• Big Fedi and Small Fedi, by Evan Prodromou
• A Round Robin of sign-up servers to prevent too much centralization
• Nodes versus Networked Communities, by L. Rhodes
• Fedipact, to preemptively block Meta’s Threads from federating
• Paradox of tolerance
• Moderate people, not code, by Ryan Barrett

Links: Podcasts typically don’t provide sources for whenever guests or hosts say interesting or important things that could use citations. Just the same, podcasts don’t—and can’t—have inline links to immediately allow exploring things that peak my interest while listening. Some good podcasts do provide some references but even then it means I need to hunt those links myself, or at least browse away and identify their correct places in the description. For information-dense consumptions, in-line linking within web text is supremely efficient.

Pauses: I tend to take frequent pauses while reading to think, look up things, make notes, etc. When listening to a podcast, you need to manually pause and play. When reading, your mind does it for you. This makes my pauses seamless and engaging rather than one of interference.

Browsing: When I come across a podcast episode that may or may not have something of my interest, I can’t do a “Find on Page” equivalent to know the same. Unless it comes with a reliable transcript. With articles, getting past this decision point is a cakewalk. But with podcasts, even with powerful AI abilities now in the mix, you need to ask a bot if the audio or video in the link talks about the specific thing you’re looking for or not. And then you need to trust it.

Archiving: On the rare occasion that I do subscribe to a podcast show, it’s because it offers transcripts. I add such podcasts to my RSS reader, where other than being able to scan or read transcripts of new episodes, I can do future searches and discovery since their text is now archived. For podcast shows that don’t offer transcripts, I’d like to see podcast apps and feed readers offer automated AI transcripts as “better than nothing” starting points. In the absence of such options, the value of most podcast episodes swiftly dwindles over time for me.

Of course, there are other reasons to listen to podcasts instead of reading articles. Sometimes you just want to hear a human voice. And take in all that comes with it. In the conversation that partly sparked this blog post, a friend who is a voracious reader said she likes that podcasts and audiobooks convey the speaker’s pitches and inflections. Podcasts are great to hear straight from a source. They’re also most practical when you’re time-strapped to read a screen, like when doing chores or commuting. They’re good for people who have dyslexia. What are some other reasons podcasts are great? Let me know!

At the same time, there’s something else about podcasts that doesn’t sit well with me. They are verbose. That’s just how humans talk. Some say a podcast feels like a conversation. I say it feels too much like a conversation.

From a publishing perspective, editing a podcast is less about attaining a certain economy of words, as is so satisfyingly the case with writing, but about ensuring the episode sounds good. Combine the verbosity of podcasts with the aforementioned points, and I hope you see why I feel a little disjointed when listening to them.

1. Blogs and websites publish an RSS feed accessible at a specific link.
2. This link contains a list of recent posts from the site along with their content.
3. A feed reader, which is any app or web service capable of reading said link, regularly pulls such posts for you to browse and auto-track new items.
4. To add a feed link to your reader, you usually don’t need to hunt where it lies on each site. Simply paste a website’s homepage link in your feed reader, and it will find one for you.

A feed reader, sometimes called an RSS reader, saves you from manually checking multiple sites or apps by bringing all their new posts in one inbox. Here’s what such a reader looks like:

Feed readers also let you read posts from social networks that support RSS such as Reddit, Mastodon, and Bluesky. This way you can escape the attention grabbing traits of social media, and only browse posts from people you decided to follow. At this point if you feel like escaping the YouTube algorithm too, the good news is feed readers let you follow YouTube channels and playlists too. Moreover, since podcasts are actually powered by RSS, you can subscribe to them in feed readers too.

As if all that wasn’t enough, some readers like Feedbin let you subscribe to newsletters as well. No more cluttering your email inbox, and no more consuming content in places where you tend to communicate instead—be it with humans or robots. And this way your email and you stay private. While adding newsletters is typically a paid feature on feed readers, you can use free workarounds like Kill the Newsletter. On the actual news front, sites like The Economist publish multiple news feeds for you to pick and choose.

Feed readers are particularly useful to scientists, academics, journalists, and researchers of all kinds by letting them track newly published research papers via RSS. Indeed, many journals have RSS feeds. In fact, this aspect is so useful that the Arizona State University has an entire page dedicated to how you can grab RSS feeds links for various popular journals.

If I’ve convinced you to try out a feed reader already, I suggest getting started with Inoreader. It has a generous free plan, and its mobile app is pretty good too. Feeder is decent too. If you’re as yet undecided, or simply curious to know more about the delightful prowess of RSS, read on.

RSS has four key human attributes, either or all of which you might desire:

1. Convenience
2. Control
3. Dumbness
4. Privacy

Convenience

Having all the thoughts you actually want to consume converge in one place is immensely time-saving if not game changing. And to avoid your reader inbox feeling like a firehose, feed readers let you organize your feeds into folders. Browsing posts by folder not only let you scan all related posts in one place but also ignore topics you may not be in the mood for.

