Werd I/O

My posts are syndicated to Microsoft Start as part of the Creator Program. It’s been interesting to see which ones find an audience there and which ones don’t: politics seems to be more interesting to the community there than tech commentary, which stands to reason, as it’s a more universal topic.

What’s noticeable, though, is that the only comments I see over there are wildly right-wing. The Microsoft Start readers who seem driven to weigh in tell me that climate change isn’t real, that the police are right to infiltrate protest movements, and that DEI initiatives are wrong.

This skew doesn’t match the population overall, so I wonder what’s happening there. Are there people looking for content on these topics to comment on in order to squash those topics? Does Microsoft Start itself somehow skew right-wing? Or is something else going on?

I wish there was a conclusive list of “share-to” URLs. For example, here’s the URL you can use to build a “share to Threads” button:

https://threads.net/intent/post?text=

Here’s the equivalent URL for Reddit:

https://reddit.com/submit?url=

Every Known site has a URL like:

[domain]/share/?share_url=

Every Mastodon instance has a URL like:

[domain]/share?text=

Does Micro.blog have a share URL? How about WordPress installations? Ghost? Bluesky? And platforms like Lemmy, etc?

I’m on a mission to collect them all.

After some to-ing and fro-ing, I finally cracked how using Obsidian is useful.

I’d previously been trying to work in the open and update my thoughts for a public website there — but, of course, that’s what my personal site is for! So it didn’t click, because I was already saving notes to a space that people could read.

I’ve started keeping daily notes in a private vault, linking to people, products, and concepts as it makes sense, but not bothering to actually create resources at the other end of those links until there’s something that needs to live there. Backlinks are on so I can always see what’s referencing a particular resource.

And it’s clicked. I’m finding it particularly useful to keep track of features and products that aren’t part of my daily workstream but still are something I need to remember the status of (and when I last interacted with them). Suddenly what felt obtuse and overcomplicated seems easy and incredibly useful. I get it!

Subsequent conversations have convinced me that I’m right about the assertions I made about the Fediverse for media organizations. There’s a huge need, a huge opportunity, and the underlying technology is there.

The thing that’s a bit missing is a first-class Fediverse platform. Mastodon itself has become a bottleneck. Its design decisions are all reasonable in its own right, but there’s a need for something that goes beyond copying existing siloed services like Twitter. (Pixelfed, similarly, apes Instagram; Lemmy apes Reddit.) What does a Fediverse service look like that’s been designed from the ground up to meet a user need rather than copy something that already exists? And what if that user need is a first-class reader experience with the ability to comment and share interesting stuff with your friends?

I’m not bullish on squeezing long-form content into a microblogging platform, whether on Mastodon or X. Long-form content isn’t best consumed as part of a fast-moving stream of short updates. But the fact that both have those features — and that people are syndicating full-length articles straight to the Fediverse despite the poor UX — points to an interesting deer path to pave.

What if we had a great experience that ties together both short-form discussion and re-sharing and long-form reading, in a way that better showcases both kinds of content and realizes that the way we consume both is different? What if it had a beautiful, commercial-level design? And what if it remained tied to the open social web at its core, and pushed the capabilities of the protocols forward as it released new features and discovered new user needs?

If I had a year and funding, this is what I’d be working on.

Someone I follow posted this weekend about how the progressive wing of the Democratic Party was stupid because it consistently pushed for projects that would require higher taxes. I don’t like the framing, and as a self-identified progressive I’m not particularly excited about being called stupid. But there is an underlying political reality about America’s inability to raise taxes which I can grudgingly accept.

I think, though, that a lot of this is about what you get for those taxes. When I moved to the US from the UK, the percentage I paid out of my paycheck in taxes went down (although not by as much as you’d think, given the rhetoric). The amount I had to pay out of pocket for living expenses skyrocketed. It’s far more expensive to live in America than in Europe. Consumer prices are lower, sometimes by a lot; healthcare is free at the point of use; in most places you don’t need to own or run a car.

American taxes don’t seem to be used on infrastructure that most people can actually use. Part of that is the bananas military spending, for sure: a wartime economy instead of one that builds domestically. Part of that is solid opposition from the Republicans, whose modern incarnation appears to hold an Ayn Randian opposition to any kind of policy that could actually help regular people. Part of that is a solid neoliberal streak from the Democrats themselves. All of which is informed, in part, by American public sentiment.

