A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated
Micro Stream
Some other stuff ...
On This Day
Webring
What I’ve watched
I keep a little log.
A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated
Naomi Duguid is just one of the writers I enjoy who has succumbed to the lure of Substack. I’ve made my brief pitch to each of them to consider some other place, which generally falls on almost-deaf ears because of the supposed network effects: “the building of visibility and profile via cross-mentions, cross-posted comments, etc”.
Fair enough, although I’m not sure how often that translates into paid subscriptions for them.
Still, it is interesting that Naomi contrasts writing her books, which happen to be a joy to read, with the insatiable demands of the newsletter, while at the same time acknowledging that books and magazines do not have the breadth of interested readers to publish the niche stuff that newsletter writers thrive on, even though they don’t actually thrive as a result. And that then raises the question of longevity. As Naomi asks:
What record are we leaving if the printed word is not the most interesting creative work being developed?
To which I reply that the problem is the word “printed”. Online silos come and go, and with them the writer’s words, but it is not difficult to maintain your own publicly available archive of your writings in a place you control. Of course it won’t benefit from those fabled network effects, but at least the record will survive.
Webmentions
Webmentions allow conversations across the web, based on a web standard. They are a powerful building block for the decentralized social web.
If you write something on your own site that links to this post, you can send me a Webmention by putting your post's URL in here:
Comments
I very much regret that Russian spammers have made my comment system unusable. If you want to email me a comment, it is easy enough to find the address and I will be happy to do the needful behind the scenes. Webmentions remain available (for now).