Now here’s the kicker. A feed reader is also a little personal search engine. You can search posts across all of your feeds, or only within certain feeds or folders. Combined with more filtering features like advanced search syntax and keyword monitoring, closely following specific topics of interests becomes radically easy on feed readers.

Control

RSS is spam-less. Unlike email, where you can receive things from organizations even though you didn’t explicitly subscribe to them, there exists no obvious mechanism in RSS for someone to send you things at random. To receive anything from anyone via RSS, it is you who needs to manually add their feed to your reader. And if you unfollow a feed, it is you who can later decide to receive it again.

Dumbness

If there’s one thing the feed reader is smart about is that it chooses to be dumb. Unlike most social media apps, a feed reader has no algorithmic timeline promoting “popular” posts and suppressing authentic ones. Your stream of posts won’t have content from randomwhere either. You simply get who and what you follow, from latest to oldest or vice versa.

If you decide to check your reader after a month, it will let you pick up from where you last left off without screwing up the order of posts or giving you algorithmic FOMO. Like an email client, a feed reader tells you which items you’ve read and which you haven’t, to ensure you don’t miss anything. And if you’re okay with missing things, you can mark everything as read. The categorizing, filtering, searching, selecting, and pruning of feeds is all up to you. That’s really the point after all: you’re the driver.

Privacy, for freedom

When you subscribe to blogs, newsletters, social network profiles, websites, podcasts, news, YouTube channels, and whatever else via RSS, their owners and publishers can’t know that you’ve done so! They won’t be notified that you follow them or be able to see your email—much less what you read. This feature isn’t about hiding anything but rather exists to give you the freedom to follow and unfollow without association and dissociation.

These attributes of RSS greatly aid my work as a space exploration writer, which involves scanning over 150 sources of information every single week, reading several dozens of them, juggling perspectives, and often searching for the littlest of things across it all. I’ve been absolutely loving spending time in Feedbin for three years now. It’s the best $5/month tool I’ve ever used, to the point where I consider Feedbin to be the only employee I’ve hired as an independent writer.

If my article persuaded you to use a feed reader, here’s a heartfelt thank you for using the best, most ethical reading technology on the Internet ^_^. And if you get stuck in using a feed reader, I’m happy to help.

Pro tip: When reading a post in your feed reader, you can click on its title to visit the original webpage. This helps if you want to share the page, explore the site, read the full story if the RSS only provides briefs, or contact its human.

P.S. It shouldn’t be surprising at this point that all of my blogs have RSS feeds, and so if you’d like to read my writings from the comfort of your feed reader, click these links:

• Jatan’s Space
• Web Wisely (the one you’re reading)
• Journal J

1. The Own Your Web newsletter by Matthias Ott, which is all about inspiring and helping people create on the Open Web.
2. The “Fediverse” finally becoming a viable means to socialize on the Web without isolating others. Flipboard and Threads have started to federate. WordPress and Medium are aboard. People are more familiar with Mastodon thanks to the X fiasco. Bluesky bridges are being built. Micro.blog federating is cherry on top.
3. The People and Blogs project by Manu, where he gets interesting people to talk about their blogs and the associated processes.

Most of you know that I love reading things on the Internet to virtually no end. It’s a feeling many of us can relate to. Some of you also know that I love the open Web. When you combine the two, the synergy makes consuming the Internet an absolute pleasure.

But most people aren’t aware that adopting the open Web’s underpinnings can help them be better read in every way—from absorption and habits to efficiency and perspectives. While there are plenty of blogs and newsletters urging people to write on their own websites, barely any exist to simply help them systematically read and discover things outside the bubbles of social media, messaging apps, and Google. And those who don’t exist solely in such bubbles tend to look for ways to enhance their Web reading pursuits.

This is why I’m starting a monthly curated blog & newsletter called Read and Surf Sanely. Yes, it abbreviates to RSS, natch. Simply put, I want to help people better peruse the Internet. And in the process better myself too. Here’s what I’m planning to include in the first edition of Read and Surf Sanely when its out in February:

1. New features and use cases on Read it later apps and RSS readers
2. Share newly available RSS feeds of public interest
3. Fediverse updates, and how to use it to counter social media woes
4. New features on search engines and browsers related to reading
5. Kindle and ebook tips
6. Resurface a good old feature
7. Share a well read human’s reading stack
8. and more!

If that sounds like something you would enjoy, subscribe for free.

In the meanwhile, check out the zeroth edition and maybe some of my essays about the open Web.

The trouble is this may not be a problem that can be solved at an individual level. It’s not fair to say that people are using the internet wrongly. That “if only we utilize social media in sensible ways, it’s a force for good.” Even when we do use the digital socials “sensibly”, we let the faceless algorithms decide what we say and how so.

