This is what I liked about the open blogosphere of 2000 to 2008. Whereas something like Twitter is optimized for the fast-take and the brutal one-liner, blogs allowed actual conversations. You could write something serious, develop the idea, and maybe some other people would engage with it, also at a serious level. But then the walled-gardens began to gain ground (Facebook, Twitter, and then later Instagram) and the era of the blogs came to an end. (Yes, they still exist, but they most exist as standalone essays, not engaged in conversation with other blogs.)
To my mind, the blogosphere had a lot to do with political polarization. Once you added a comment widget to a blog it was easy to build a following of very devoted fans who would argue on the blogger's behalf, amplify them diligently etc. Certainly blogs could foster thoughtful discourse with a wide variety of inputs, but they were just as likely to foster combative tribalism. One interesting example of a blog that followed this path only to later reverse course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Green_Footballs
When Twitter, MySpace, and FaceBook came along, they were initially considered 'microblogs' that had the potential to democratize personal publishing (no need for complicated mechanics) and foster better discourse by getting people out of silos onto a common platform where there would be a greater diversity of opinion.
Of course, you could have said the same thing about gopher v usenet, web pages v blogs, blogs v social media, social media v defederation etc. A new medium becomes available that is less centralized, early adopters hop onto it (either to gain a voice or amplify an existing voice in a new space), followings/fandoms/communities emerge (and often clash), and eventually a meta-tribal identity develops around the new medium as being in tension with the old one.
Over the longer term there's a huge move away from centralized mass media publishing and the huge capital pools required to establish and compete in that market. This increases autonomy and opportunity and fosters greater diversity, but in the absence of clear market signals rhetoric is often substituted for reliable information, and influence by capital (political or financial) persists while being less visible or accountable.
> When Twitter, MySpace, and FaceBook came along, they were initially considered 'microblogs' that had the potential to democratize personal publishing (no need for complicated mechanics) and foster better discourse by getting people out of silos onto a common platform where there would be a greater diversity of opinion.
Most people take extreme personal offense at the concept of diversity of opinion. A common platform is always, without exception, a way to unify opinions, not diversify them.
Malcolm Galdwell discussed the trend away from “mainstreaming” and its social impacts on his Revisionist History podcast recently in the episode series beginning with “When Will Met Grace”
Very few did. And some of those that did in that era are still around, and they don't allow that now.
I don't think it had anything to do with walled gardens, it had to do with the fact that political polarization wasn't quite complete yet. It's getting there.
We used to do the same thing in Newsgroups. It was a sad couple of years when the ones I used to hang out in slowly hollowed out as people migrated to web forums, which was inevitable, as more and more people came onboard and chose the "easiest" route to other people who were into whatever obscure interest you suddenly had a community for.
Usenet was limited to nerds and nerd-adjacent people who were shown, on a one-to-one basis, how to use it. My uncle logged me into the local university's mainframe when I was a kid in the mid-80s, absent that influence I would've jumped onboard with everyone else in the late 90s, probably.
After the extreme efficiency of desktop Usenet clients, where I could traverse and keep up with many communities in one easy interface, with exactly the text size and font I wanted, I never really joined any web forums to speak of. I would've had to create an account on a different site for every single interest, most web forums had appalling crayon interfaces with zero sorting options or anything like that, they were all functionally corrals rather than intersections. There was no way to efficiently cover that many communities anymore, and the act of engaging had become detestable, but only in the context of what was lost; for those just arriving it was brilliant.
I wish there was a word for the expression on my face right now. Once you've been on the internet for any length of time, you start looking back to a better one in the past. It's probably one of those internet laws, like Moore's.
One of the problems I recall with such mailing-list-based discussion groups was that participants had an expectation that the discussions would stay in the group, and that members wouldn't dump such semi-private conversations (which might have included various controversial takes, etc.) onto the larger web - but in many cases, that did happen, with resulting blowback for individuals whose comments were taken out of context.
The expectation of any kind of clearly attributable group discussion on the web remaining private appears to be long-gone. Even with closed, in-house corporate or institutional discussion groups, it's likely everything is logged and recorded for review by management at their whim. It's all depressingly Orwellian these days.
This is the exact reason I started working on Satellite. To be a platform where I could have a blog that talked to other blogs. If you have feedback I'd love to hear it.
It's interesting. It'll be interesting to see how you address moderation and boosting. Since your federation page is "coming soon" and your handles appear to be globally unique, it's unclear to me who the moderators are and how you will deal with spam (defined as content that I, as a user, don't want).
And perhaps consider "bootstrapping" with external content. Take a place where content is legal to reproduce and select the stuff that reflects what you want your network to be, then mirroring it. Give external authors from your content source separate identities on your system; and tag the content with the original source. StackOverflow allows this, for example (don't do this as a crappy SEO technique; rather do it in such a way where passers-by can see the kind of content you want to exist on the site).
