For their bold endeavors in jest
and that one kid’s flying quest

Persist your passion to build their nest
for the world rumbles them in unrest

Swivel their failings with your empathy
and rivet their pursuits like a fall under gravity

A future needs to be built,
one without ethical guilt

Go build a world that’s green
And satiate your world within.

Notes: This poem is for Day 3 of the Global Poetry Writing Month. I dedicate it for teachers everywhere, including my friends and teachers, who have been mentoring the world’s future through acts of enabling.

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Notes: This poem was written for the Global Poetry Writing Month. The Day 1 prompt encouraged posting in the Japanese poetry form of tanka. The poem reflects on the overlapping feelings around existing, weeping, and flying that many of us feel these days amid war and claims of technological utopia. Even as NASA has finally launched astronauts towards the Moon for the first time in over five decades, its juxtaposition with the ongoing US and Israeli military strikes killing and displacing children in Iran and the Middle East does not reinforce the slogan of “going to the Moon for all humanity”. I know many of us would’ve been way more excited about Artemis II if it also didn’t overlap with a million children weeping. If this was any other space power, the media would not have hesitated to contrast the double standards.

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5. If you post on your blog about multiple things, or if you post frequently, everyone would not be interested in everything you share. Offer an RSS feed of the most important or the most publicly relevant post type you publish so readers can choose the slice of your thoughts they like best. As such, I offer a feed specifically for Moon Monday since that’s my flagship writing.
6. If you move blogging platforms, always ensure you redirect the old feed URL to the new one, including URL variations and links of category feeds and such.
7. Thank your readers for using the best, most ethical reading technology on the Internet. 🤓

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• I also gave a talk about lunar exploration at a concert space in BLR for Pint of View because let’s be frank the Moon rocks. 🪨

• I picked up a paint brush after two decades, thanks to an informal Kuch Bhi Art (Anything Art) session. Guess what I painted..

• The Moon still exists and birds still fly. So can you.

Looking up remains hopeful.

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• Airports
• Trains
• Cafés
• Amid conferences
• Hostels and Hotels
• A beach
• A wedding
• When traveling in Europe, China, and Hong Kong
• A hospital

Someday I’d love to publish a Moon Monday from the Moon. 🌙

In the near future, maybe a mountain top or hill station.

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Vada Pavs

The most authentic way to have the iconic Vada Pavs in Mumbai is to spot small Maharashtrian street stalls or food carts instead of shops. Usually they won’t be making Samosas. Only Vada Pavs and Pakodas/Bhajjis, and sometimes potato-bread cutlets. If they’re making Samosas too, avoid the vada pav there. Also, do not have vada pavs at restaurants.

If you’re unsure of the hygiene of the stall you stumble upon, there’s a branded option with street-food-like taste. Mumbai is famous for its efficient local railways. You probably will end up experiencing one. Outside most stations is this branded shop called Jumboking. Grab only the “Classic” vada pav from there. The rest are burgers; avoid ruthlessly.

If you really want to avoid street food and street shops, the costlier but still authentic option is to go to franchise outlets across the city like HAS South Bombay, which offer some of the best vada pavs, and Kailash Parbat.

The Bombay Sandwich

The rule of going to street stalls or shops, not restaurants or brands, applies to the famous Bombay Sandwich too. A telltale sign of authenticity is they will typically have packets of Wibs bread loafs lined up on their counter. Specifically, ask for:

1. Veg (cheese) toast sandwich, or
2. Masala (cheese) toast sandwich (I love this one even more)

These venerable Bombay Sandwiches are filled with more sliced veggies than every other sandwich in existence. It’s filling, and tasty in layers. No Subway sauce can beat the Bombay Sandwich’s green coriander-mint chutney and butter duo. The bang to buck ratio of the sandwich is incredible. 5/5 ⭐️ for the concept and execution. 🥪 🥔 🌿

Note: A Bombay Sandwich is not supposed to be a grilled sandwich. If any “Bombay sandwich” is being offered grilled, stay away. If you don’t like toast as a concept itself, get the non-toasted “kaccha” version which preserves all the other fractions as intended.

Chaats

For chaats, dedicated shops are the best instead of street stalls or restaurants. They tend to be more hygienic too, an important consideration considering the nature of chaat ingredients. The Bombay sev puri, pani puri, and ragda patis are a must. To identify authentic dedicated chaat shops, look for packets of puris hanging on shop counters. If restaurants with chaat counters do the same, avoid them.

The aforementioned Kailash Parbat has decent but pricey chaats if you want a branded non-street experience with hygiene assurance. It’s also a decent place to have Pav Bhaji. But the best Pav Bhaji palette is, of course, found at dedicated stalls in areas like Borivali and Vile Parle.

Chai

Roadside chai shops that have local, unbranded biscuits on display tend to be the authentic ones offering firm masala chai. Another indicator of authenticity is if they offer a ‘cutting’ (half portion) chai option. Among branded outlets, any Tea Post will serve you an excellent kadak masala chai as well as its spiced or tempered variations. You can also visit a Chaayos if you know exactly what you want because here you can customize every single bit of your chai. ☕️

Irani Chai & Bun Muska: South Bombay is famous for its smooth Irani chai. Pair it with a Bun Muska at Kyani & Co. in Marine Lines. Mumbai trains make it quite easy to reach this place from nearly anywhere in the mega city.

Bonus: Bombay-infused Western cafe

If you want a break from the local food, here’s a one-of-a-kind western cafe to relax in. The Bombay to Barcelona Library Cafe in Andheri offers the standard cafe menu but with additional variations infused with Bombay vibes. What makes this cafe really special though is its model of employing previously homeless people. The owner, who was once homeless too, provides such staff shared homes, and trains them in cooking and general professional conversation, helping them be employable in long run beyond the cafe as well. I quite like the cafe’s garlic bread and Cafe Bonbon.

Did you bookmark this peak pragmatic post already?

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Likh de ye fasana
Dekhe jo zamana
Taaron se aage ho
Khwaabon ka thikana

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The museum displayed many accessible house games as well, including such versions of several popular games we play with friends and family to enjoy while competing. Everyone should be able to have fun, and so it would be great if this added feature becomes a standard rather than something you have to hunt for and buy separately.

The interesting thing is that all such features can be just as useful to people without certain disabilities too. Like the e-pen saving your book highlights to a file and maybe syncing it to your phone & computer. This dual-use reminds me of a thoughtful old blog post by the developers of the elementary computer operating system: Accessibility features are just features.

Much like curb cuts—the slopes on sidewalks designed to make traversal with a wheelchair possible—many “accessibility” features can be used to improve the experiences of everyone, regardless of any specific ability or impairment.

This post is my submission to the IndieWeb Carnival’s theme for March 2026: Museum memories by James. It’s posted based on encouragement at an in-person IndieWeb Club meet in Bangalore to participate in this global blogging festival.

P.S. I love how James describes museums:

Museums and galleries are places we can go to learn about the past, think about the present, and consider the future. Museums are places we can connect: with times, people, and place.

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This book is a good history of publishing and sharing on the Web, particularly through blogging, and how related web technologies evolved. It also places them in the context of social media. The author Manton, creator of the thoughtful service Micro.blog, drives home the point that blogs contribute to the Web by being independent, openly connected without any giant centralized third party platform in between. If you want to understand why having a personal website or blog on your own domain—your own digital house address—is linked to saving the Web itself, read this book. Some quotes from the book below.

There weren’t enough blogs back in 2002, and there aren’t enough now. I have no doubt that some of the blogs created today will be important in the years ahead, maybe contributing to a debate on politics, or showcasing new writing or art, or serving as an archive that reflects today’s culture. Personal blogs are independent by default. They are separate from any one platform.

The web was always meant to be a read-write medium. Not just browsing, but posting too. When Tim Berners-Lee developed the first web browser on his NeXT workstation, he also developed a way to edit web pages. Tim would write in his book Weaving the Web: My vision was a system in which sharing what you knew or thought should be as easy as learning what someone else knew.

I’m a child of the open Web, and I’m driven by the fact that my blogs help create and sustain that Web itself. I can’t code and I still create the Web. It’s important for more people from all walks of life to actively participate in this shared global resource by looking outside the silos of social media. Which is why I like how Manton emphasizes two things in the book:

1. Even micro posts belong on your blog, on the open Web.

Millions of tweets are created every day. These are short posts, links, and photos. If we redirect even a small amount of that effort to instead start with indie microblogs, it will be an explosion of new growth for the open web. It will accelerate the maturation of IndieWeb standards. This is why we should start with short posts. They represent the majority of content on silos like Twitter and Facebook, and they’re easy for anyone to create, without the often daunting task of thinking about a whole web site. With better tools and platforms, people can have their own website as a default outcome when microblogging, rather than as a chore and technical hurdle.