When global conglomerates hire fleets of smart people whose entire collective job is to exploit deep-rooted psychological behaviors from our evolution, a lone human is powerless and vulnerable. How can a single human in its most organic form live with true purpose every single day when an entire economy is built to keep grabbing attention? And so, that seduces even the best of us.

So what we did instead is disguise these demons in indulgent names: binge watching, the attention economy, doom scrolling, and so on. Back when we intertwined more of the world with the Internet like never before, we thought we’d work to surface signals that enhance our connections and pursuits. What we’ve gotten much more of instead is an unparalleled noise surge.

Take the example of the like button. It single-handedly spams over a billion people every single day, incessantly reducing attention spans with interlocked streams of instant gratification. The like button amounts to nearly no conversations but those in our heads. An indulgent way for us to feel we did something without doing anything. Well, other than feeding the algorithm to drive more siloes and ads.

To become yet another tool for mass manipulation was not the Internet’s promise. It’s certainly not its only potential. Social media dominating consumption on the Web is proof that technology doesn’t automatically get better with time. This is why we should gauge and question the intents of builders, creators, and influencers whose tools we use and words we consume. It’s to this end that I found Nitin Pai’s article on threats of social media interesting. Below is an excerpt:

While popular attention is mostly focused on controversies around free speech and privacy, these are actually superficial in nature. More serious is the underlying second level, involving political power that technology platforms have come to wield through their ability to shape international and national narratives, micro-target and influence human behavior. But most serious of all is the third, deepest level concerning the effect of social media on how we process information, how we think and how we make judgements.

Nitin goes as far as to call social media an existential threat to civilization.

The world’s nation-states, shaped as they were by the Industrial Age, lack effective mechanisms to deal with this new power centre. The old formula of separating the legislative, judiciary, executive, monetary and religious authority, ensuring that the media is free, and that there is competition in the economy does not work satisfactorily in the Information Age.

Whether or not you agree, social media is certainly a threat of a kind that’s immediate. Its dark patterns even control and degrade our news consumption. How much of what we read is what we explicitly decided to? How often do we engage in dissent versus giving in to the peer pressure of the like button?

We seem more interested in how easily we can get information served rather than what information could serve us better. As an anecdote, some longtime friends once unfortunately displayed their complete lack of understanding of what I do when I read science news as a space writer by insisting that I buy an Alexa speaker. Why? Because it was on one of those big consumerist sales. They tried convincing me to buy the Amazon speaker by touting its news reading features. Yes, random, low quality, SEO’ed servings of information bubbles sounds fantastic.

But seriously, how is submitting our minds to one faceless, narcissism-rewarding algorithm after another not a decidedly collectively stupid thing to do? Who thought pairing and amplifying traits of cancel culture and out-of-context servings was a good idea?

Social media was also sold to us as a tool for expression. But I fail to fathom that as well. Where is the novelty in conforming all expression and sharing to identically arrayed endless cages whose interactions stem from predefined procedural labels and buttons?

If we want to embrace diversity of thoughts and all of our very beings, it has to start by overcoming misguided affordances engineered solely for engagement. Leaving any engagement-based social platform for another doesn’t solve a thing—rather it’s precisely the cause.

Again, I don’t think this behemoth of a problem is for an individual to solve, unfortunately. Personally though, the only action I could take, and have, is run a blog on my domain which lets me truly own my thoughts and connections to people on the Web. Maybe you could do that too. In such little corners of the Internet, there are no algorithms shaping content based on hollow likes or reposts. And no public list of followers to race for. Just humans sharing stuff and interacting at will.

On the reader side, critical events—good or bad—make most people so emotional that they forget their scientific hats, leaving them vulnerable to ostensible propaganda over prolonged cementing of facts. This makes the whole damn publisher-reader dynamic a vicious cycle, where chasing hard facts from either end slows you down and out of people’s field of view.

If only we accept a little delay in breaking news and reward patience, we could avoid so much noise and misinformation, a lot of which is irreversible even on long timescales. Instead, what we did was create a system that made everything more agonizing. It’s one thing to publish information on a website and let people consume it via organic shares, subscriptions, and (reverse) chronological feeds, but it’s completely another to instantly algorithmically amplify content created on a whim. Welcome to “modern” social media.

What we’re really grappling with in terms of misinformation and its spread are but sides effects of three core attributes of these “modern” social networks:

• make web publishing hyper instant
• bring virtually every person in one massive digital square
• leave amplification to the algorithm instead of people, meaning people’s emotions get tapped into primarily instead of their intellect

Unless we solve for these at scale, I don’t see misinformation and its woes dwindling. When we want instant and maximum visibility for our posts, we can keep creating as many digital socials as we like but it won't solve the problem.