I've spent about ten minutes poking around that link and I'm still not at all sure what kind of tool Satellite either is or wants me to think of it as. Front page:
> Satellite is an alternative space for writers and the beginning of an entirely new kind of network
O...k? Alternative to what? New how? Presumably "alternative" here means the space is an alternative to other spaces (not a space for alternatives) and "new" means "there are features other things don't have" (not "we made it a week ago") but it's very vague branding. What are the commonly-known alternatives so I have an existing idea to latch on to? What are the new features? Moving on, it appears that wasn't actually the front page - clicking through to the named front page:
> a free, open, and unstoppable network better aligned with the interests of humanity
To do what! I gather this is a writing platform, but is it akin to blogging where individuals regularly put out articles? Scientific publishing that enforces a web of citations? Both? Can I have friends/subscribers of sorts? If so, do they also have to be Satellite members? Do my posts appear on any sort of front page anywhere? I'm still very befuddled at how the tool wants me to use it. Mastodon seems like the closest competitor, what does Satellite bring to the party?
> Open protocols and data ownership
Great! I like those things. But I'm only going to choose to use a tool if it has those things after it satisfies my primary use cases. Using a screwdriver to hammer in a nail is stupid if you do it just because the screwdriver has an open source CAD file somewhere.
I'm sorry if this all comes across as harsh -- I'm trying to be as straightforward as possible. I'm not at all certain if I'm Satellite's target audience, but if I am I am already disinclined to try and find out more. Tech bro hype over trivial things (or even stupid things) has completely burnt me out on new web stuff that tries too hard and doesn't respect my attention. I very much appreciate tools that are a little opinionated and a lot forthcoming about their intended uses so I don't feel like my attention has been hijacked or co-opted. If the tool is for me, great. I know what my pains are and it's not difficult for me to imagine what it might take for them to go away and you'll win me over if I can fit you into that thought. If the tool is not for me, that's also fine! It might be for someone else. But I'm not going to spend the effort to figure that out. If I have to, it's already not for me.
That said, the website is very pretty. I'm always a fan of those dynamical network images, and the layout & typographical styling is very appealing.
I'm so close to the product after building it that it's not obvious to me which things are not obvious to other people seeing it for the first time, so thank you, this is very valuable feedback!
> is it akin to blogging where individuals regularly put out articles
Sort of. I think of being modeled after a text-based subreddit.
> Scientific publishing that enforces a web of citations
It's doesn't enforce citations, but it does have a credibility mechanism. That's what the "stars" on each item are supposed to be doing. When a writer stars another person's article, a link gets created to them in the constellation. The constellation is intended to visualize the web of ideas that connects people. It could probably be improved upon to be more functional and not just an art piece!
> Can I have friends/subscribers of sorts?
Yes. Other people on Satellite can subscribe to you, and people can also subscribe to get new posts sent to them via email without having to make an account. In this sense it's similar to Substack.
> Do my posts appear on any sort of front page anywhere?
Yes. All posts appear on the front page immediately under the "new" feed. Top-starred posts appear on the front page under the "top" feed. The subscribed feed just filters the posts from people who you're subscribed to.
> I'm still very befuddled at how the tool wants me to use it.
Basically the idea is you post articles and comment on other peoples articles. Everyone has a their own blog page at /@<username>
> Mastodon seems like the closest competitor, what does Satellite bring to the party?
The biggest difference is that every post on Satellite is digitally signed. Satellite supports signing with a local wallet, but it's not required. Another thing Satellite offers is data permanence. Every 28 days, all the data is archived in a kind of "snapshot" and added to IPFS as a kind of insurance for users that the value of their contributions won't be totally lost, even if Satellite shuts down (which is one problem with Mastodon, that all your data depends on being hosted by one instance). Another thing thing that archiving does is that makes the network "forkable" which I think is going to be an important part of how social media works in the future.
> If the tool is not for me, that's also fine! It might be for someone else.
In any case, I really appreciate you taking the time to engage :)
> The biggest difference is that every post on Satellite is digitally signed
that's not a very compelling difference for most people. Definitely not enough to get other people to sign up and follow you on it.
I've followed hundreds of people with no form of validation and I just don't care. It's good to know that the account claiming to be the president is actually the president's account (and other similar political or popular figures) but for the other 99% i really don't have to worry that it's someone else pretending to be them.
And then there's the fact that signing only proves that it's the same account holder posting not that they're who they claim to be.
The snapshot to IPFS is ... meh. Most people don't care about what they said on a microblog a year ago, and very few have a clue what IPFS is, or how they'd do anything with an IPFS backup.
