You know what's sad? Is that in 2024 the simplist way to send a newsletter is substack.

Sendfox is amazingly simple and straighfroward, but web based. No app. You can't do much with the template, but that's fine to get that simplicity.

Beehiv is really good (its UX is like a mashup of substack and medium), but also web based and little much to configure for simple newsletters, but you do get to set up your email template and never have to touch it again if you don't want to.

So the instance I'd signed up to in... 2017 and was using as my main went down around about the time life came at me sideways - in mid jan, I guess.

I saw it was unsteady but was dealing with all the "Life" stuff.
It's permanenty gone. No option to transfer content.
Ouuf.

Joining #mastodon has reminded me how much #UX is a form of community politics. Discussions over usability, searchability, federability (sounds awkward but you know what I mean) -- these reflect debates we are having right now in many aspiring democracies. Where do we want people to live? What will we build to make it easy to get around? What kinds of social services should be available? How do we manage borders? UX choices are political choices, and it's important to treat them as such.

Timeline cleanser. My kids made a new friend. Meet Larry the Squirrel. Every morning he comes and knocks on our back door eagerly waiting for food. My kids feed him and he scurries off. 😅

@jon One of the big problems with "the algorithm" for me and many others is that we simply STOPPED seeing content from people we want to see, and started seeing MORE content from people being reactionary, fandom drama, call-outs, and the like.

The algorithm made the experience a lot worse for me and others, and turned our timelines into a shit show.

I'm okay with some subtle algorithmic sorting, but rather then bringing conflict forward, to bring accounts forward we frequently interact with.

So I’m just supposed to be ok with the fact that Wordpress uses block themes now and not try and recreate my old theme? ((Clears my plans for Saturday))

I swear to god, journalists have become Big Social's PR department even as Big Social puts them out of business.

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I've said this previously. With the old startup model, you might be able to capture significant marketshare for 20 years. You might even be one of the most valuable companies on the planet during that time. Hence, Meta.

But if you want something people will use indefinitely, you need to build a protocol.

Guess what? Corporations don't want to build protocols. Hence, a startup-driven version of the Fediverse will probably fail.

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This holiday season Twitter fires 4K workers, Amazon fires 10K workers, & Facebook fires 11K workers—all while US Billionaire pandemic wealth increased an absurd $1.7T.😳

A reminder that billionaires don’t create jobs—they exploit workers. Tax billionaires. Unionize workers.

Google developed a new text editor that allows you to steer a story by asking questions ("tell me more about the fairy's day job") and got 13 well-known writers (Robin Sloane, Allison Parish, etc) to write a book of short stories with it. Stories and model demo: wordcraft-writers-workshop.app

If you're interested in running your own single-user instance, follow @darnell

Not only does he run one, he runs multiple—and has learned lots of lessons in the process!

Great news, @internetarchive is now the official Internet Archive Mastodon account. Accept no substitutes! We also have @brewsterkahle , the ever-fascinating founder of the place, and more coming soon. Hop on!

I actually really like tumblr and don’t want it to die. It feels more like mastodon than other networks. But it seems having once central hub isn’t working financially.

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So with tumblr losing millions each year and twitter.. ((waves hand in that direction)), and meta losing ad money: are we seeing the limits of social media over a certain size? Or is it the limits of building with investor money?

They’re suing private bookstores for selling books with sex scenes now. A court of most and fury isn’t a gay romance, just a het romance with sex in it.

bookriot.com/barnes-noble-bein

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