At this point you can bet that it gets worse still. How we’ve been handling generative AI has added a fourth dreaded dimension to the whole issue, one not just of publishing misinformation at an unprecedented rate but so via authentic-seeming false identities.

• making web publishing hyper instant
• bringing virtually every person in one massive digital square
• leaving amplification to the algorithm instead of just people, meaning people’s emotions will be tapped into primarily and not intellect

Unless we solve for these at scale, I don’t see the problems dwindling.

When we want instant visibility for our posts but also want to complain about misinformation or unfair engagement metrics, we can keep creating as many socials as we want but it won't solve the problem. How we’re handling generative AI adds a fourth dreaded dimension, one not just of misinformation but authentic sounding false identities.

Unlike most social media platforms, blogs are largely standardized. This means you can fairly easily move your blog from one platform to another, should you ever want to or need to. The thoughts and things you have shared won’t die or become irrelevant along with the platform. Even if Wordpress.com or Medium happen to suspend your account, something Twitter has always been doing a lot, you can at least export your blog in a way understandable by another platform. You get to own your content on a blogging platform. But what about your relation with your readers and followers? Do you own that too? This is where Wordpress.com and Medium aren’t good options.

Owning the connection to your audience

If—nay—when Twitter shuts down or becomes irrelevant, you won’t be able to export and import your followers to your new chirp-site. Heck, you can’t even move your followers if you create a new account on Twitter itself. The same is true for nearly all social media platforms. The ethical socials of Mastodon and Micro.blog—specifically its social component—are rare exceptions to this rule though their processes to retain your followers aren’t easily discoverable. Wordpress.com and Medium have unfortunately borrowed the anti-user trick from social platforms to lock-in your followers.

Now, both platforms do provide email subscription options for your blog, meaning there’s an email followers list you can export any time. But it isn’t presented as a first class option to visitors. For example, for people logged into WordPress.com, the platform replaces the default email option with a “Follow” button, which is a separate list. Despite being the blog owner, you can’t export this list and so those followers are tied to your blog being on WordPress forever.

Medium, on the other hand, displays but a small icon-only email subscription button besides the larger “Follow” one, which leads to much the same issue. Even if people click the email button, Medium asks them to create an account, something that isn’t really required for this functionality.

Essentially, you’re semi-locked-in with regards to owning your relation with your followers when you use WordPress and Medium. I would know because I have my nearly 10K followers locked on Medium since three years now. It gets worse. Thanks to Medium’s infamous algorithm, almost all of these followers literally never see anything I publish on the platform. For the same reason, posting to alert my Medium followers to subscribe to my new blog didn’t work.

This is why I’m now wholly invested in having a direct relationship with my readers based on open technologies that allow portability: Email and RSS. It’s also partially what made Substack my blogging platform of choice since it allows people to follow my blogs using those two methods only. There’s no such thing as a “Substack account follow”, meaning my audience isn’t tied to the platform. Should I want or need to move my blog to another platform tomorrow, I can carry not just my content but also my current audience of about ~5000+ email subscribers and an estimated ~300+ RSS followers. Email lists can be exported and imported in a few clicks, and RSS feed links can be redirected in a few more.

What to do

So what can you do if you’re blogging on Medium or WordPress.com and want to own your relationship with your audience? Since I advocate not discouraging people from blogging on “non-ideal” platforms, I want to provide you with not just one solution but a few options, each of which could solve the problem for you.

1. Move your blog to Substack, write.as, Ghost or any other platform which provides full audience portability. I recommend Substack because it’s the path of least resistance but other options are fine too.
2. Continue publishing on WordPress but move your blog from being hosted on WordPress.com to any other easy to use hosting provider to avoid audience lock-in.
   Note: There’s an issue with content formatting when moving from a WordPress blog regardless of where its hosted. Even though WordPress is open source and widely used, complex blog post layouts & formatting created with its new Block Editor won’t import reliably into other blogging platforms. So don’t use fancy formatting and presentation tools in your posts, unless you know they work well on other platforms too, to make your blog easily portable in the future.
3. Keep your Medium blog but not as your primary one. Copy over your blog from Medium as in point #1, and then crosspost articles to your Medium profile using their easy Import tool. This way you can still benefit from Medium’s network effects—if that somehow works for you unlike in my case—while pointing people and search engines to your main blog as the prime location.

If you need help moving your blog from Wordpress.com or Medium, feel free to contact me and I’ll try to guide you. I know some of my friends have blogs on these platforms and so if you’re reading this, you know what to do.

Colored text links on the Internet are popular. The familiar blue touted by a majority of hyperlinks on the Web goes back to 1993. However, as the linked article explores, web links used to be underlined for a decade before they went blue. That was backwards. I think we should go back to having underlined links everywhere for several reasons.

Clear communication

Below is a screenshot of a paragraph from my article on NASA’s TESS space telescope, where I’ve changed the styling settings to display colored links.

