5 thoughts on “”

1. Chris Aldrich was posting about something like this and I realized that I don’t think I’ve shared this since using it for my latest attempt to Get Into RSS. Feed import / export remains pretty garbage for RSS readers once you get enough feeds that categories are essential… but we work with what we have.
   For me, it was cool because I’ve tried for a long time to follow a lot of non-dudes in tech. After this OPML file was generated, I went through and found a lot more blogs / sites of those people than I’d expected!
   If your Twitter follow list is anything like mine, I recommend manually verifying that people have posted within the last year or so before adding them to whatever your canonical RSS feed list is.

   Syndicated copies:

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2. Ian, I am really intrigues about the rise of Substrack. I liked Sean Monahan concern about the magic of micropayments:

   A new micropayments platform for newsletters won’t magically liberate public intellectuals from commercial pressures; it won’t solve the tensions between free speech and safety; and I highly doubt it will make having a career as a writer any easier. But it will create space for writing not tailored to the trending on Twitter section, encourage writers to develop a deeper relationship with their audience, and promote the sort of writing (both longform and short) that doesn’t fit neatly into the categories of legacy media.
   Sean Monahan https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/17/substack-media-platform-publishing

   I really liked your association between Substack and Medium. What Monahan labels a ‘social media interregnum’. I really liked Chris Aldrich’s point about ‘yet-another-platform’.
   I have been using Buttondown, but have reservations and am considering moving to Mailpoet, especially as all my posts are already on my site.

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3. I think that part of it is the fact that every interface supports different features, so we have to choose based on the features we want. We need to make every CmS have indieweb feature perity.
   
   
   

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4. Including all the ones that don’t have it yet; #OrchardCMS, #DNNCMS, and so on. I intend to contribute on the #dotnet front, at some point.
   
   
   

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5. Clio Chang reports on the rise of Substack. Established in 2017 by Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi, it was designed as a platform that allowed users to earn an income. A part of this move is to approach potential contributors. The problem is that it still replicates the patterns of marginalization found on other platforms. In addition to this, there is something sacrificed in going solo:

   Writing is often considered an individualistic enterprise, but journalism is a collective endeavor. And that is the paradox of Substack: it’s a way out of a newsroom—and the racism or harassment or vulture-venture capitalism one encountered there—but it’s all the way out, on one’s own. “Holy shit, I work anywhere from fifty to sixty hours a week,” Atkin, of Heated, told me. “It’s a lot.” Harvin, the Beauty IRL writer, said she missed the infrastructure—legal and editorial—of a traditional outlet. “I just know how valuable it is to have a second ear to bounce ideas off of, someone to challenge you,” she said. “I’m very not big into writing in a vacuum, and I think that is the thing I miss the most.” Kelsey McKinney, a journalist whose literary Substack, Written Out, has accounted for about a third of her income during the pandemic, doesn’t do any reporting for her newsletter because of the lack of legal and editorial backing. Investigative journalism seems particularly difficult as a solo enterprise on Substack, which doesn’t reward slowly developed, uncertain projects that come out sporadically.
   Clio Chang https://www.cjr.org/special_report/substackerati.php/

   Chang closes with a reflection on some of these limitations and why it still is not necessarily the answer.
   This piece me thinking about the Substack newsletters I am subscribed to:

   HEWN
   Little Futures
   Mike Monteiro’s Good News
   The Art of Noticing
   The World is Yours
   Amazon Chronicles
   People First
   Insight

   I still wonder about Chris Aldrich’s point about ‘yet-another-platform’.

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