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Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks

philipithomas.com

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Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks

#31

Post by kylecordes »

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.

Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks

#32

Post by Rayhem »

lovvtide wrote: post #23
lkrubner wrote: post #6

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…

disclaimer: self-promotion 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. https://satellite.earth/

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.

Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks

#33

Post by dutchbrit »

jacobobryant wrote: post #27
dutchbrit wrote: post #24

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.)

Good point!

Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks

#34

Post by _Microft »

cowuser666 wrote: post #11

I hate newsletters. I don't want them in my inbox. I want them in my RSS feed where they belong. Thankfully substack has feeds.

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?

Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks

#35

Post by Tomte »

jacobobryant wrote: post #20

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 c…

> Please provide single opt-in as an option

Where it isn't illegal, it is still scummy.

Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks

#36

Post by nextweek2 »

jacobobryant wrote: post #13
philip1209 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good platform should support both email and RSS, and give users the choice. (Postcard, which I discuss in the submitted post, does support both.)

Yep! You can think of email as a version of RSS that regular people actually know how to use ;)

Except email for news is a waste of resources, it is a push which fills bandwidth and inboxes regardless of if the bytes are read.

RSS is pull, it only fetches the data if it’s needed.

And rarely do I see people using an inbox correctly, they’ll have 1000+ unread messages and have missed something important.

Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks

#39

Post by photochemsyn »

082349872349872 wrote: post #16
lkrubner wrote: post #6

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…

Before 2000, there were the "shared spaces" of mailing lists. I think of Winer the same way you probably think of Zuck.

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.

Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks

#40

Post by lovvtide »

Rayhem wrote: post #32
lovvtide wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

disclaimer: self-promotion 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. https://satellite.earth/

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 "…

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 /@

> 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 :)

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