404 Media
404 Media
Seconded. Decentralized services are the way and we should be using the networks we want to see succeed.
decentralization
dansinker.com
dansinker.comThe rise of mass social platforms has been at the cost of a truly independent, truly open internet. But it's still there. You can still build anything on it, free of platforms and the overreach of monopolists and oligarchs.This is the way. The mass media is not helping right now but there is a vast network of people sharing information that you can tune into with a little work.
lil.law.harvard.edu
lil.law.harvard.edu"I’m not sure yet where I personally lie on the spectrum between the fediverse view and my default of learned helplessness in the face of unrelenting capitalism, but exposure to Mastodon changed my thinking about this project. I stopped referring to the people who would fork my repository as “users” and started calling them “participants”—a term which assigns them more agency and a sense of belonging to a collective whole."Thoughtful essay by Liza Daly about how the existence of an alternative way of being online helped inform decisions about protecting people online.
runyourown.social
Darius Kazemi describes running a modified Mastodon instance for 50 friends. This is my kind of heresy:
"I'd like to advance the notion that software does not have to scale, and in fact software can be better if it is not built to scale."I think his vision of thousands of small communities that federate would be a better future for social media.
git.sr.htNice throwback idea—syndicate a few posts from weblogs you like on your own weblog. This is a bit of code to accomplish that but it shouldn’t be too hard to put something similar together in any environment.
nrempel.comThis is another great post about changing digital habits, google edition. This is feeling more possible to me every day. I need to switch to Fathom Analytics here. Google Analytics is overkill for a personal website. And it wasn't mentioned in this post, but I still haven't found a good alternative to Google Maps on my phone. Apple Maps has been improving but it's still not as accurate in my experience.
inessential.comBrent Simmons on his blog tech setup. I like his micro.blog idea but I have mixed feelings on syndicating out to services like Twitter and Facebook. a.) They are terrible for society and individuals. b.) I think you need to be ‘present’ and interacting for the social part of social media. Maybe you can do both, but: society.
Similarly: Always own your platform.
Similarly: Always own your platform.
Postlight
Webster’s Dictionary defines serverless as—well, it doesn’t define it yet. But I like Postlight’s take on it here. I’m also a fan of Airtable which does structured data and media entry well. With some light glue in Node.js form, you can present that data and media with HTML & CSS. I could see using this when you don’t need the overhead of running WordPress but you want some structure around how you enter content. Neat idea! In conclusion, serverless structure still requires servers.
Gizmodo
"I’d start with, at most, 10 news sites to subscribe to. This will give you a feel for how fast you want the feed to move. Too slow? Add more. To fast? Delete a few. I try to narrow things down even further: Instead of subscribing to the New York Times, which publishes dozens of items per day, I subscribe specifically to the Times’ tech section, which means I get a much more curated selection."Seconded. And hey, I could have written this. This article has great advice for embracing the decentralized lifestyle. I personally use a self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS with Reeder on iOS which costs about $8/month at AWS. Instead of limiting feeds, I subscribe liberally and put them in folders by subject. Then I browse by subject periodically instead of the full list of feeds and tune from there.
forbes.com 
"The decentralized web is a mindset and a belief in an alternative structure that can address some of the afflictions that have risen from data pollution."This article raises more questions than it answers but it’s a good summary of why some of us prefer decentralized web tools and recreation. Re-decentralization feels like a lost fight but I’m glad people are working on it.
Craig Mod
"...email has stayed, and has largely stayed decentralized, and from that — its ubiquity and lack of central authority — email has become one of the most boringly powerful publishing platforms around." Newsletters, amirite?! I agree that it feels like an exciting time for email and I really need to get back to posting my favorites. Are you thinking about starting your own newsletter? There's a guide for that: Newsletter Guide. And here's the obligatory Simpsons reference.
Medium
I like this framing of the Mastodon vs. All Social Media story. Mastodon doesn't have to supplant Twitter to be a success. If people like me enjoy using it (and I do!) then it's working on some level. Yet every article about Mastodon says, "it has a long way to go to supplant Twitter." When you look at raw number of users, that's true, but do we need massive centralized networks? This recent Mastodon 101 article falls into the same framing trap, but it's a good summary nonetheless: The quest to design an ethical social media platform.