A growing backlash against technology’s dominance threatens to stall the heady growth of the industry. The nerd set is fighting back against capitalist entrenchment, building new open infrastructure that respects user privacy and eliminates gatekeepers. A revolution is underway to make it even easier to publish on the web, push content and software features across networks, and find meaningful successful as an indie producer.
You can feel it in the air. What’s old is new again. Blogs are returning. RSS is again ascendant. Email newsletters—popularized once more by Substack but now migrating to even better services—are all the rage. Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and other open source software are enabling new social networks to form—yet this time no longer beholden to Big Tech.
Hell yeah 🤘
Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems and other tools.
File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.
You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve.
I’ve been fascinated by Steph’s philosophy since I starting using Obsidian.
Creating a resilient system of plain-text files, that will stand the test of time, makes a lot of sense. It’s the Rule of least power and the KISS principle all rolled into one – or something like that.
After all, when an app disappears or becomes obsolete, nobody wants their content to disappear along with it.
I think it’s really important that every blog have a Links page or a Blog Roll. In today’s internet, finding good websites is difficult, and similar to the early days of the net when everything wasn’t listed in a search engine, the best way to find content is by word of mouth.
In Links page update Brandon talks about the importance of spreading good links by word of mouth (via your personal website).
Only fitting that this should be the first post on my new /links page.
