Ready to Party Like It’s 1999…Again

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 🤘