How do we get to the good stuff? Universal healthcare, high-speed rail, integrated public transit, a welfare system that catches people who fall through the cracks, well-funded public education, renewable energy a renewed investment in the arts, public science infrastructure, parks, bike lanes, shared spaces, real programs for the homeless … and so on? Let alone gun control, anti-trust reform, and all those more contentious tasks that seem insurmountable. These all seem important prerequisites for everyone being able to live well, which surely should be the goal. And yet they seem completely, hopelessly unreachable.

Is there hope for the American experiment? And if so: where?

I used to have a night-time routine. I would help my mother up the six stairs from the living room to her bedroom, give her a hug, and set her up in bed. Sometimes, if she was feeling particularly weak, I would bring her toothbrush to her with a mug of water, so that she could brush her teeth in bed.

I could hear the rolling stand that held her food pump against the hardwood floor as she moved around at night, to go to the bathroom. My dad had all the carpeting removed when they bought the house — carpets harbor dust and fungus that could inflame her lungs.

Years out from a double lung transplant, it was no longer the pulmonary fibrosis that was causing her pain: it was the anti-rejection drugs. The operation had saved her life, but it was far from a magic bullet. For eight years, she seemed to go from near-death experience to near-death experience: operations to remove scarring on her lungs, fungal infections, feeding tubes, inability to eat, nausea, pain. In 2019, we spent eleven straight weeks by her bedside. In 2020, the silver lining of the pandemic was that I no longer had to go into an office, and could spend most of my time helping to care for her. In 2021, on an awful Sunday evening in June, we lost her.

She fought for over a decade. Even at the end, she said she wasn’t ready to say goodbye. She still had life left. She didn’t want to leave us.

There are so many things I want to tell her; so many things I want to talk through with her. There’s so much I want to apologize for, too: she had told us, over and over again, that she didn’t want to die in a hospital. In some of her last lucid moments, she tried to remove the tubes on her arms. “This is not okay,” she said. Palliative care, which is supposed to be about making her as comfortable as possible, seemed in the end to be about making us as comfortable as possible. They starved her. I watched as my sedated, unconscious mother starved to death in a hospital bed.

This is not okay.

I feel compelled to go back to that hospital room, as if she’ll be waiting for me there. When I was still in San Francisco, I’d walk by the hospital and look up at the corner room, facing the trees on the hillside, hoping to see her silhouette.

I wish she would show up in my dreams, so I could at least talk to a version of her, even if I intellectually know it would just be my own projection. She hasn’t shown up there once, except as a brief staccato “oh my god, you guys” that came out of nowhere and woke me up like a nightmare.

The morning she died, I collapsed into Erin; I’m not ready, I said, over and over, as if it could change anything.

I’m not ready.

I will never be ready.

I came back to Britain for my friend’s wedding a year after her lung transplant. I didn’t stay long: whenever I went anywhere, there was always the fear that something would happen. But I’d ripped my life apart to come to California to be with her, and returning there made me feel at least a little bit connected to what my life had been. I saw my friends, I saw the places that used to be home to me. But rather than slotting back, there was a bittersweetness to everything. It had all changed, my life and theirs, and this couldn’t be home to me anymore. I was severed.

I gave a presentation about the indieweb at an Edinburgh TechMeetup where my laptop had frozen up and needed to be hard-rebooted halfway through. Afterwards, we all gathered at a nearby pub, and a prominent member of the Edinburgh tech scene said to me, “I wouldn’t have gone. I would have said, ‘sorry, Mum, you made the choice to move there’.” I couldn’t understand, and I still can’t. She had never met my mother. She would never understand who my mother was. And she misunderstood me if she thought I would ever say that. (Did I do the wrong thing?, I asked myself that night, and for years afterwards, over and over.)

Ma’s illness was genetic. We’ve lost five members of our family — people we dearly loved. Researchers were finally able to figure out how to identify the relevant mutation in the TERT gene, which eventually led to my sister and I getting cleared. But, of course, the science is evolving; there’s no complete guarantee that we are actually cleared. It will hover over us forever either way: we lost people we dearly love to this thing as recently as this summer, so any relief we might have felt was painfully hollow.