The problem with a mastodon instance shutting down is only slightly about the lost data. It's much more about the lost account and connection to your followers and the people you follow.
Nothing you've said sounds bad. They're nifty things, but they're also not compelling enough to overcome the network effect on other networks and they're not features I can actively use that offer me something notable i can't get elsewhere.
Not sure if it's just age, or if it's truly a sign of times, but many of the friends I kept up with on social media -- and who are no longer active on social media (none of us are on Facebook) -- are nearly impossible to keep up with in real life either. It feels like digital communication has been completely abandoned by my social cohorts. And with no one wanting to talk on the phone... or message via texts, it's hard not to feel that the social media / digital lifestyle tribulations have negated the "keep in touch" proclivities of a certain subset of people.
I've been also thinking a lot that why it's so fricking hard nowadays to make phone calls to even people you think are your closest friends. It's like you need to schedule a time slot and then make the effort. What happened to "just called you to ask what's up"?
Sorry to be brutal, but this sounds like they weren't truly friends. I and many of my friends have given up on social media, and now have to make a conscious effort to ring each other and arrange dinners, activities, etc. If your "friends" aren't willing to do this... find better friends.
Yeah, your post seems mean-spirited and unhelpful.
I keep up as well as I can with a wide variety of people and some portion of people fall off the map. I keep up enough to know that many of them are in a spiral of isolation and despair that characterizes the present era. Sure, some might not have valued me personally but many "just can't" keep up with friendships generally and suffer from this.
Hmmm, I like this idea. It's more or less rebranding good ol' blogs that do the same thing (more or less) as "Personal Newsletters" which I'd imagine have a wider appeal and may get wider adoption/traction?
Telling people "I have a blog" or "I have a substack" or any of the other many alternatives, doesn't sound quite as nice as "I have a personal newsletter".
And I've been telling people I have a blog since the 90s!
Blogs have a permanence about them. I think that permanence make people hesitate to write - almost like the posts are academic papers.
I prefer "newsletter" instead because it sounds more ephemeral and personal. You can delete or hide them in the future.
(For Postcard specifically - I'm working on the ability to add better privacy controls to individual posts - so that they can be public, unlisted, or private.)
Would there be need for a more personal take on Substack? Newsletter service which works on top of email - nothing gets posted to internet. And you could only invite people to subscribe your newsletter. Maybe some subgroups for your subscribers to manage whom you send your most personal thoughts.
Edit:
Didn't read the original post with my both eyes. Seems that's describing a service which is quite close to what I had in mind.
True, I guess I'm lumping in anything that's even close. I have read many things written on substack and I'm only subscribed to one or two. I suppose I'm just counting anything with an email side and a web side?
This looks really nice. I've been fiddling around building newsletter-adjacent products for a few years, and I've been wanting a simple Substack-alternative* that's good for casual use so that I can recommend it to users.
Can I make one request? Please provide single opt-in as an option! v2 invisible Recaptcha is effective for stopping bots, and most of the time people won't even be shown a challenge. Double opt-in confirmation emails only have about a 70% conversion rate in my experience (and that's counting only people who get past Recaptcha), so you lose a big chunk of subscribers. I almost started using Ghost a while ago for my own newsletter, but no single opt-in is just a deal breaker for me.
*Substack _is_ good for casual use, but I have various beefs with them, the main one being that they're trying to build yet another platform instead of being part of an ecosystem.
I just ran a query, and 93% of email signups on Postcard have completed the email confirmation step. A quick look at the incomplete signups shows a lot of obvious fake emails, too.
I'm trying to minimize my reliance on big tech, so I want to avoid Google's captcha product. But, hCaptcha and Cloudflare both seem to have more privacy-focused alternatives that I'll check out.
Ah, well that's encouraging then! Perhaps you can add that query to an automated report/dashboard in case the conversion rate decreases as the service grows.
Out of the many complaints I've seen leveled at Substack, I honestly can't think of a single time where someone was complaining about their default use of single opt-in. That's not to say you're wrong--however, as best as I can tell, it doesn't seem to be much of an annoyance for most people.
Maybe that’s opening up a new space for you then: did you know that you can access a Mastodon user’s feed via RSS by appending „.rss“ to the address of their profile?
Does anyone else still receive round robin letters? Multi page letters from friends or family that were the same and sent to everyone at this time of year. I remember one person's in particular that was basically just a recap of this year's misery including their various health problems etc. It would be read aloud at the Christmas dinner table while the family would all giggle at their terrible experiences. My wife's family had a terribly dark sense of humour.
If it were round-robin, you'd have to mail it to the next person on the list, just like a chain letter. ...minus the dramatic consequences if you failed, although perhaps familial disappointment is both stronger and more likely!