Here’s the same paragraph with underlined links instead.

In the second view, you can clearly tell that “Earth-like” and “habitable worlds” link to distinct webpages whereas the first colored-links-only view would have you believe all three words point to the same webpage. This is a simple example but it’s not hard to imagine sentences with even four consecutive links.

Of course, you could argue that hovering the cursor above the link(s) tells you if the colored words represent one or more links. But that’s an unnecessary workaround, not a solution. More importantly, the argument fails on mobile devices where there’s simply no hover state. Let’s not forget that mobile devices are where majority of the people browse the Internet from.

Perhaps a better argument is that maybe having successive links in a sentence isn’t a good idea in the first place. But limiting how we write things just to avoid how we link things is a backward premise. Moreover, are we going to (be able to) convince millions of people to make sure not to put successive links in a sentence? Yeah, there’s no chance of that happening.

Accessibility

If you indicate links on your website or blog only with color, people who are color blind might either have a hard time recognizing the links or won’t at all depending on the contrast between the color and its background. But they won’t miss an underlined link.

The finer things

We should also consider readability. While it’s definitely an opinion, I think colored links take attention away from words and sentences, especially in link-busy articles full of references. On the other hand, underlined-only links nudge you enough to identify clickable text but otherwise minimally alter their look.

Now let’s consider devices other than just Desktops PCs, laptops and smartphones. People reading your blog or article on an e-book device such as the Amazon Kindle, however rare that maybe, won’t see colored links at all! Most e-book and e-ink displays are black & white, and so underlined links are the only way to tell the reader “you can click me.”

Much the same argument applies to printouts of articles, most of which are likely to be black & white instead of color. Of course, we can’t click links on physical sheets of paper (yet) but even knowing that there exists a reference in a particular statement you just read is better than not.

Oh Wikipedia..

Even Wikipedia has stuck to using plain blue-only links since its existence. Below is a screenshot from the TESS telescope’s Wikipedia page demonstrating the link discoverability problem I explained above.

Circling back to my point about people reading things on e-devices, Wikipedia definitely fits that bill. There are dedicated projects that allow you to download entire sections of Wikipedia for offline reading on digital devices. Wikipedia itself offers a book service for downloading a bunch of pages as PDFs and ebooks to read or print.

And yet I failed to locate a toggle in Wikipedia’s preferences to make its links underlined. The only relevant thing Wikipedia offers is adding custom CSS, which solves the problem for me at an individual level but isn’t a solution that will ever reach and thus benefit most people.

Imagine my dread when I realize that the biggest encyclopedia in the world, choke full of links to other Wikipedia pages and references, not only doesn’t underline links by default but offers no easy way to do so either.

May 2023 update: This article was published in February 2022, back when Wikipedia didn’t offer said option as I wrote. Recently though, Timo has helpfully pointed out that Wikipedia now lets users have underlined links. To do that, visit “Preferences > Appearance > Underline links” via your Wikipedia profile.

What you can do

I’m not a web designer or developer but I hope that I’ve offered a compelling argument in favor of underlined links from the perspective of an Internet writer and reader. I hope it convinces you to make links you control underlined. If you really dislike monotonous-looking text, you can style the links to be colored and underlined. I’m pretty happy that Substack, where my blogs currently live, offers a simple toggle in their Dashboard to switch styling of links.

I hope other blogging and website platforms offer the same. Even if they don’t, you can make your links underlined by learning to add some custom CSS to your site. Again, it isn’t an ideal solution scalable to everyone. But if you do so at a personal level, it will make reading easier for all your site visitors.

Notion was a close second in its import support but not in its relatively limited export options. It also messes up the order of some text in HTML files. On the other hand, many of the popular note-taking apps can’t even import HTML files, or export as such, both of which is perplexing. Workflowy, the app I use to organize my article notes, can export notes as HTML but not import them. In fact, it seems to have no import option for anything at all!

At $15/year, Bear is also among the cheapest note-taking apps out there while being generously featured, pleasant to use, snappy, and efficient. I’m thinking to import and consolidate all sorts of scattered note-taking I do into Bear. I’ve begun my free trial of Bear Pro, and am excited about typing a lot on this beautiful app with my bear hands.

This isn’t a novel observation. Nevertheless, the problem seems to be getting worse by the day. For a while now, I’ve been honing an idea of a new kind of network that I believe is a solution to the problem. A tool, specifically, that facilitates advancing conversations. I’m calling it LinkTalk.

LinkTalk is a platform where you can only post links. You can’t caption your post or write any introductory text. None. To respond to a link, you post another link. This is how we can have debates, rebuttals, curated streams of links on topics, and more. That’s it, that’s the core idea. Converse in links.

While I’m primarily thinking of links as in blog posts, articles, and research papers, other mediums of disseminating information such as podcasts and videos are also welcome.