Holy shit, did it fuck me up.

I remember my first experience of really feeling different when I was around eight years old; the dawning understanding in my third-culture mind that people saw me as some kind of other. One boy used to drag me into the ditch at the side of the school playing field and just jump on me, as if he was trying to break my legs. The teachers at my school mocked me for having a German name; forty years later, the war still weighed heavily for them. I have wondered if they would have acted differently if they’d known my Jewish heritage, but honestly, I don’t think it would have mattered. I wasn’t one of them, was the thing; I was Other.

When I was a teenager, I became so tall that I often loomed over people. My new presence attracted yet more attention, and I grew to hate the looming hugeness of my body, this bounding form that people found it necessary to laugh at. I wished I could have disappeared. I wished I could have been normal. I fantasized that there was a magic word that other people knew that I didn’t, and if I could only figure out how to invoke this special incantation, I would finally feel like I was okay.

So when this happened, when I tore my life to bits at the hands of this terrible terminal disease, I felt like I deserved it. I didn’t feel like Ma deserved it; I didn’t feel like my dad deserved it; I didn’t feel like my sister deserved it; I didn’t feel like the other members of my family deserved it. Intellectually, I don’t believe in fate or karma. Nonetheless, I deserved it. Of course I did.

The internet, though. Here was a place where I could write something, or take a photo, or build some software and release it, and the world would respond. Every response was a distraction from what was actually happening. This other world, not so much a backchannel to real life as a parallel universe with its own culture and rules, could take me away, just as it had when I was a teenager. Even then, I would check for new messages relentlessly, dialing up to Demon Internet and logging in many times during a long, after-school evening. Now, decades later, the web seemed infinite, and there was always something new to say, to get involved in. It was a balm, and then an addiction, and then a distraction. A way to feel less worthless. And whereas my teenage self had needed to dial up from the desktop computer in his bedroom after school, the iPhone gave me access to it anywhere.

I wrote recently about needing to pull back from social media. It’s not the first time I’ve written a post like this: it’s been a cycle of addiction. But I don’t think I’ve ever written in depth about why I needed that back-channel. It’s sometimes easier to look down at the device in your hands than take life squarely in the face.

But that doesn’t mean the escape is reasonable, or healthy, or right. There were times over the last fifteen years when I needed to be present in the moment and I just wasn’t: when I was racking up points sharing links rather than facing up to what was happening. It made me avoidant and disconnected; untethered me from the world. It dulled my empathy and let me remove myself from it all.

This isn’t a “screens are bad” post. It is a post about being forced to reckon with what actually matters, even when it’s hard to look at.

Maybe what I’m saying doesn’t make sense to you. But when I say I want to remove myself from social media, when I don’t think it’s good for me, and when I keep coming back, this is what I mean. This is what’s happening.

Which means the indieweb isn’t just a technology movement to me. It’s a way of reclaiming more of myself. And in that light, perhaps I should just own my mind and switch it all off for good.

Confession: I’ve started to find ChatGPT to be useful in my fiction writing.

And now, before proceeding, I must very quickly add that I haven’t let it write a word of the story, or come up with any ideas, or engage in any ideation. That’s all me.

But writing is lonely, and conventional wisdom says that you shouldn’t share your first draft with anybody. (I agree with that: the times I’ve broken this rule have been disastrous.) So for me, a first-timer who blogs quickly but has rarely published outside of that format, the self-doubt had reached a crescendo.

Which is why I’ve started feeding passages to a generative model and asking it to provide a loose critique — then adding and editing, and asking it to provide a second one.

Here’s a response it gave me yesterday on a revision:

This revision maintains the strong atmospheric and thematic elements of the original while making significant strides in clarifying the narrative and deepening the intrigue around the Source. The interactions between [character] and [other character] are particularly effective in teasing out the central mysteries of the story.

[Further description of strengths and weaknesses omitted]

In summary, this version of the passage improves upon the original by deepening the mystery, enhancing character depth, and expanding the thematic exploration. Further refining the balance between exposition and action, clarifying the stakes, and enriching emotional and sensory descriptions will continue to elevate the narrative, drawing readers deeper into the world you've crafted.

