Matt

Mainstream social media is just like the suburbs — inhabited by many people, with the aura of a town (even Zuckerberg falsely dubbed Facebook a “town square”), but without the civic institutions that actually make it a town.

I'm slowly, quietly mulling over the idea of a Write.as “version 2” that takes the past six years of lessons and starts from scratch, in terms of our user experience.

As I wrote about in July, this year we started experimenting with paid content on Write.as and WriteFreely via a proposed standard called Web Monetization. Now we support paid articles, which we'll be fully announcing this week. Here's a demo of what that looks like.

I'm thinking about notifications and writing digitally. When do I need to be notified of something related to my digital writing?

I chased many things this year, particularly in business, and didn't achieve what I was hoping for. This hit me in the last week or so. Since I've been striving and grasping all year, reaching November far short of my goals felt disappointing — which is unusual for me. I'm usually fluid and adaptable, but at some point this year I stopped moving, my old goals ossified into hopes, and I lost my beat. Now I'm trying to reset a bit.

For a while, I've been looking to dip our toes into payments / monetization for writers on Write.as and WriteFreely. I've taken a “wait and see” approach to this so far, but now we're starting to experiment with some ideas.

Starting early last year, we saw a new creative use for WriteFreely: internal blogging. At the time, we worked with a large client to modify our open source platform and let admins run their site completely privately. We included this new option in the core platform, and started using it ourselves (as we do with all of our software). Then we launched a new hosted service, called Write.as for Teams, that I imagined would be the next big thing for us.

After some time, it's clear that this is still the next big thing for us. But the execution will be a bit different from what we initially planned — and it's in progress now.

This morning I spent some time thinking about Read Write.as and its general purpose. I want to keep its “publication”-like feel, so we pushed out some simple design changes that make it look more like that. But I also want to support the amazing social activity that's grown on it through quoted replies, good old-fashioned links, and shared hashtags. It's time to start thinking about facilitating conversation, instead of it happening accidentally.

Since joining the fediverse as a user in 2017, then starting to produce ActivityPub software in 2018, I've made the decentralized social web my home. It just feels right — as “right” as a digital space can be — and so I want to help it grow.

Here are some things I'd like to see, and some of the projects we're building at Write.as to help the ecosystem along.

A small conclusion arrived in my head the other morning, as I woke. It was years in the making. It said that technology, and digital text-based forms of communication in particular, will never replace or surpass real-life human interaction.