2. Owning your place on the Web is not about the technology stack or tools you use but just about having a bunch of words on your domain name. It doesn’t require having any elaborate technical knowledge.

I think in the tech world—and especially as programmers—we tend to make things more complicated than they need to be. We know too much about content ownership, most of it irrelevant for mainstream users. [...] Controlling the writing and photos you post online isn’t about open source or the technical experience to run a server. It’s about using domain names for identity, so that you can move your data in the future without breaking URLs.

I wrote something on the same topic back in 2022, which I’m a little surprised that it has largely stood the test of time.

Overall, I find Indie Microblogging to be a great read for anyone interested or invested in the Web itself.

Social networks come and go. Protocols evolve. What always remains is your blog, based on open standards: HTML, DNS, and IndieWeb formats. It is always the right time to invest in the open web.

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So you have decided to write a blog. Maybe you too are tired of cramming your thoughts in tiny social media posts for the cold algorithm and deleting all nuance in the process. You want to share your real expertise with the world, or maybe just some organic human thoughts and experiences. You don’t want to figure out which is the “best” blogging platform. You don’t know what is a good design for your blog. You don’t want to worry or bother about SEO. You merely want something that just works. Something that would last a while. Something that might even feel like your home on the internet. Something that lets you advance your writing goals. And you know what you’re willing to pay for it—even if it is $0.

This curated list of good enough blogging platforms sorted by price range is for you. It’s not for someone who already knows their tech preferences and wants to maximize every single aspect of their blog. The list is for people who want something great at whatever price they pick without having to do much else but write. For every blogging platform I suggest, I’ve linked to two example blogs hosted there so you can see how your blog might look and feel. You’ll notice that even with minimal differences, blogs can have a dash of personality that you can never get in the infinite sameness of Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles.

My advice for people new to blogging: just pick any platform in your price range, and write your first human post on the world wide web. It’s all that matters.

Free blog!

Pika

• Beautiful themes, simple interface, 50 posts for free.
• Example blogs:
  • acutewhispers.pika.page
  • cartography.pika.page

Mataroa

• Write in markdown, newsletter integration, fast and barebones.
• Example blogs:
  • ludic.mataroa.blog
  • nutcroft.com

$10-30/year

Pagecord

• Post by email, good online editor, newsletter integration, analytics, your domain.
• Example blogs:
  • olly.world
  • sylvia.buzz

Micro.one

• Quick posting like social media, extendable like blogs, your domain, good community.
• Example blogs:
  • links.houseofkyle.com
  • micro.welltempered.net

$35-60/year

Bear Blog

• Multiple blogs, great community, your domain, write in markdown, retro themes, long-term archive.
• Example blogs:
  • blog.avas.space
  • notes.jeddacp.com

Pika Pro

• Powerful yet simple editor, newsletter integration, fun guestbook, easy theming and layouts, your domain.
• Example blogs:
  • anniemueller.com
  • wrywriter.ca

$100-150/year

This category intentionally has just one recommendation because with the highest pay, you should get the best in terms of features, polish, and support.

Ghost via MagicPages

(referral link, only because I personally use it happily)

• All core features from above, top notch performance & support, best newsletter integration, document uploads, beautiful themes, full site search. In my opinion, this is ideal for serious writers who want an archive and home for their words.
• Example blogs: (Ghost blogs look similar wherever they’re hosted)
  • citationneeded.news
  • werd.io
  • 404media.co
  • jatan.space 🌝

Some notes

• If your blogging platform lacks newsletter integration, you can copy-paste your blog posts on free newsletter platforms like Substack, Beehiv or Buttondown. This allows readers to subscribe to your posts via email—a medium everyone uses, and the connection of which you own.
• You can copy-paste your blog posts on Medium or other such reading networks too for potential discovery.
• If you’re curious, Manu has created a big list of blogging platforms, which is what partially inspired this post.

Hope my curated list helps you start a blog and write your first post. When you do, maybe share it with me?

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Goals

1. Nurture evergreen writing 🌱. Continue the transition I started in 2025 of writing longer longform articles on my space blog. Keep doing more pieces that will retain utility over time rather than newsy posts with short lifecycles. News as a hook with added context and analysis, like on Moon Monday, is better than news relayed for the sake of it.
2. Publish at least one booklet globally on space exploration, building on and refining the foundation I laid with my space poetry pamphlet last year. 🌙
3. Transform this blog, Journal J, into a better home for my refined words and verses on all things non-space. Share interesting links there too. I’m excited about this.
4. Write freely for the self.
5. Draft poetry in Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) instead of just English.
6. Build the courage to publish some things I normally wouldn’t.

Methods

1. Continue curating, tracking, and absorbing longform web writing through an RSS reader. Ruthlessly cull all shortform feeds. Tune into interesting websites and blogging philosophies by participating in IndieWeb Club BLR meets. 🤓
2. Read more books but choose carefully. Attend book clubs & events at Atta Galatta in BLR.
3. Continue to not use AI/LLMs to write a single word. It would kill my brain and soul.
4. Keep avoiding hot takes and largely speculative coverage
5. Stay inactive on social media, especially to not pollute my thinking and writing.
6. Stay quietly connected. Have my own blogs on my own web domain be enabling spaces to interact with readers via emails and DMs instead of using terribly context-deprived and noisy social media.
   1. Reach out to others directly as well. People remain the best signal to noise filters.
   2. Extend the philosophy experimentally to Fediverse replies, Webmentions, and other direct means.

I might not achieve all of these goals or necessarily always stick to each method but they will remain my north star. What are your writing goals and methods for this year? Let me know. Blog about it!

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Alt text:

I will go on nurturing the tablet and the pen
I’ll go on recording what the heart goes through

I’ll go on providing wherewithal to love’s passion
I’ll keep being kind to the desolation of the times

No doubt, the harshness of the times will grow even worse
No doubt, the tyrants will continue to practise tyranny

I accept the harshness, I bear this torture
I’ll go on trying to remedy the affliction with every breath

By Faiz Ahmed Faiz in ‘The colors of my heart’

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I want something that can connect to the Fediverse in a quieter way. My attention first turned to Ghost, which already powers my flagship space blog as well as Journal J. But Ghost’s Fediverse integration is too basic as of now. More importantly, it still has noisy likes, reposts, their notifications, and follower counts & suggestions like a micro-posting network despite being a longform publisher platform. Their Reader section is good, and the only saving grace, but I’m disappointed that Ghost did not build a Fediverse experience that’s longform-focused first and foremost. So I decided to use Micro.blog as the foundation of my Fediverse profile because it offers several advantages:

• No support for likes and boosts/reposts, stripping them off the UI completely.
• The notifications area contains just a feed of Mentions and Replies from others, with an added indicator for Direct Messages.
• No follower notifications or counts. I have no clue who follows me unless they engage, which is great.
• No hashtags. In fact, Micro.blog will try to hide the spammy hashtags at the end of posts. Good riddance because I hate hashtags.
• No trending posts or suggested followers section. That Mastodon has these bad network effects is puzzling.
• Posts from all my blogs get auto-shared to my profile thanks to Micro.blog’s feature to pull from RSS feeds of your blogs.
• Relatedly, I don’t like small post editors that limit in feeble amounts what I write and how I think. Which is why it’s great that Micro.blog allows you to automatically show entries from your external blogs in apt ways in the Timeline! So that’s the route I took.
• There’s an option to hide Replies from the Timeline, making it cleaner while still retaining the ability to open any conversation.
• Micro.blog offers RSS feeds of my Timeline, and even of individual profiles, so I can use RSS to follow the Fediverse instead of relying on inferior apps to sort, filter, and search posts. Mastodon does support profile RSS feeds as well but using Micro.blog means I can strip off noisy boosts and reply posts.

These should make the experience clean and focused. Lastly, I used Bridgy Fed to enable Bluesky integration, saving me the hassle of having to keep around yet another social media account. 