Look, I know. I’m incredibly familiar with all the shortcomings of AI. And I know its literary feedback is not good. But there’s a kind of magic feather quality to this back-and-forth: now I feel less alone, and the feedback, however mechanical, is enough to puncture my fear that everything I’m doing is bullshit. It’s the equivalent of a mechanical Turk that sticks its thumb up from time to time and tells me I’m doing great, but also, have I remembered to show not tell? And that’s kind of what I need in the moment.

I guess what I’m saying is, sometimes I need a robot cheerleader. And I’m going to say that’s okay.

Manu Moreale discusses the dual use of the garden metaphor for both walled gardens and digital gardens:

It’s interesting how we’re using the same metaphor—the garden—to describe two completely different things. [The walled garden] is the embodiment of the capitalist mindset applied to the digital ecosystem driven by greed. The other is the digital manifestation of personal expression. Digital gardens are—or at least should be—a welcoming place.

It’s an insightful observation, and an illustration of the way power dynamics change everything.

Consider surveillance. We don’t want (and shouldn’t want) the government or big business to understand the nuances of our lives; our comings and goings; who we gather with; the things we say to each other behind closed doors. At the same time, we absolutely do want to understand the nuances of the lives of people with power; their comings and goings; who they gather with; the things they say to each other behind closed doors.

That’s because they have power and we do not. giving them more knowledge about our lives just cements their position; giving us more insight into them gives them more accountability to us.

So it is with gardens. If a megacorporation builds a walled garden, it’s to hem us in. If we build a walled garden, it’s to keep them out.

Threads has begun its wider beta test of publishing to the fediverse. You can follow accounts that are part of the test from Mastodon, and even see them interact with each other.

Here’s Evan Prodromou’s post on Threads, and you can see it if you search for evanprodromou@threads.net from my Mastodon instance. It’s pretty nice!

Nice is actually an understatement: I’m super-excited to see a company like Meta begin to embrace these kinds of open standards. While the Threads API itself will not allow anyone to build their own Threads app, anyone can build their own fediverse app, without asking for permission, featuring every fediverse-compatible profile as well as every profile on every other fediverse-compatible service.

The other day The 19th joined the fediverse without having to build its own integration: by maintaining a profile on Flipboard, it could automatically be followed and interacted with on Mastodon (and soon, Threads). That’s also pretty cool.

It really does feel like it’s all happening: a new social layer to the web. I’m pretty excited.

People are sometimes a little taken aback by my criticism of the US, just as they used to be about my criticism of the UK when I lived there. In both cases, it’s not that I don’t like the place — I just see all kinds of opportunities for them to be better.

I sometimes wonder what a perfect place to live might look like. Some things I’d like to see:

• Universal healthcare
• A solid social safety net
• Integrated, well-run public transit
• Walkable cities
• No guns
• Progressive, inclusive policies overall

Which describes a few social democratic countries really well. But then I’d like to add:

• Good weather
• Delicious, fresh food
• Affordable housing
• No state religion (officially or effectively)
• No monarchy
• Permissive immigration
• Low discrepancy between rich and poor

And it all starts to fall apart a bit more. I think there will be countries that tick all of those boxes (maybe some do already); over time more and more places will become this.

But if you leave aside the obvious ties of family and friends (not small reasons to stay in a place), and toss aside patriotism and nationalism (which are two cultural values that I genuinely think are useless), where’s the best place to be now?

I’ve heard a lot of variations of the quote, “you can’t teach taste” over the years, and haven’t thought much of it. Taste in design, in home decor, in good food, in art — it’s seemed obvious that some people are more attuned than others. Tastes are different, but some people have strong tastes and others do not.

But, of course, what is considered to be good taste is inherently about in-groups and out-groups. Why do people talk more about Paris and Rome, and less so about Seoul, Bangkok, or Istanbul? Why is Restoration Hardware revered over more accessible furniture stores (or Black-owned outlets like Ilé Ilà)?

I totally get that part of it depends on who you’re listening to, so this aside is kind of a self-own. But my point is: I don’t trust the idea of taste, and I think it’s often used as an exclusionary cudgel to separate out people and cultures that aren’t from “approved” backgrounds.

