It's been a while since I've really thought about what's most important for Write.as. It's been 10 years since we launched, and the internet has changed a lot.
As an issue that's top-of-mind for many people, I've seen privacy take a back seat to AI and its consumption of the web to feed the hungry models that will generate the digital slop of tomorrow.
What hasn't changed, and what I think will become even more important in this age, is our need for self-expression and forming real human connections.
So I'm orienting our road map around this: facilitating more writing, and helping people connect and build their own community.
Last year, I joined the crowdfunding campaign for a neat little 7-inch, open hardware laptop called the MNT Pocket Reform. After much anticipation, I finally got it in the mail a couple days ago, and absolutely love it so far. Here are some first impressions.
Last month I went to Brussels for FOSDEM, for the first time since 2020. While I didn’t go to many talks, I was able to connect with many people there, from WriteFreely users to old friends to many new people I met along the way.
It was late 2013 when I drove past a little dog head with big floppy ears attached poking out of the long grass in the backwoods of Florida. My girlfriend at the time said we had to go back and get him, so we did.
He was timid at first but friendly, and came right up to us when we approached. We took him home and fed him. I was reading a lot of Salinger then, so I named him Holden.
After taking a bit of a sabbatical in 2022, I’m back into Write.as and WriteFreely development. My views on the product naturally change over time, so I want to share where I’m at now.
It's been a while since I've written. Seems like the end of this year quickly fell away from me and now it's almost 2023. So what's been going on? (A microblog that turned into a macropost.)
After many, many long years of searching, it finally found me: a relevant social media advertisement. It was for the Tidbyt, a gorgeous retro display encased in wood that, among many other things, can show arrival times for the NYC subway.
In discussing the network topology of social networks — whether centralized like Facebook or federated like ActivityPub — I think the ultimate goal is for users to never actually encounter the underlying architecture.
To remain human-centric, ideally services wouldn’t bend social interactions to fit a chosen technical design. Instead, you would just publish to the network you choose, freely pick your persona for each place (how you present yourself), and keep control of your content (i.e. you still have it if a network goes offline, and you can move it from place to place). For bonus points, you could also build dynamic new social interactions on the network.
This idea isn’t revolutionary; we’ve seen most of these things in one form or another. But have we ever had it all in one place?
