Werd I/O

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?