Matt @matt@writing.exchange

Welcome to all the new Writing Exchange users joining us from Twitter!

We're friendly here. If you want to send out an #introduction post, I'll boost it so you can start finding some followers.

Otherwise, check out the Local Timeline to see what conversations are happening.

✅ It has decentralization: you can self-host
✅ It has interoperability: you get a JPEG on your hard drive
✅ It has payments: your grandma can use them
✅ It has status-signaling: leave your name as a patron

It is web3 and I am now web3

As a fun project last night, I made a little storefront for selling JPEGs — or what I'd call NFPs (Neat, Fun Photos) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I feel like you only really need other protocols when you want to notify people and/or have a private feed.

Of course blogrolls publicly show everyone you "follow" or "friend" on your site. But additional protocols and formats, like RSS for plain subscribing and #ActivityPub for notifying others, could enable a private home feed and everything around that.

The cool thing is this could take a million different forms, on both the creation and connecting sides.

The website builder could be generic and user-friendly, like Figma, or more niche and purpose-made, like a blogging platform.

Connecting sites is as easy as linking to them. So a site-building platform could make it easy for people to manage these links to friends' sites (e.g. a "blogroll"), and then publicly display those links or not.

If the web itself is the social network, the website is the atomic element of that network. We just need it to be easy to create a website, and then connect it with others.

In real terms, personal websites are better than social profiles for a few reasons:

- They can be more stable and reliable, and not subject to feeds or changes in platform policies and design
- They're much more intriguing, artistically, than some cookie-cutter profile on an app or the web

I've had trouble distilling down the single "thing" I'm after. Is it web publishing? Alternatives to social media?

I think it's partly the latter, and I think the model for me is the personal web.

the revolution will not be algorithmically amplified

staying optimistic through societal collapse