Let me address the obvious question upfront: If people can’t write any text in posts, how will others know what to expect from the shared link?

You must have noticed when you share a link anywhere, most networks and messaging apps autogenerate a link preview. This includes a title, often a subtitle or lead text, and a thumbnail. That is sufficient information when a user views a link on LinkTalk, with the title being the key. The goal is to make people click links and consume them, not look for (often inaccurate) TLDRs in the comments section. Besides, Twitter and other networks already exist so there’s little point in not breaking some notions to test new waters.

Now come the juicy bits. What follows is my initial ideation of the specific mechanics and incentive structure of LinkTalk.

Legit links

How do we get people to post legitimate links on the network and not just links to tweets, GIFs, or spam in general?

I have no technical knowledge of how such things work at an implementation level but three things come to my mind that could act as a baseline posting filter.

1. The system will check if the link being submitted has an associated RSS feed, particularly one with an explicit title field instead of just a date, and only then allow posting it. Blogs, many research journals, YouTube channels, and podcasts have RSS feeds to aid reading and distribution, whereas things like tweets, Instagram photos, and LinkedIn posts don’t. So that’s a natively available filter on the web for us to utilize.
2. Of course, an RSS filter would catch only some unwanted links. After all, RSS is a versatile beast also used for things like tracking changes in Wikipedia pages. So the next step would be to maintain a blacklist that disallows posting links from unwanted websites in the context of the network.
3. While we’re on this topic, let’s also disallow URL shortening services. Users should be able to clearly see which website they’re heading to. If needed, the URL un-shortening can be baked into the service so users don’t need to care for it.

Needless to say, it’d require quite a bit of work to even make and maintain such a blacklist but my hope is that these filters block a reasonable amount of spam. But since I have no knowledge of these things at a technical level, including how to handle bot problems, an expert needs to chime in here.

Reactions

People consuming links on LinkTalk need to be able to react in some way, typically to weight on or against a link’s quality. I imagine implementing this differently than the usual mechanisms of likes, retweets or shares. Each link could show the following buttons to vote on:

• Good link
• Bad link
• Disproved
• It’s complicated

People can vote links as good and bad the usual way—just select your reaction. But when a user selects any of the other two reactions, they are required to post a reply link. So when you click “Disproved” on a link someone posted, you need to reply with a link that you think proves it wrong. If you think a link has many gray areas or caveats, use “It’s complicated” to reply with a link that justifies your reaction.

The benefit of such a mechanism is clear. For every user that strongly disagrees with a post or thinks they know more about a matter, the system helps others ride along by having the relevant information available by design.

Displaying reactions

An interesting divergence in displaying reactions on LinkTalk from other networks is it wouldn’t show how many and which reactions a link got until you vote yourself. This is similar to how polls work. Let’s accept it, most people on social networks upvote content only because 100, 1,000 or 50,000 people already liked it. This is the self-feeding bubble we want to break by having people realize their honest opinion first.

Also, a post view on LinkTalk will always show vote count for each reaction separately. This is to avoid giving the impression that a cumulative score of say, +50, somehow makes the thing purely positive. This will help maintain some nuance, which is the easiest thing to get lost on “modern” networks.

Following, not followers

The network effect is real. An account with over 10,000 followers has their content better heard overall than one with 500, no matter what they’re saying. People also tend to follow people who have a large following over those who don’t—another vicious loop. So on LinkTalk, each profile would only show who they’re following, not who or how many are following them. This should incentivize people to find more people they actually want to follow, and not get hung up on a popularity contest. This concept is borrowed from Micro.blog, a platform with some neat ideas.

Replies

You can reply to a posted link with another on LinkTalk, even if you don’t react to said link. Each reply post has all the same properties as a regular one so it can be reacted and replied to the same way. Conversations can thus happen in multiple threads to as many levels as the replies go. The idea with replies on the network is that you either find a good link to reply with or write one of your own, which is where the next feature comes in.

Reply by writing a blog post

When you hit reply on LinkTalk, other than allowing you to post a link, you can initiate a new blog post via a button. This will open a new post editor on your blog, which you may have connected to via your account settings or during onboarding. If multiple blogs are connected, you can choose which one to reply with.

I think this is good for two reasons. First, writing a blog post requires a more nuanced mindset than impulsively replying on traditional social platforms. Second, even if the blog post’s response length is a mere 100-200 words, it’s fine. Since the response will go as a post on your blog, you’ll be more mindful of what you write for your readers, readers which are more invested in you than a passive social media follower.

I think this feature is a good way to incentivize the largely lost culture of blogging while keeping conversation quality in check. With this feature, LinkTalk also incentivizes you to own your thoughts on the Internet via your blog, unlike the pseudo-ownership that social networks provide.

Besides, it has never been easier to start and write a blog.