I actually have been off social media since last year. Admittedly though, a Fediverse account on my own domain does makes fundamental sense to try breaking big tech and social media jails. But it still feels like breaking the law when blogs over the web are social by themselves. However, Webmentions are simply too complicated for me to even understand properly, much less implement and deal with for my blogs. That’s why I’ve decided to try this Fediverse experiment in a sanitized and sandboxed way as a middle ground. Feel free to follow me on Fedi, but remember that I won’t see that you followed or be notified of likes and reposts. I only see replies and mentions. 😌

If even after all these guardrails, the Fediverse turns out to be more noise than signal—because, humans—I shall go back to not existing on digital socials.

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Well said, Dmitry Kudryavtsev.

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With Mastodon, you usually have a mix of Twitter-like instances based on ActivityPub, each one holding many users, often thousands. […] Instead of multi-user instances, a more distributed web should contain many solo instances, each a blog for just one person with their own domain name. […] ActivityPub is now widely deployed and makes a great addition to most blog platforms, as long as there’s a solid foundation first with personal domain names, feeds, and IndieWeb standards.

I’ve noticed in my own usage of Mastodon that while your account followers are portable to other servers, your username is not and neither are your posts. The Fediverse is therefore anything but like blogs, where your domain and posts both persist across platforms. Manton thus has a Fediverse presence through his own blog on his own domain at @manton@manton.org. Ghost is offering the same for blogs. It’s a sensible idea. Do you have your independent Fediverse presence too? I’m interested to hear how and where you set it up.

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Below is the English translation of the poem by Baran Farooqi, followed by a transliteration of the original Hindustani verse by Faiz.

Speak, for your lips are free
Speak, for your tongue is still yours
Your upright body belongs to you
Speak, for your soul still is yours
Look, how in the blacksmith’s shop
The embers are hot, the iron glows
The mouths of the locks are being opened
Chains lengthen their reach
Speak, for the little time that you have is sufficient
Before the death of body and tongue
Speak, for the truth still lives
Speak, say all that is to be said

Bol ki lab azaad hain tere
Bol zabaan ab tak teri hai
Tera sutvaan jism hai tera
Bol ki jaan ab tak teri hai
Dekh ki aahan-gar ki dukaan mein
Tund hain shole surkh hai aahan
Khulne lage quflon ke dahaane
Phaila har ik zanjeer ka daaman
Bol yeh thoda waqt bahut hai
Jism-o zabaan ki maut se pehle
Bol ki sach zinda hai ab tak
Bol jo kuchh kehna hai keh le

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All the EU has to do is repeal Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, and, in so doing, strip Apple of the privilege of mobilizing the European justice system to shore up Apple's hundred billion dollar annual tax on the world's digital economy. The EU company that figures out how to reliably jailbreak iPhones will have customers all over the world, including in the USA, where Apple doesn't just use its veto over which apps you can run on your phone to suck 30% out of every dollar you spend, but where Apple also uses its control over the platform to strip out apps that protect Apple's customers from Trump's fascist takeover.

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People

• 📨 Mail, Calendar, and Contacts: iCloud
• 💬 Chat & Messaging: WhatsApp, Signal and Slack
• 🤡 Social media: Obviously none, just read my blogs

The Web

• 🌐 Browser & Passwords: Safari and Firefox
• 🔍 Search engine: Kagi
• 🧩 Extensions: AdGuard, Open Access Helper, StopTheMadness and Wayback Machine
• 🛜 VPN: Mullvad and Proton

Work

• 💻 Laptop: MacBook Air M1, the trusty
• 📁 Files & Media: Finder and iCloud
• 📄 PDFs & Images: Apple Preview
• 🤓 Productivity: macOS Spotlight, Supercharge and Maccy
• 📊 Spreadsheets, Slides, and Documents: Apple iWork and ONLYOFFICE

Reading

• 📖 Longform: Kindle Paperwhite
• 📰 The Web and News: Feedbin, the best (please use RSS too)
• 🔤 Dictionary: Apple (English, Thesaurus, Hindi-English, Chinese-English)
• 📑 Read articles later: Instapaper
• 📚 Bookshelf: Goodreads

Writing

• ✍🏼 Drafts: My blogs and Google Docs
• 📝 Notes and To-Dos: Bear
• ‣ Outliner: Workflowy (get more storage with my referral)
• ✨ To publish my poetry: A combination of Apple Pages, isbn.gov.in, IngramSpark, Draft2Digital, Pothi, Google Play Books, Internet Archive, and more.
• ⤵️ Notes importer: Klib

Blogging

• 🛰️ Space and Personal Blogs: Ghost, via MagicPages (referral link because I use it happily)
• 📈 Website stats: Umami (privacy respecting)
• 🕸️ Domain: BigRock
• 📇 DNS: Cloudflare

Etc.

• 🎶 Music: YouTube Music 
• 🎙️ Podcasts: None (here’s why)
• 🚈 Local life (pun intended for Mumbaikars): PhonePe, Rapido, Google Maps, Playo, DigiLocker, and Mumbai One
• 🛫 Travel: MakeMyTrip and Booking.com

So that was my digital lifeOS for 2025. Blog about yours! Did you particularly enjoy an app or web service this year or found something in this list useful? Let me know.

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I’m writing to you from my beloved home city Mumbai, where I’ve at long last come to rest and enjoy some time with my parents. I hope you’re having a refreshing break as well this year end. It’s once again been three months since I dispatched the previous newsletter. Life has been incredibly productive and satiating on some fronts; below is a snapshot of some notable things I’ve been up to alongside some pictures from my trip to Hong Kong. I’m grateful that I can embrace a calmer digital life on this personal blog of mine by connecting with people directly instead of drowning in the slurp—and now slop—of social media. Click the links you’re curious about—that’s what the Web is for. :)

Liked reading

• Sci-Fi: The Dark Forest

He was won over by their expressions, because he knew that the eyes of ordinary people were the best reflection of the level of civilization in a time and place.

• Poetry: Gitanjali

The child who is decked with prince’s robes and who has jeweled chains round his neck loses all pleasure in his play; his dress hampers him at every step. In fear that it may be frayed, or stained with dust he keeps himself from the world, and is afraid even to move.
Mother, it is no gain, thy bondage of finery, if it keep one shut off from the healthful dust of the earth, if it rob one of the right of entrance to the great fair of common human life.

• The story of how RSS (feeds) beat Microsoft
  • ChatGPT’s Atlas: The browser that's anti-web
  • How we lost communication to entertainment
• Joel Mokyr, Gita Chadha, Lawrence Krauss, Joseph Vijay
  • The Zomato ad and India’s hustle since 1947

Poetry on Space

Seven uni-verses (booklet)

By Jatan Mehta. Poetry on all that space evokes.

Read for Free →

Publishing Seven uni-verses in an independent manner has also helped me lay the foundation for the next phase of my space writing: Merge the worlds of blogs and books.

Writing

• Achievements and shortfalls in global lunar exploration in 2025
  • Lunar sample science updates straight from Hong Kong
  • A giant leap in orbital imagery will unlock advanced Moon missions
  • Prepping to live on Luna via analogs on Earth
• ISRO and India had a mixed year in space in 2025
  • A space program can only move as swiftly as its rockets. It’s India’s time to act on that.

Space, personally

• I got to see Moon samples!

• People have been buying print copies of my poetry booklet—despite the ebook being free!—and sending me pictures along with their thoughts and even reviews on Goodreads. ^_^

• I made some original memes about my poetry booklet:

I created these not just to promote the booklet’s open access approach but to also have some fun. After all, I write for you, not social media or SEO, so why not be more humanly whimsical sometimes?

Life and Pictures

• Bangalore has great communities around human micro-cultures, which make the city’s growing woes bearable, and sometimes worth it. Reading at the beautiful Cubbon Park as part of Cubbon Reads, participating in blogging meets at IndieWeb Club BLR, and attending bookclubs & events at Atta Galatta have become my monthly doses of sanity, serenity, and community.
• Poem: Words
• You don’t peek at Hong Kong, it peaks at you:

• There are natural vistas at the edges of Hong Kong:

• The crescent Moon gracing the Hong Kong skyline, making some humans happy in the process.

So these were highlights from my very happening last quarter of the year. What have you been up to? Did you read something nice lately? Reach out to me.

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What an invention,
second to none

Thoughts that live on,
even after one is gone

They can speak volumes,
without making a sound

No wonder then
that you like to read
between the lines
and write on empty spaces

Here’s to many more
orbits around our Sol

For the more you get old,
the more words work
to keep your soul

Thank you then
for sharing your words
with me
and everyone else.