Everyone has taste. The most important thing is that they’re allowed to display and share it, and that we’re able to appreciate it.

All told, I lived in Edinburgh for nearly a decade between my late teens and early thirties. I went there to study Computer Science at the University, stuck around to work in the Learning Technology department, co-founded Elgg, left for a while, and eventually came back to live with my then-partner. I lived in a student flat in Old Town, had a house in The Inch, and then later lived in a flat in Bruntsfield.

I think it’s probably changed a lot, but I miss the anarchic, artistic spirit of the place. Maybe it was because of a certain time in my life, but I felt free in ways that have been hard to come by since: I could be whoever I wanted to be, without judgment. It’s not without its flaws, of course: the weather, for one, the food for another, and by the time I left the first time I was pretty sick of a certain kind of cynical pessimism that permeated the place at the time. But it’s a progressive, lovely place to be, and were it not for some surprise events I might never have left.

All of which has me wanting to check out One Day, the Netflix show which starts and ends in the city. I was delighted when Avengers: Infinity War showcased Waverley Station and the site of my favorite baked potato shop, but I like the idea of the lightness and brightness of the city being showcased somewhere rather than as some dark, gothic backdrop (see also: the endlessly bleak but darkly inventive Trainspotting, which I charmingly showed to my parents the day before I headed up there for University).

Which other films and TV shows showcase the beautiful humanity of the place? I’m eager to feed my nostalgia.

I feel more than a twinge of regret that I’m not more involved in the current decentralized social web movement. This is where I came from, after all: I built one of the first open source social networking platforms (and one of the first social networks overall). Decentralized social networking was the ultimately vision and exactly where we wanted to take it.

So, here we are, decentralized social networking has been realized thanks to the hard work of many teams, and I’m several degrees removed from it. There are open source social networking summits that I’m not invited to — quite reasonably, but I care so much about the space and wish I could be there.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t have regrets about my current direction. I’m focused on journalism in the public interest right now, which feels like an important thing to be doing in America in 2024. There are lots of technical challenges that go far beyond keeping a website online (consider what it took to obtain and analyze The IRS Files, for example).

But, also, oof, it feels weird to not be in the room and helping to push this movement forwards.

I do have a strong project idea for the space — something that would expand the fediverse and bring on a bunch of organizations who haven’t been able to join yet. So, maybe I’ll try and get that moving.

Dave Winer has been talking a bit about blogrolls lately: lists of blogs you like to read that typically sit on a sidebar or separate page of your site. I definitely used to have one, back when I had my Movable Type blog a million years ago, and I always found it a useful way to discover new people to read.

I’m kind of ambivalent about them today, though. I sat down to try and write one the other day, and realized that figuring out who to include gave me enormous anxiety. I read thousands of sources via RSS, most of which are blogs.

There’s a huge distinction in my mind between a following list — here are the people I’m actually following and reading — and a list of people who I’m choosing to highlight. The latter implies an unpublished list of people who I’m not choosing to highlight. Yikes.

I wonder how I would concretely go about building one. Would I organize them by whose writing I find interesting? How people post ebbs and flows, and what might be interesting one month might be devoid of content the next. Would I include the people who I consider to be friends or acquaintances? That kind of feels shitty and in-groupy. Would I just try and categorize blogs? There are sites for that.

So, I don’t have a blogroll, and I don’t think I’m going to build one. Instead, my Sources page is powered by my actual RSS subscriptions and updates every 5 minutes. That’s probably as close as I want to come. But, I’d love to read other peoples’ subscriptions and discover great new writers that way.

I’ve set up a new post type, “asides”, on my site. I’ve been kind of worried about writing shorter thoughts here for a while, because all of my long-form blog posts make it into the newsletter in real time, and who wants to receive a 150-word email about blogrolls or whatever?

This new type of post will show up for folks who subscribe to my full feed via RSS, and it also has its own, dedicated feed. Newsletter subscribers will get the week’s thoughts collected up as a digest on Fridays.

I’m hoping this will free me up to post more regularly in a blog-like way — which, in turn, will mean that I’m more likely to capture these thoughts here than post them on some third-party site somewhere. Let’s see?