Extending to the Web

LinkTalk seems relatively simple in terms of the number of things it needs to host a conversation. So why even limit it to a website? There are two ways I imagine sensibly extending LinkTalk.

1. If site owners want, the comments section on webpages could host a tab for LinkTalk integration. People can then react and reply directly from a webpage. This tab could also show any existing replies to the link on the network. To integrate LinkTalk into a website, a mechanism similar to commenting systems like Disqus could be used.

2. A browser extension, similar to Reddit Checker, when clicked could show a list of LinkTalk submissions of the webpage you’re visiting, either as a shared post or a reply. It could also allow you to share the link on the network yourself or reply to it without leaving the page.

   

With these two extensions of LinkTalk, having conversations and finding them can happen organically on the open web, and not inside application silos. Unlike other networks, there’s not much incentive here to keep you on the network’s website. If anything, the more of the open web you explore, the more likely you are to add value to the network. So tools like these actually align the incentive structure more tightly to the core idea—better quality conversations on the Internet.

I have considered making LinkTalk federated so that people can spin their own, independent instances rather than have a centralized one like Twitter. But seeing the unfortunately subpar user experience of Mastodon, and its moderation issues, I’m not convinced about federation being a net positive in this context. Said that, I’m no expert and could be wrong.

For writers, creators and publishers

Having many keen readers on a platform that incentivizes thoughtful conversations can be a great opportunity for writers, creators and publishers to find more people interested in their work, and also ones more likely to stick around. But people who spend most of their time creating often do not, or cannot, spend enough time sharing and marketing their work. This is why LinkTalk will offer an auto-share option after you connect your blog. When enabled, every new blog post you publish will get automatically shared to your profile feed on the network, and thus appear in your followers’ non-algorithmic feeds.

However, automated sharing can easily turn a network into a spam factory, much like all of social media. This is why automated sharing would be enabled only after a profile has been manually vetted. It will also require domain or email authentication via your blog or website so only site owners can autoshare.

Slow, deliberately so

At this point, it should be clear that LinkTalk discourages quick responses. While its tools are made to incentivize and accelerate a deliberate response itself, the network can, by definition, never be as spontaneous as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and the rest. Again, there would be little point if LinkTalk didn’t try to do something substantially different than already existing networks.

Said that, I do think LinkTalk has some resemblance to email conversations in terms of the mindset it places you in. Email conversations tend to be thoughtful because a) their asynchronicity allows for deliberation, b) they serve an established purpose of mutual benefit, and c) there’s incentive to not lose the other person’s interest. LinkTalk’s incentive structure positions it to benefit from such virtues, and potentially amplify them with the power of the open web.

Closing thoughts

So that was my first concept of a new kind of tool that encourages and rewards thoughtful conversations on the Internet, or so I hope. I will make additions or changes to this blog post as my thoughts refine and people provide feedback.

There are certainly many elements of the network I haven’t touched on yet, such as the timeline, search and discovery, mentions, moderation (which is no joke), and much more. While I do have some more ideas to expand LinkTalk, I stop here for now. The more quantifiable elements you introduce to a network, the more it can be, and is, gamed. As such, any change or addition to the core idea of LinkTalk must be considered with caution—better to be safe than sorry, right?

At the same time, I’m sure that LinkTalk has its own demons, which would likely only be apparent and addressable if and when the network takes off. I don’t consider, or even intend, LinkTalk to be the ultimate solution for online conversations. It’s supposed to be a new tool that solves some problems better than other tools. If LinkTalk increases discourse quality for even relatively small communities compared to large social networks, I’d consider it a success.

Now comes the bad news. I’m not going to build LinkTalk. Not now, not anytime in the near future. It’s not that I don’t care enough for what it intends to solve but I care even more about spending my inherently limited time and bandwidth spreading the purpose of exploring space and our Moon, a journey I have barely begun.

Part of the reason I’m sharing the core idea of LinkTalk as this public blog post is that if it turns out to be good one, it shouldn’t remain locked with me. That’s the least I can do. My hope is that someone at some point builds LinkTalk or something similar (and hopefully credits me). At its worst, it would be a successful experiment.

What I’m open to though is working on a small proof-of-concept with an interested person or a group of people. If you’re passionate about the same problem as I am, reach out to me with your background, your interest in the matter, and how and why do you think we should work together.

Post originally published in 2021, refined in 2022.

How can a single human in its most organic form possibly compete for our attention against an entire economy built to grab it? Heck, we have even veneered such demons of our “modern” Internet with formal names: the attention economy, binge-watching, doom-scrolling, and so on.

It’s not fair to say that people are using social media wrongly. That “if only we utilize social media in sensible ways, it’s a good thing.” When global conglomerates hire fleets of smart people whose entire collective job is to exploit deep-rooted psychological behaviors from our evolution, a lone human is powerless and vulnerable.