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• Gave a public talk about our Moon and its exploration to people having beer. The talk series it was part of is aptly named Pint of View. It was great to have an extremely engaged audience.
• Went to Cubbon Reads. Reading at the beautiful Cubbon Park has become my weekly dose of sanity and serenity. ^_^
• Attended a talk and discussion around a book on Vikram Sarabhai, the founder of India’s space program as well as many more things related to India’s holistic development post-independence. It was good to see an approach to profiling Sarabhai from outside the organizations he was associated with.
• Discovered a nice and nestled Thai café in BTM layout, Bangalore with friends.
• Participated in the latest IndieWeb Club meet in Bangalore. It was on week notes, thereby prompting this week note. Let’s see how it goes.
• Spent a lot of time figuring out the nuances of the logistics of self publishing books (I’m not writing a book yet but was curious).
• Published the usual Moon Monday, which always feels worthwhile.
• Continued work on my next edition of Indian Space Progress.

Have you been up to something interesting lately? Let me know!

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In the more than three months since I sent out the previous newsletter, life has changed. Between reading more of longer longform, ditching social media completely, stepping out more, writing better on my space blog, and reorganizing my personal blog, life has improved, calmed down, and become more clear. Here’s a snapshot of some notable things from the past three months. Click the links you’re curious about—that’s what the Web is for. :)

Liked reading

• Sci-Fi: The Three Body Problem
• Poetry: Iron Draped in Silk
• Re-read: What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
• The rise and demise of RSS (feeds)
• Is the decline of reading making politics dumber?
• Gaining context on China and its rise (Good reads)

Writing

I’m so happy that I’ve been publishing many feature stories lately. It really feels good to have been this productive while spanning distinct space developments. 🚀

• Achievements and shortfalls in Moon exploration this half year (by country or region)
  • We’re building future technologies for the Moon without closing missed milestones
  • Our Moon is valuable even beyond itself
  • China’s bags many milestones in getting humans on the Moon while Artemis slows down
• Indian space
  • Was Shukla’s Axiom-4 flight to the ISS worth it for ISRO?
  • Chandrayaan 4 will bring unique Moon materials—and maybe a giant scientific leap for India
  • Notable nuances about NISAR and how it flows into planetary science for NASA and ISRO
• On SpaceNews going paywalled, and the broader disregard for archiving in journalism

Visual posts!

Space, personally

• Welcomed Open Lunar Foundation and Astrolab as continuing sponsors of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter
• Fraser Cain of Universe Today recommended my blog & newsletter on his YouTube channel!

Life

• Took the day off against my will, and thankful for it

I’m grateful that I can continue embracing a calmer digital life on here while staying connected with people directly instead of drowning in the slurp—and now slop—of social media.

Have you been reading something interesting lately? Reach out to me.

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This post is my submission to the IndieWeb Carnival’s theme for November 2025: Cycles and fluctuations, hosted by Alex Sirac. It was written based on encouragement at an in-person IndieWeb Club meet in Bangalore to participate in this global blogging festival. As for the meet itself, hearing people speak and understand the same language as you for once was happiness. Thank you Ankur and Tanvi.

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I just turned 5.

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China is the world’s sole manufacturing superpower

– Richard Baldwin

China’s industrialization is unprecedented. The last time the ‘king of the manufacturing hill’ got knocked off the throne was when the US surpassed the UK just before WW1. It took the US the better part of a century to rise to the top; the China-US switch took about 15 or 20 years. China’s industrialization, in short, defies comparison.

How did China become a manufacturing superpower?

– Yogesh Upadhyaya

China has kept most of its commodity and energy producers in the public sector. What is more, the prices that these businesses can charge have been regulated. This meant that the terms of trade were favorable for manufacturing companies using these commodities. Many authors describe how China has resisted pressure to go to a system of ‘market prices’ for such inputs.
[...]
A high level of support can make entrepreneurs complacent. This has not happened in China. One of the big reasons is fierce competition. The decentralized nature of the country’s governance and the entrepreneurial nature of the society means that there were hundreds of companies in many sectors.

China shows science is not dependent on liberal democracy

– Caroline Wagner

Since 1990, China’s national spending on research and development increased at a rapid clip. From less than 0.6 percent of GDP in 1990, in 2023, China spent over 2.2 percent on R&D.

The short march to China’s hydrogen bomb

– Hui Zhang

China formally codenamed its first nuclear bomb “device 596” to commemorate the date of June 1959 when Moscow sent a letter to Beijing informing that it would not provide the promised atomic bomb model and data.

Notes on China

– Dwarkesh Patel

We really need to do a better job with Chinese students studying abroad in America. These students will likely end up in influential positions back home, yet colleges treat them basically like cash cows. They often arrive bombarded with propaganda about America, which is reinforced by the prevalent discourse at universities. And they find themselves isolated by language barriers and cultural differences. Giving these future leaders a genuinely positive experience in America might be the best thing we can do to improve US-China relations in the long run.

Ancient China

– Joshua Mark

The Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) is considered the 'golden age' of Chinese civilization. Gao-Tzu prudently maintained and improved upon the bureaucracy initiated by the Sui Dynasty while dispensing with extravagant military operations and building projects. With minor modifications, the bureaucratic policies of the Tang Dynasty are still in use in Chinese government in the modern day. By the time of the rule of Emperor Xuanzong (712-756 CE) China was the largest, most populous, & most prosperous country in the world.

Do you have recommendations for what I should read next to better understand China’s growing and leading technological capabilities? Email or DM me.

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However, most people don’t know what RSS feeds are, and how feed readers can benefit them. I wrote an accessible article about RSS, which anecdotally made some headway within my friends and little network of humans. But even then most people have a notion that RSS is complicated to use. These notions carry terse truths. Compared to the ease of following someone on social media or subscribing to a newsletter, it’s far from obvious what you’re supposed to do when you encounter an RSS feed icon or link. Even for people who do know about and use RSS readers, it’s still a chore to manually hunt, grab, and add RSS links to their feed readers. How do we simplify this?

I redid my space blog’s RSS feeds page to offer big buttons for people to subscribe to my posts on every feed reader I could think of. Did you check the page already?

Clicking or tapping on any button on that page does one of these two things:

1. If you already use that particular feed reader service/app, you can add my blog to it in two taps. Bam.
2. If you don’t use that reader, most of them will present you with a login & signup option. This way people can directly use a feed reader with at least one blog added instead of having to imagine and figure out what they are and how they work.

Isn’t this solution better than the status quo? At least fellow netizens James and Ashur agree. I went ahead and added these two-tap buttons on my personal blog’s feeds page as well. 🤓

These direct-subscribe links work based on special dynamic URLs. I’ve hunted down special URLs for more than 20 feed readers for my feeds pages. Very few RSS readers are missing from the list, and that’s only because they don’t support such a URL structure or scheme—as far as I can tell. I’ve reached out to various such developers to add support for the same. I’m hoping to add direct-subscribe links for Reeder Classic, Feedgrab, Miniflux, and popular Android-only apps. Any tips you have for me to add those or other RSS apps/services are welcome.

P.S. I absolutely know that many people will still find RSS confusing and just won’t use it. That war is for another day—perhaps if and when the Web is about to come full circle to blogs from the clutches of social media? For now, I’m happy to have made the RSS situation at least a little better than I found it. This is the kind of post which is so niche that most people will wonder what I’m even rambling about. But I don’t care because it has made me happy.

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I slept through the afternoon, then walked in the park, had a nice butter vada pav, did some physical and digital chores, and then read a bit on my Kindle over a big cup of chai (tea). One of those reads was about the fascinating problem of character amnesia in China. Allow me to quote the very first para which will make you click with intrigue:

During a visit to Beijing many years ago, I was having lunch with three PhD students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all of whom were native speakers of Chinese. I happened to have a cold that day and was trying to write a brief note to a friend to cancel an appointment that afternoon. I found that I could not recall how to write the Chinese characters for the word ‘sneeze’. I asked my three friends to write the characters for me and, to my surprise, all three simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the characters.

I end the day writing this blog post, which has brought back my fluid thoughts. And now I can sleep in peace. And, maybe this post provided you some perspective for when you find yourself in a similar situation?

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It’s again been over three months since I sent out the previous newsletter for friends. And once again, a lot has happened in life. Here’s a small snapshot of some notable things you might like to browse. Click the links you’re curious about—that’s what the Web is for. :)

Loved reading

• Lyrical poems by Aurobindo

Friendship is no longer seen as an integral part of daily life, but rather something we squeeze in when all our other responsibilities have been met.

