Reflections on the state of the Web.
Social Networks
It actually happened. Meta’s social networking app Threads joined the Fediverse! And I have a few thoughts. 1. This is a big deal. For the first time in history, you can not have an account on a Meta-owned app but still be able to follow and soon interact with
Social Networks
Mastodon and most Fediverse platforms may be better than traditional social networks at interoperability but they don’t do much about other issues. In fact, they largely copy these issues straight from the social media giants. Most Fediverse platforms, including Mastodon, publicly display follower counts, like (favorite) counts, and share
Social Networks
Many of us are familiar with the feeling of investing time and effort on a particular social network, only to either see it become irrelevant over time or do something stupid or malicious that scatters people over to half a dozen platforms. And so you start over, with all your
The Web
In today’s Web, being online seldom means being present. Browsing doesn’t mean reading. Following hardly means connecting. Posting certainly doesn’t mean articulating. Commenting rarely means conversing. Listening doesn’t mean comprehending. Watching never meant absorbing. And likes don’t mean anything anyway. We largely live an internet
Read and Surf Sanely
RSS, or Rich Site Summary, is a website reading technology nearly as old as the consumer Web itself. And yet it can keep you on top of news and perspectives in ways social networks can’t. How it works is really simple yet smart: 1. Blogs and websites publish an
Podcasts
I rarely listen to podcasts. They are hard to discover in web and app searches. Articles are much easier to find, even good ones. There are four more aspects where I find podcasts to be lacking against articles. Links: Podcasts typically don’t provide sources for whenever guests or hosts
The Web
The “modern” Web, especially when served via our phones and social media, makes it too easy to live without intent. Hour after hour. Days at a time. Cumulatively months even. Maybe for years. While most of us have a job, family, and friends, how much of our daily time and
Social Networks
I wish the press took fact checking a bit more seriously. When major events of any kind take place, media publications at large jump the gun to break out any info that seems remotely publishable. They spurt out instant takes and hammered quotes to grab more views, and thus ultimately
Blogging
It’s fairly popular to write blog posts on Medium or WordPress.com. As I argue in my post on How to feel at home on the Internet, that’s a good thing compared to posting on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube or siloes alike. Unlike most social media platforms, blogs are
Blogging
A nice internet friend, Kev Quirk, recently resonated with this blog post of mine and shared it with his readers. I figure this is a good time to remind my readers of the same, so here you go. Colored text links on the Internet are popular. The familiar blue touted
Reading
The quality of conversations on the Internet is terrible. Most platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc. optimize for engagement as their key metric. This spawns and rewards behavior that leads to bragging of gameable metrics such as likes and followers, self-feeding thought bubbles, knee-jerk reactions, “if you’re not
Blogging
A lot of people have asked me lately how I got my space blog listed on Google News. Doing so has enhanced the distribution of my articles and the Moon Monday newsletter on Google Search and News as well as other channels like the Discover feed on Android and Chrome.
Social Networks
I recently requested my Patreon supporters to move their patronage to my Donorbox so I can avoid Patreon’s high platform fees. Lately I came to realize that the actual cut Patreon takes from us creators is far higher than the cleverly advertised ~8-10%, which isn’t low to begin
Reading
Colin Walker recently listed blogs by female authors he reads, so as to promote diversity and improve representation of voices on the Web. It’s a nice idea, and so I replied there with a quick list of my own. But I think it deserves a proper blog post to
Social Networks
I was a panelist at an event in my city yesterday on space writing & journalism. It was nice, with lots of enthusiastic folks in the audience who had some good questions. However, literally everyone who engaged with me was trying to search my profile on Instagram. When they found
Writing
As I grew in my professional writing journey, I realized some writing mistakes I had been making for years. And they seem to be common among aspiring writers I keep coming across. So I’m sharing simple not-to-do tips here along with explanations. Don't add any images to
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