This was not the Internet’s promise. To become yet another tool for mass manipulation. But perhaps it’s us, the hopeful tenants of the open Web, who are naive. Nevertheless, it doesn’t change the fact that if the attention algorithms are the strings that bind us, it’s largely a puppet show.

• Start a free blog on Substack

  • Here’s why

• Make a simple yet elegant website using Carrd

  • My own website jatan.space is on Carrd

• Buy a domain from BigRock

  • Enter jatan.space as the coupon code to get up to 20% off

• Take organized notes using Workflowy

  • Here’s how I use it as a writer

• Get a bunch of cool Web services from the aptly named omg.lol

So how did I submit my space blog to Google News? Given below are all the steps. These apply specifically to Substack, since that’s where my site is, but the steps are generally valid for other blogging platforms as well. This is not intended to be a tutorial, and I can’t handle many support requests (sorry), so I’m only listing high-level steps and trust that you’ll search your way through the finer things.

1. Make sure that your blog or newsletter’s content is actually news-related either directly or at least tangentially. If only some of your sections or categories are newsy, then submit just those. This isn’t a hard rule—and I’ve seen publications on Google News that have nothing to do with news—but it’s better to avoid your site from getting unnecessarily penalized in search results.

2. Setup a custom domain for your Substack publication. Note that Substack charges $50 for enabling the feature but it’s worth it for your blog’s portability and branding. In fact, most popular blogging systems charge yearly for mapping custom domains so the one-time $50 cost of Substack is actually cheaper on average.

3. Once your site is up and running on a custom domain, you should now see an option called “Google Site Verification” in your Substack Dashboard > Settings.
   

   

4. Sign into Google Search Console and add your site. At this point, Google will provide you with a “meta tag” option to verify your site. Copy-paste its code into the “Google Site Verification” input field shown in Step 3, and click Save. Once done, come back to Search Console to complete the verification.

5. Visit Google’s Publisher Center and click on “Add Publication”. Follow all the steps to submit your site.

   • One of these steps is adding your site’s RSS feed, which is how Google would know of newly published stories on your site. Each Substack’s RSS feed lives at “/feed”—append the same at the end of your site’s homepage link. For example, my space blog is at “https://blog.jatan.space” so my RSS feed is at “https://blog.jatan.space/feed”. Accordingly, add the RSS feed for your site.

   • What about submitting RSS feeds for your sections or categories? Substack has those too! Albeit they’re not as intuitive to figure out. For example, my Moon Monday newsletter section on the blog is at “https://blog.jatan.space/s/moon-monday” and its RSS feed is at “https://blog.jatan.space/feed?section=moon-monday”. You can similarly get RSS feeds for your other sections and add them to your Google News publisher application as relevant.

6. Wait patiently. In my experience, Google can take anywhere between 15 days to two months to approve your publication’s application. If they reject it, they usually provide a reason, which you can then look into and solve if addressable.

7. Even after your publication is approved on Google News, you won’t suddenly see more traffic flowing in. Google can take months to start “trusting” your publication. Eventually, at least some traffic will come.

That’s it. Again, sorry that I can’t help with detailed personal support but I hope you find these brief steps useful and that your publication gets the traffic it deserves without losing your sanity to social media.

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 with. For example, there are additional charges for non-US PayPal payments as well as separate currency conversion fees that are mysteriously high at 2.5%. Patreon sells the latter to creators as a “feature” that can help get more patrons. Well, at least I haven’t noticed any change in the rate of new patrons in the nearly one year I've had the feature turned on.

When considering all factors, including standard payout processing fees, the real cut incurred by a creator on Patreon is often a stark ~14-17% depending on the exact scenario. This is too high for a platform essentially only acting as a middle manager for supporting recurring payments.

So I looked into switching my account to Patreon Lite, which has lower base fees. But doing so strips away every bit of useful functionality, including being able to offer multiple donation levels. On Lite, I can’t even decide how much to ask from my readers by default, presumably because lower support amounts result in higher fees.

Like everyone else, I thought that being on Patreon could help my work reach more people and get more patrons due to its network effects and brand trust. But that’s clearly not the case in any way. Patreon has never advertised small, niche creators like me either via their social channels or the non-existential discovery mechanisms on their network. It’s been disappointing and deceitful.

So about a year ago I started offering my Donorbox as the primary, preferred way for readers to support my work. Donorbox has a 5x lower base fee, and all additional charges are transparently conveyed.

If you’re supporting a creator on Patreon, it might be worth taking the time to cancel your support for them there and continue with another better option they might be offering. You’ll be paying the same amount but the creator you’re supporting will get more out of it due to lower fees.

Edit: This post made it to the front page of Hacker News. Many creators agreed and shared similar issues, and many interesting discussions are also on there on what might be happening on the infrastructure end behind the scenes.