receiving them in their inbox.

- I write a personal update every month. So, there's a cadence.

- When I write a post, I still share it on social media. So, people who prefer socials can still receive updates.

- My philosophy is "Write once, share everywhere." Email is just one way to get content - but Postcard even has full-text RSS on it.

There are several others I subscribe to, not all of which release daily (though I wish some of them did). So "no one" is the wrong term to use here.