• People aren’t mean to talk this much
• Twitterlike is a bad shape

Writing

• China selecting international researchers to study Moon samples, demonstrating automated navigation at the Moon, and welcoming India to cooperate on Moon missions
• On the immense success of Firefly’s Moon lander but also the disappointing failures of landers from Intuitive Machines and ispace Japan
• On India’s joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission and the PSLV rocket’s failure
• Trump’s proposed budget cuts and changes to NASA’s Moon missions
• Why Moon missions need their own Wikipedia and beyond

Space, personally

• Joined Open Lunar’s orbit as their Science Communications Lead
• A story about open knowledge sharing in space
• Welcomed Catalyx Space, The Orbital Index and PierSight Space as yearly sponsors of my space writing
• I had fun moderating a rather stellar panel on global Moon exploration at the international GLEX conference. Watch the video. 🌙

Thoughts

• Utterly fascinated by dinosaurs—want to launch them to space
• Made a list of good enough blogging platforms by price if you just want to write
• In which AI kills the human Web, or at least its spirit

Life and Pictures

• App subscriptions and Yoghurt
• Visited the Taj Mahal and Agra Fort

I’m grateful for this space where I can embrace a calmer digital life and connect with people directly instead of drowning in the slurp—and now slop—of social media. Have you been up to something interesting lately? Want to share a good read? Message me.

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The fall

But suddenly there soared a dateless cry,
Deep as Night, imperishable as Time;
It seemed Death’s dire appeal to Eternity,
Earth’s outcry to the limitless Sublime.

– The Life Heavens

Gathering hope

The day ends lost in a stretch of even,
A long road trod — and the little farther.
Now the waste-land, now the silence;
A blank dark wall, and behind it heaven.

– Journey’s End

The rise

Who art thou that camest
Bearing the occult Name,
Wings of regal darkness,
Eyes of an unborn flame?

Like the august uprising
Of a forgotten sun
Out of the caverned midnight
Fire-trails of wonder run.

Captured the heart renouncing
Tautness of passion-worn strings
Allows the wide-wayed sweetness
Of free supernal things.

– Who art thou that camest

I happened to pick up this book during my recent solo trip to Puducherry. It was well worth it.

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Pterosaurs could fly, T-rexes could swim, and massive Titanosaurs could walk across active volcanic lands. Think about it. Dinosaurs existed in and dominated so many different environments on Earth for almost 200 million years. That’s close to 100 times longer than we humans have dominated the planet. What’s not to like?

Well, ultimately what killed them was a giant rock from space. And that, my dear friends, is also why you need a space program.

Not that evolution is necessarily convergent on conscious intelligence—as far as I know—but imagine if dinosaurs had evolved to have intelligence like us and could build rockets. Firstly, their rockets would be huge, considering the average size and weight of dinosaurs compared to humans. Dinosaurs might hit the limit of chemical rockets faster than us purely because of that.

Of course, what their rockets might look and be like would depend a lot on their socioeconomic structures but here’s some food for thought. The most powerful rocket in operation today, NASA’s SLS, can lift a mass of nearly 95,000 kilograms to Earth orbit. You’d need that for the titanosaurs as each one weighed some 70,000 kilograms. Now, cramming their 37-meter long body in the 8.4-meter fairing of the SLS is another matter. As is fitting an environmental control and life support system on the rocket for the dinosaur. So maybe the larger dinosaurs were doomed regardless.

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You can get an LLMs to write an article, but if you care about little things like facts and truth, as I hope anyone reading this does, then you’re going to spend as much time fact-checking as you might have done writing. Thus, your time savings are minimal, if any, for a worse product.

In this depressing death of the human Web, there’s at least one silver lining: Using AI to throttle AI

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1. Micro.one → flipboard.social (for the Fediverse)
2. Inoreader Pro → Inoreader Free (second feed reader)
3. Pika Pro → Pika Pup (for my third blog)
4. EchoFeed Pro → EchoFeed, MastoFeed, and Social Champ (to autoshare my blog posts on some social media)
5. Old blog on Ghost via PikaPods → DigitalPress (to maintain backwards compatibility for my space blog)
6. Umami via PikaPods → Umami Cloud (for blog stats)
7. Linkding via PikaPods → Raindrop and Anybox (for bookmarking and PDFs)
8. ArchiveBox via PikaPods → Wayback browser extension (for webpage archiving)

So how much money did I save by not continuing these subscriptions?

$20, or nearly ₹1800 a month.

That may not seem like a lot. But consider that for people like me who don’t live in the US or Europe and are affected by purchasing power parity, it’s not a small amount either. While the paid services above were all great, and Pika in particular is quite lovely, neither of them were essential for me. The alternatives I replaced them with do nearly the same work for all practical purposes, with only little manual intervention needed.

More importantly, $20 is roughly what I spend every month on greek yoghurts as part of my meals. Yoghurt is essential, and it directly maintains my health. I’d rather spend my 20-odd dollars to get the best of that. Especially that sweet organic mango yoghurt now that the crazy summer is here. 🥭

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It’s been over three months since I sent out the previous newsletter for friends. Usually I share every month’s key things as a linked list, which includes what I liked reading, professional space writing I published, some non-space thoughts I blogged about, and notable life events. The past three months have been too busy and too eventful, and it’s hard to give you a sense of it all without spewing out a robotically long post. And so instead this newsletter is a condensed list of things you might like to browse. Follow along the links you’re curious about—that’s what the Web is for. :)

Loved reading

• We owe each other
• Why blog if nobody reads it?

Like newspapers, blogs change from timely to a time capsule.

• o(m)g:image
• Disrupting my reading habits to read more of what *I* want

Writing

• Published the 200th edition of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter! 🚀
• Created a huge, curated linked list of the state of global lunar exploration in 2024 🌙
• Shared my experience speaking in China on Moon exploration and Indian space as an invitee
• How ISRO et al. laid the groundwork for a decade of Indian space ambitions in 2024 🇮🇳
  • How Chandrayaan 1, 2 and 3 leveraged their view from the Moon
  • Celebrating two years and 7500+ readers of my monthly Indian Space Progress blog+newsletter
• What makes a Moon landing mission successful?
  • This article got republished on Jeff Foust’s revered publication The Space Review, and was featured by Medium’s Editorial. ✨
• Critical scientific documents go missing from NASA community website
• Sharing my approach to avoid hot takes and speculative coverage
• How to follow CLPS Moon mission updates
• A long march of lunar papers from China

Space, personally

• Fun with Moon exploration headlines
• The story of my blogs
• Places I’ve published Moon Monday editions from 🌙
• An unexpected Moon Monday story
• I got a friend to publish a blog post sharing insights previously missing from the public web. I’m going to elevate the space industry’s public knowledge one blog post at a time. 🤓
• I’m pleased to share that ISRO’s webpage on details and scientific context of the Chandrayaan 4 lunar sample return mission plus their Venus orbiter cites my blog as well as my work for The Planetary Society as references! ^_^

Thoughts

• The media and arbitrary ethics
• Responding is better than replying
• If I was born and brought up in the time of modern social media, would I even blog?
• Reinventing the wheel
• Realizations about actually avoiding social media

Life and Pictures

• I do (not) care
• I finally found a great place for my daily meals. They make such homely food. The sabzis, rotis, and their amazing daal suit my taste preferences and portion sizes. The place is clean. And it doesn’t break my wallet. The best part is it’s a two-minute walk from my place. My life has stabilized and upgraded due to this. 😋
• I had fun spending the end-of-year holidays with my parents visiting me in Bangalore. Gave them a taste of the city and its food.

• China: Honestly, every stranger person there I interacted with was very nice to me, and patient with translations. Can’t say the same for Luxembourg, where some would visibly judge or ignore me because I look different than them. Not so with people in Hainan. 微笑

I went on a solo trip to Puducherry.

Their museum is fantastic. I saw locally excavated human artifacts about a million years old, things traded with the Roman empire 2,000 years ago, and ancient peri-mineralized tree trunks as well as over 200 rocks and minerals sourced from Puducherry and nearby areas. That’s one hell of a value for ₹10 ($0.12).