I like the idea of building a newsletter in order to interact with like-minded people. The hard part is to convince these people to subscribe. If you are already well known, it might work. If not, you are back to social networks.
Of course one might question the point of trying to be noticed. But if you want to connect with interesting people, find contract work or grow a small company, building relationships is essential.
Kind of a shameless plug for my newsletter, and also a nod in agreement. I love being able to share articles that I find interesting, share useful tidbits and stuff, and getting responses from folks who actually read it and want to talk more. I love the concept and hope more people do it!
I have written a person newsletter every month for 5 years now. I have people request to get on it. But, this as a business seems very odd to me.
Kind of the whole point is to keep it simple. I have 120 people that keep up with me from all different stages of my life, but why would I want a website. The whole point is it is personal and not advertised. Otherwise, I'd use a blog instead.
This seems great in theory but unlikely to work well in practice.
Your close friends are already in touch routinely via email, phone, text, in person.
Your extended network of acquaintances though? Connecting on a social media site is much less of a hurdle than: make them aware you have a newsletter. Get them to click and subscribe to the newsletter, get their email client to route that newsletter to their actual inbox so they see it, etc.
A newsletter seems best suited to those with a bit of fame, enough to have a bunch of 'followers' - who will seek out and subscribe to a newsletter.
I have a newsletter that my extended friends and family have signed up for. I did post on social media when I set it up, and a couple of times after that. I also added a link to the physical Christmas cards we sent out a few years ago.
But now I have 20ish people who are interested and that is enough to me.
It doesn’t seem people have a problem receiving them in their inbox.
If you think about it, it’s actually pretty bizarre we thought the same people that would want to read our newsletters would also be interested in our political opinions and news stories.
I love the idea in principle but, this is a tough sell. As much as I want to delete traditional social network apps (Facebook, Instagram, etc) from my device, I simply don't see that happening. Most people willing to pay $8 / month will want something out of it and as a result, it will be used mostly by professionals and content writers (as evidenced by the showcase in the home page). IMO, this is better suited to compete with public social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn. I wouldn't use it as an alternative to Facebook or Instagram, which IMO is far more detrimental to society than Twitter or LinkedIn. In an ideal world, I would like my friends and family to get off of FB and IG to use something like this but, I don't see that happening.
Main issue I see with this form of trying to keep people up to date with your life is that it requires a more intense attention span and willingness to know what’s going on. I think social media as it is thrives on short form content because people who do care will call you or message you or whatever.
If you’re a very popular person - celebrity, executive, or otherwise some form of a status holding person in a community - I think something like this could be useful. For normies and the 99%+ of rest of folks - I don’t think this is really that relevant. I can’t really think of many normal friends who would use such a thing.
In my area, a lot of people arent giving their phone numbers anymore but instead having you text their events list phone number
They may seem like event managers or socialites (because it works) but really individuals are just trying this approach and telling people theyre going to be at a certain place, bar, hike, swanky hotel lobby, party, mixer
And you know that you know at least one person there
I've had a lot of people request SMS or messenger-type app support for Postcard. I realize the HN crowd generally is less in favor of SMS, but it seems that there's a big group of people that use SMS/messengers exclusively.
This is an interesting idea, however, I find it difficult to find time to even sit and scroll through Twitter and read news-based newsletters. It would be nice to have long form updates from friends and write my own as well, but I think with the pace of living this is not possible - which is unfortunate!
I love this idea, and have been working on something similar. The problem is, how can my mom like and comment on photos of her grandkids without setting up her own account or domain?
Edit, removed my previous message as it sounded quite negative, wasn't well thought out and was also partially off-topic. Product looks nice and simple, good job!
Email isn't terribly expensive to send--a common rate is roughly $0.80/1,000 emails. It's absolutely dirt cheap ($0.10/1,000 emails) if you can get past the application for AWS SES. (I didn't--don't know the magic words I guess!--so I'm a happy Postmark user instead.)
Tried doing a newsletter in my final year of highschool, around the time of the 2008 financial crisis.
Got a couple classmates and a few bemused teachers signed up, and once a month wrote up 500 words talking about what was going on in our small little town.
Turned out to be a precursor to my career in journalism. But still, it's an obsolete method of news. No one wants to click an email to see a wall of text anymore.
Dunno about that. I subscribe to several newsletters. Dave Pell puts out NextDraft almost every weekday. https://nextdraft.com/. Also available on a website and via an iOS app.
There are several others I subscribe to, not all of which release daily (though I wish some of them did). So "no one" is the wrong term to use here.
After the last few years, when I hear "newsletter" my brain translates it to "poorly-proofread overlong blog post with lots of pleas to subscribe to a Patreon"