Shortly following this view was a dark windy seashore you could hear more than see. A crescent Moon, red Mars, bright Jupiter and Venus, and stellar Orion hung above. Moving wave crests were lightly lit by ambient light. What a lovely experience of breezy serenity. 🌊🌌

So that was my long overdue newsletter for friends. I’m grateful to have this space where I can embrace a calmer digital life and connect with you directly instead of drowning in the slurp—and now slop—of social media.

I’d love to hear what interesting things you’ve been up to.

Don’t know what to say? Reply with an interesting read!

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1. Crossposting to or across social media is counterproductive if doing so to avoid social media. Applies to POSSE too.
2. Having a domain for micro thoughts, day-to-day photos, comments, and random musings is a waste of time and effort. Not all links need to be permanent.
3. I’m better off avoiding all social media timelines even if I may have followed all the “good” people on not-evil, non-popular social networks. Mastodon, Bluesky, Micro.blog—it doesn’t matter, it’s all the same in the end. I want non-social-media versions of people so I can continue liking them.
4. I’m not giving a single dollar for social media related posting or consumption.
5. My posts not going viral on social media is great. It means I’m expressing organically and choosing reality.
6. Reading only one longform blog post that turns out to be of minimal value is better than reading a hundred random microthoughts.

I’ve been trying to avoid living an internet without intent by embracing a simple but effective digital life since the last year. It’s been working wonders but there are moments every week where I fallback to bad habits. These realizations above might just be the final piece of the puzzle.

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Some might say: why would I do this without expecting anything back?

Well, because I can.

My goal with Moon Monday is to advance lunar exploration globally, and I think this does just that.

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First up, my response to my own question..: If I was born and brought up in the time of modern social media, would I even blog?

Jamie Thingelstad’s response included a good analogy of renting apartments versus owning your house to convey his point:

Having a blog is like having a single family home. Want to remodel? Okay. Want to play your stereo? Okay, within the noise ordinances. Want to change the way the living room is laid out? Fine, none of our business. This is why I have a blog. I want to have my own space, and do my own things, and not be under a landlord. That also means I have to mow my grass, tend to the rain gutters, and manage the upkeep. And just like houses some take more of that than others.

Incidentally, I’ve offered a similar analogy in an earlier article on “how to feel at home on the Internet”.

Then there’s Manu with an interesting take:

The vast majority of people on social media won’t move to blogging because what they get out of social media is not the same thing you get out of blogging. I think it’s a false equivalence.

Blogging is primarily a solitary, output-driven, activity. People have blogs because they want to share, they want to express their thoughts and feelings. Social media is instead driven by consumption. Sure, some people are power users and post 5000 times a day, but the vast majority of users are lurkers who just scroll their timelines, follow other people and their interactions are limited to likes and the occasional comment.

I think this dovetails with what I’ve long considered to be two separate challenges:

1. Empower people to own their reading experience on the Web
2. Enable them to write and share independently

People doing one may not need, or feel the need, for the other.

Hedy’s thoughts resonated for me:

I would write down my thoughts in what my friends back then would call the "essay format" and post those big walls of text instead. Pictures and media alone didn't appeal to me as a medium for expressing my thoughts a lot of the times. As I expected, barely anyone cared, and posts with media got the most engagement.

Naturally, I drifted away from posting to socials, using these platforms just for catching up with friends. I started to write elsewhere, and eventually turned to blogs.

Lucio said things I found funny—because it’s true for me too:

The reason why I do [blog] is, frankly, because I am a nerd with way too much free time on my hands who loves to put unnecessary amounts of effort into things I cannot put in my resume.

Well, true for me except for the free time part. After becoming a working adult, I have no clue how seven years have passed.

Matthew, a writer by choice, responded in another direction:

In a world where nothing really happens to you unless you’ve documented it for the entertainment of strangers, I would insist on an undocumented life.

Ava touched upon why many write:

I also wrote very very long texts all day long to online friends in direct messages or chats. It wasn't that I had seen it and emulated it, or was surrounded by an online culture normalizing it […]; it came from within me no matter what anyone else was doing. I used it as therapy, to get things off my chest, to get help and advice and sort my thoughts when help wasn't available in real life. So I think even if I was born later when the big socials already existed and favored short form content, I would still blog.

As someone who also prefers to write to sort out and structure my thoughts, I could relate with her approach.

Note again how these responses are entire blog posts and not micro comments or replies on my social media. You know what I love the most about them? Other than Manu, I didn’t know any of these people. And yet their responses are personal reflections. They have the momentum of thoughts gathered over days. It’s something you can never get with the transient nature of social media.

While these responses may be scattered across the Web, they are also independent and interconnected thanks to the Web itself. It’s like conversing on email but in public. Thank you to each of you who wrote and shared your thoughts. ☺️

I love talking in links. This is the way.

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I do care when you don’t do what you said you would for things that involved me. Not just the big things but especially the day-to-day stuff.

Make those traits a habit and then even if you appreciate me in public, I’d feel distant from you anyway.

To me, how you treat me in daily life is what matters.

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Many said no, which I find to be an interesting conclusion especially for people who do blog right now and encourage others to but aren’t from this time period in question and so haven’t experienced the Internet the way younger people have.

For my own response to the question, I found myself thinking about it more than I expected. It’s honestly difficult to really know, especially because my space blog is my profession right now, and my personal blog—which you’re reading—is integral to my identity. That said, here’s my response:

Even if I grew up with Twitter and Instagram as something that always existed, I might have still blogged when I needed to express something longform. Hopefully, LinkedIn wouldn’t have been the tool of choice for that. I think I would end up avoiding it for sure if I was writing about something non-space especially. But I also think that the form and extent to which I’d blog may have been less intense. I may not have had a domain name to begin with because I would’ve had an app-based upbringing rather than through the fundamentals of the browser. And maybe I would settle for one of those LinkTree websites—ugh—to present the portfolio of media outlets I’ve written for.

I think a major reason why I still would’ve eventually started a newsletter is Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. The resulting scattering of people across platforms, having to rebuild all of those connections, and still losing out on readership anyway due to algorithmic changes would’ve burnt me and taught me the value of owning the connection to my audience as a writer and journalist, which in actuality I learnt much before. And if not for X, Meta surely would screw up something similarly every few years to provoke a similar response.

The entire world view of what the Web is to people can be tied to their digital upbringing, and so how do we even agree on common causes related to the wellbeing of the Web?

Edit: Love it when my blog post leads to someone else writing another in response. Many have! This is the way. I’ve collated responses from people on “Responding is better than replying”.

P.S. Jamie uses a good analogy of rented apartments versus owning a house to convey his point. Incidentally, I’ve offered a similar analogy in an earlier article on “how to feel at home on the Internet”.

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Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hello web reader from our beautiful Pale Blue Dot. I’m Jatan Mehta, an independent space exploration writer. Independent means I don’t write for other media outlets primarily and instead publish and sustain my professional writing on my own website at jatan.space as a blog+newsletter. Majorly I write about lunar exploration because our Moon has immense intrinsic value, and is something we all share, see, and cherish in our skies, day or night.

I currently live in Bangalore, a city I like for many reasons and not just because it’s the space hub of India. You must try the ‘filter coffee’ and soft idlis if you come here. And maybe join me for a game of badminton.

If I wasn’t writing about space somehow, I’d still be writing because that’s who I am deep down. When I get the time, I share musings about the Internet, life, technology, writing, and more on my personal blog called Journal J. As part of it, I digitally dispatch a newsletter for friends as a calmer way to stay in touch against the slurp—and now slop—of social media.

What’s the story behind your blogs?

I started blogging in 2011, when I was 17. I had a desire to share the excitement of physics and space with people beyond my Facebook connections. That’s when I came across Blogger and was utterly fascinated by the idea that anyone can have a website to publish articles on the Internet through! No coding, technical chops, or money required. And I loved the power of linked writing.

Fast forward past my graduation and free blogging platform swaps along the way, I got my first job thanks to my blog. Subsequently I decided that I want to write about space full-time instead of pursuing space research. My blog is called “Jatan’s Space” for long now because it conveys the topic and its independence in a nutshell.

I also always had an interest in no-code consumer technology. I loved exploring blogging platforms, reading services, operating systems, apps, and so on. I would sometimes write about them too, and that’s how I’ve always had a second blog in some form that’s not about space. Over the years, I started writing on there about anything else I felt like sharing, morphing it into Journal J.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I don’t need inspiration per se because I’m almost always inspired to learn and write about space. Here’s approximately what I do every week:

• Scan and read with judgement the more than 150 websites, blogs, newsletters, and other types of sources I’ve added to my feed reader, which I’ve meticulously organized using folders and Feedbin’s search filters. I grab excerpts and take notes along the way.
• Thoroughly read the most notable things from my feed reader and elsewhere on my Kindle (sent using KTool). Take notes again.
• Use Kagi not just for fact checking and research but also to search conversations within forums and social networks for when I need to gauge people’s reactions on a topic.
• Collect all thoughts in one place and order them using Workflowy
• With that context, write and edit either on Bear or my blog’s editor
• Publish to the World Wide Web

For my personal blog, I write and publish when I feel like, and can. Often I refine and post something I’ve previously shared with friends or taken notes on. It’s an easy way to blog. Other times I write from scratch to better understand a topic, and so I research along the way. And rarely, I write to respond to someone else’s blog post. I don’t like microblogging, and don’t like to post too casually, because it tends to be so terribly contextually deprived. And so often I’ll wait until I have at least a few paras to publish.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I think writing is an act of solitude. Anything that provides a queit space is good. I also need my laptop, and ideally will not write until I can rest it on something that’s not my lap. I cannot write on a phone. My thoughts feel handicapped there. I cannot write sanely in cafés and public spaces either. Having said that, I’ve written and published articles from airports, hospitals, and trains when needed—so long as I can hunt down that one spot.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

Both my blogs are running Ghost, hosted on the wonderful and affordable MagicPages service by Jannis. I love how Ghost elegantly handles running both a blog and a newsletter as an integrated service. I view email subscriptions as a delivery option for my posts for those who don’t use or prefer RSS. And if you’re in any other field than blogging or related tech communities, practically everyone uses email and not RSS. Ghost will soon offer the Fediverse as another post delivery option, and I’m eager to see how that might help independent writers like myself.

I use the default Source theme, which I’ve personalized a bit to show nothing but a list of posts and a menu instead of wasting my time customizing site layouts and whatnot. A clean, legible reading experience doesn’t require a lot by definition. And it’s the words that matter at last. Which is also why I’m so grateful to have ditched the cruft that is WordPress and Gutenberg.

Blogging platforms I’ve used over the years: Blogger → WordPress → Medium → WordPress → Substack → Ghost

My domain jatan.space is from BigRock because it’s cheap, easy to use, and has been extremely reliable for me for years.

I use Micro.blog to auto-share my new blog posts to multiple social networks and platforms. And so, thanks to Manton, I don’t need to waste time or efforts on social media while maintaining some presence for possible discovery by potential readers.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I’ll quote what Jim Nielsen said when he was your guest at People and Blogs:

The current state of my blog is a result of me experiencing the difficulties of where it was previously. […] The best part of blogging is what you discover and learn experientially along the way. I wouldn’t want to rob myself of that.

I would’ve loved to not have wasted years customizing virtually every aspect of my blogs and rethinking the various categorizations but it’s how I realized none of that matters.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetizing personal blogs?

I’m going to say something potentially controversial here.

Each blog’s hosting currently costs me $60/year on MagicPages (referral link, if you’re inclined to go Ghost for cheap). And $10/month extra for sending emails to the large subscriber base of my space blog. My domain costs me $25/year. All the other tools I mentioned previously cumulatively cost me in the range of $20/month.

If people are not able to (fairly) monetize their freely readable blogs, then especially those like my space one crafted out of both passion & profession simply cannot exist. My space blog is community-supported through organization sponsors and individual readers, which I accept with no ads and under a strict, public Editorial Independence Policy. I think blogs are a powerful, resilient way to do independent journalism, which we direly need more of in today’s world. Denying their monetization means denying such possibilities.

Sure, you could argue I wasn’t talking about a purely “personal blog” there. But if blogs reflect your identity or parts of it, and space is an integral part of mine, is that not personal enough?

In any case, even when people say they don’t monetize their non-professional blogs and appreciate others not doing it, the earnings to cover its costs are still being offloaded somewhere. It could be their day jobs, family wealth, savings or stocks, technical chops, or whatever else. So I consider those claiming and evangelizing an ethical position against fair monetization of blogs to hold a privileged position.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

• Root Privileges, where Mukunth surfaces the intersection of science, science communications, journalism, and civic duty in a blunt manner—and that’s how we need it.
• Annie Mueller, who writes poignantly about parts of our emotional being.
• Derek Kedziora, because he thinks differently.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

Thank you, Manu, for creating and running People and Blogs. I think it’s a great way to meet blogs over coffee and discover their people.

Thank you also for having me here. I sincerely appreciate this, and my connection to you. Despite blogging being so integral to my life, I’ve often felt alienated by people in “blogging communities” because of my choice to use certain tools or services they varyingly keep disapproving of for ideological reasons. Never mind that I chose what I did because I needed something less technical that just works and that I have modest budgets, constrained further by purchasing power parity. The reason I call this out is to request one thing of all the people who want more people to blog:

Don’t associate people with their tools and platforms unless they own it. Be more inquisitive and empathetic about where people are coming from. Rant less, help more. Most of all, encourage people not to start a blog but to write longform with links. Having a blog is an outcome, not a goal.

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People (P): What if I want to retain them?

I: Now you can archive stories

P: I don’t like some people

I: Okay, you can mute their stories too

P: I want to organize stories

I: Now you can add them to collections

P: I want to share links

I: We now have link stickers

Stories are now posts.

Blog posts always did all of these things, folks. 🤷🏻‍♂️

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Wait, what?!

Of all the shady or questionable practices that media outlets follow, including ingesting notorious amounts of ads, intentionally not providing or stripping off attribution links for information sources, not naming the research paper being covered, and normalizing delayed payments, republishing an article is where they draw an arbitrary line in the name of ethics?

In any case, how on Earth is republishing an article with a linkback to the original with the author’s permission an ethical issue? Outlets republish stories often, and my articles have been republished with credit by The Space Review, The Planetary Society, The Wire Science, and more. So why do some outlets like the one that called me have an issue with it especially when they’re the ones expecting writers to do the work for them and on their time demands?

I suspect that it’s because many media outlets operate so opaquely like this on multiple fronts, and legacy publications think they’re above all, that people have lost trust in the media and are instead more than happy to trust social media influencers whom they can see.

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Here’s an example from the Twitter of yore—which people forget wasn’t all that great either:

And here’s LinkedIn recently:

Then there’s peak reddit. Here’s an example of a commenter who, without reading the original article—natch—dismisses the post’s title with a response that links to my own blog..

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Social network algorithms are designed to bury posts with links because they want to limit engagement to their own websites. And, people are lazy to click on links even when they do see them because it’s easier to doom scroll an infinite feed instead. Both of these things encourage and reward short performative posts rather than longer, more thoughtful work. Social media platforms as they’re designed today don’t reward depth.

Furthermore, X’ed Twitter suppresses visibility of your posts if you don’t pay for blue checkmarks of vanity while LinkedIn’s Newsletter product for creators is a spam and a scam. Oh, and recently LinkedIn rejected my application to their program for journalists.

On the other hand, people reading articles via email or their RSS readers tend to better absorb longform writing. If they can’t read something interesting in their inbox right away, they tend to get back to it when they have better bandwidth. I’m glad that with my space blog in particular, I’ve invested in readers who use one of these two methods to keep up with my writing rather than me hopelessly hoping that my social media followers will randomly see and click on my links in their feeds in the order of hundreds to thousands for each new piece.

Also see: What will make me take LinkedIn seriously

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Continuing to embrace a calmer digital life instead of drowning in the slurp—and now slop—of social media, I’m sharing with you via this web letter some notable things I’ve been up to or enjoyed in October.

Reading

• How to comment on social media
• Technology is the problem
• What would it take to make decentralized social media “click”?

Democratize not just publishing, but also the governance of the technology that enables it.

The software interoperates; so should we.

• A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles
• Jeff Bezos’ View from Nowhere

Writing

• Not the fault in our stars but certainly stressful faults on our Moon
• My longest article ever: How ISRO will study Venus alongside NASA and ESA

NASA’s road to the Moon inches through Starship

• Suit up to walk under Moonlight
• Confusion about lunar water

Space, personally

• I write for you, not social media or SEO
• Podcast appearance: Discussing India’s lunar exploration heading with Carnegie India
• LinkedIn rejected my application to their program for journalists..

Thoughts

• Trains over planes
• On the gap between voter turnouts in the US and Indian elections
• Follow my blogs on social media that doesn’t suck!

I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to.

Don’t know what to say? Reply with an interesting link!

Let’s not live an internet without intent.

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The US (Source)

• 2004: 60.1%
• 2008: 62.5%
• 2012: 58%
• 2016: 59.2%
• 2020: 66.9%

India

• 2004: 58.07%
• 2009: 58.21%
• 2014: 66.44%
• 2019: 67.40%
• 2024: 66.61%

The differences may not seem significant but when you normalize them in some fundamental ways, it makes the case for a larger discrepancy:

1. During these two decades, the eligible voting population in India has been roughly four times more than that of the US due to the absolute population difference. And yet the former’s recent turnout percentages have been higher.
2. Depending on their state, US citizens can put in their vote via post. It seems they can even potentially mail their vote if they’re abroad at the time of elections. Indian voters surprisingly don’t have any such flexibility, sans a few exceptions for accessibility like those granted to voters above the age of 80. For the 2024 national elections here in India, I had to travel from Bangalore to my birthplace Mumbai to be able to vote.
3. While the numbers vary depending on how it’s measured, the adult literacy rates in the US seem to be at least 10%, higher than India.

When considering all of these things, it’s perplexing how a developed country like the US, almost 250 years from its independence, has lower voter turnouts than the squarely developing India free for only about ~75 years. Is it that the US being a developed country means many basic needs are tended to by default and so many voters don’t really care much about whom they should vote for?

I reached out to some friends in the US to help me understand some nuances regarding this situation. Here are pointers to that end.

• A poll from November 2020 shows that non-voters in the 2020 US election tended to have a disinterest in its outcomes more than any other factor for not voting, thinking that its politics don’t matter to their daily lives.
• Voting via post is not as straightforward as I thought. A friend said:

You can only vote in the state where you're registered (and registering requires that you live there). Voting procedures vary by state, even down to the county/city level. A few states do all-mail voting. Some allow mail voting but you have to sign up. And others only allow mail-in voting if you have an excuse for why you can't go in person. Here's an explainer from the 2020 election.

• Multiple people pointed out that Republican controlled legislatures try to make it harder to vote because “it disenfranchises people of color and folks who would be more likely to vote Democrat.” A friend added that in Georgia, it’s illegal to give someone a bottle of water while they're standing in line. One follow up on this whole point would be to check if Democrat controlled legislatures have a consistently higher voter turnout.
• As an interesting tangent, a friend in Europe pointed out that voting is mandatory in Australia.

As with everything, there are arguments for and against mandatory voting. Nevertheless, I think it instills an inherent duty that everyone needs to at least pay some attention to their civics.

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• I get to spend hours reading without much interruption from humans.
• ⁠Eating and relaxing is more comfortable in spacious AC train coaches than being cramped in plane seats.
• ⁠With trains you essentially just get in and get out. There’s no fuss of guards, check-ins, microscopic security, gates, relay buses, and luggage pickup.
• And with Bangalore in particular, the airport somehow being more than a city’s length outside the city, the air transit hassles and time only add up.
• It saves money too, and reduces carbon emissions.

With increasing rail speeds in India now, however gradually, the odds increasingly seem to favor of this perspective. And so whenever a destination presents an opportunity to chill-read on rail, I grab it. A day before taking an intercity train, I send many longform reads and articles to my Kindle and immerse myself in perusing them without the distraction of a regular day. It’s like a daylong trip with the self. Only if you want it to be.

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Here’s another web letter of notable things I’ve been up to or enjoyed recently. A lot has happened over the last two months, and below are slices from both the spacey and non-spacey parts of my life.

Reading

• Why research paper DOIs don’t work sometimes
• One paragraph a day
• “Every email that lands in my inbox is like a little mini Turing test”
• China’s Great Wall of Villages
• Voter apathy in the US
• “I don’t want to bastardize the art of storytelling to mask sales copy as stories, narratives, and articles.”

Writing deep dives on Chandrayaan

• On the importance of the Chandrayaan 3 rover and its contribution to learning about our Moon’s origin
• Chandrayaan 4, India’s plan to bring samples from the Moon
• On (not) celebrating Chandrayaan 3’s Moon landing, or that of Apollo

More space writing

• When your writing is so niche that your entire article is about a cave on the Moon
• First look at samples from the Moon’s farside brought by China
• How China repurposes Moon missions to enable deep space exploration
• Continued covering NASA’s VIPER rover cancellation: Moon Monday #188 and #192
• The next Moon missions by Intuitive Machines: Mission 2 and 3, and Mission 4
• Europe’s new test facility brings the Moon vibes on Earth
• On India’s newest rocket

More videos based on Moon Monday!

• India’s increasingly complex upcoming Chandrayaan Moon missions
• The next Moon landing missions by Intuitive Machines for NASA CLPS

Space, personally

• I’m conducting a study on Indo-US lunar exploration as an Adjunct Scholar at the Takshashila Institution. Our aim is to identify specific collaborative avenues that will elevate lunar science & technology capabilities of both countries in line with their independent goals. 🇮🇳🌗🇺🇸
• Sometimes when people ask me which company I represent, and don’t understand that I’m an independent writer, I’m tempted to say that I’m a bootstrapped one-person startup that’s revenue positive from day one.

Thoughts

• LinkedIn Newsletters are spam and a scam
• Screw shortform. Live longform. Go slowcial media.
• If you’re too obsessed with context, you’ll end up wanting to become a cosmologist.
• All I’m asking for is a bluetooth watch with an e-ink display for excellent sunlight legibility and long battery life, a flat-strip just thick enough to house a USB-C port, solar cells or little dynamos on its band, call notifications, and basic fitness tracking. Instead of whatever bulky power hungry non sense these modern smart watches are. ⌚︎

Life

• Moved houses within Bangalore and dealt with some personal things
• A focused phone experience with Archaic Intelligence
• My medu wada guy in Mumbai remembered my chutney-sambhar preference and simply handed over a plate to me after a quick head confirmation despite seeing me after four months. This is what local niceties look like. ^_^
• A daylong train ride is a one-day vacation with the self if you want it to be. Immerse yourself in reading something new, and it might as well be a trip.

Pictures

I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to.

Don’t know what to say? Reply with an interesting link!

Let’s not live an internet without intent.

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An addendum to Rebecca Solnit’s How to Comment on Social Media.

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The spam

First off, as soon as I made my first LinkedIn Newsletter post, LinkedIn automatically sent out an “invitation” to all my connections and followers to subscribe—without telling me it will do so in the way it did: with notifications that look like I specifically personally invited that person. Which I did not! This is especially bad for people who are already subscribed to my space blog since this must’ve felt like spam. If that was you, I’m sorry but I had zero control over if, when, and how I could send that entitled “invite”.

The scam

LinkedIn Newsletters do not meet the fundamental definition of a newsletter. You can’t export your subscriber emails to, say, import them to another platform if and when you want to move away your newsletter from LinkedIn for whatever reason. The whole point of having mailing lists for your work is that it’s a direct connection between you and your readers. It’s portable and platform-agnostic. But LinkedIn Newsletters are a scam because they aren’t even newsletters. To drive this point home, if you share your newsletter’s link outside of LinkedIn like a normal person, people cannot even subscribe to it via their email. They must log into or create a LinkedIn account.

What posting an article on your LinkedIn “Newsletter” thus really amount to is nothing more than a push notification for a new social media post. This trait of LinkedIn keeping you off your own email list—people who chose to connect with you—is just as bad as Instagram not allowing links in post descriptions. Links! The fundamental enabler of the Web! Email! The building block of a newsletter!

P.S. Yes, I know about paid tools that scrape LinkedIn to get you some of your subscriber emails. But they are shady, and can be a hit and a miss. More importantly though, you shouldn’t need to go through such hoops just to have something that should be standard.

The thankless

Just to reinforce the idea that LinkedIn Newsletters are intentionally built to be nothing but a lock-in feature, the description field of your “newsletter” can't even link to anywhere on the Web, such as your website for example. Thankless corporates, I tell you.

If you thought things couldn’t get worse further still, guess what? As far as I can tell, there’s no way to export your LinkedIn Newsletter articles and posts in any standard format of a blog or newsletter. Your posts too are stuck on LinkedIn, unless you fancy manually copy-pasting every article’s text and images onto another blog or newsletter.

If you enjoyed this rant, these posts might enthuse you too:

• What will it take for me to take LinkedIn seriously
• How LinkedIn treats us like monkeys
• How to have sustainable conferences

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