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At the end of my Free Press post, I said “More later”, so here’s some more.

Fred Clark talks about using an RSS reader, and links to a journalism site in North Carolina, The Assembly, where the writers tell us they want to to create “new models for state level news”. A wonderful idea, and the site’s full of good in-depth journalism.

We should have more of this. We desperately need it. One way to have more of this is for us to subscribe, pay some money and help them sustain themselves. Of course, if North Carolina’s not of interest or is too far away, find someone local or someone covering topics you find interesting. There are many good journalists out there, in a very discouraging world for journalists. When we find them, let’s support them.

A few words on Fred Clark. He’s a writer of long experience, and a damned good one. He should be getting a living wage from a legitimate publication. Instead, he writes/blogs for Patheos, for what I expect is a pittance. Patheos is a site with a focus on religion (Fred’s a progressive evangelical Christian, with great knowledge and insight to that community).

To feed his family, he works at a big box store – I think Home Depot, but maybe Costco. This is sad, he’s really good at what he does. Nothing wrong with working at Big Box, but our society should support Fred’s talent better. From time to time I send him some money from my meager funds, to show my direct support for his work.

In the post I link to above Fred explains RSS, Really Simple Syndication. An old technology in internet time, but one I use every day with my RSS Reader. As Fred says, it’s a way to bypass BigCorp’s Almighty Algorithm and get articles to read based entirely on what you want to read, not what Mark Zuck’s robots want you to read. I encourage everyone to use an RSS reader, you might like it and it takes the edge off The Algorithm. I have a subscription to The Old Reader.

This post is also a test of syndicating from my personal website to my Bluesky account (@kevinphayes.bsky.social). The idea is to publish here, syndicate elsewhere, such as the social media monster sites. Let’s see how that goes.

It would also be my first Bluesky post, which shows you how much I like that type of web presence. This is an IndieWeb thing, and I love IndieWeb things.

I doubt if I’m the only one who sees “Bluesky” as a last name, perhaps Russian, Ivan Bluesky. I also see it in my head as “Blueski”, maybe someone’s babcia, which I always heard from my Polish-American friends as “botch”. Mrs. Blueski.

More later . . .

I’ve never really used Twitter. I had an account, but it seems Twitter’s approach to publishing, if you can call it that, doesn’t fit with the way my mind works.

It never clicked, not that I tried that hard. I remember thinking, fifteen years ago, “why would anyone want to put out every stray thought?” That’s how I perceived it. Part of it, for me, is I never care to use my phone for anything but voice calls and texts. Anything beyond that is massively difficult, for me anyway, because it’s so goddammed small. I’m a desktop computer user, and I don’t see that changing any time soon, not for me anyway.

Plus, I tend to be fairly guarded and value my privacy, so blipping out my thoughts doesn’t fit in with my usual approach to communication.

I make extensive use of Facebook. As Facebook increases its enshittification pace, the stream of posts is getting cluttered with a lot of robot-produced crap, which I try to knock back with post moderation, to little avail.

The most useful aspects of Facebook are groups. Great ways to discuss specific issues with people having similar interests and experiences. It’s still hobbled by Facebook’s need to monetize as much as they can. The whole “Business” aspect of Facebook is utter crap. I suppose it would get better if we spend money on ads, but I doubt it, the enshittification being as advanced as it is.

My bitches about it are the needless repetition, saying there’s something new when there’s not, and the overall difficulty of finding the thing you need to respond to or work on. It’s a hot mess, as they say. I’m not mentioning (as I mention it) that it can bring a bunch of clueless people into my work life, but then it’s part of my job to give clueless people a clue, or at least try. “No, I won’t come get your piano, or your moldy couch (only a little mold, on the bottom, not the seat), or, god forbid, engage with people who don’t have the slightest understanding of the business model of every second hand dealer in the world.

Beyond groups, the promotional features of Facebook are a cheap way to promote the buzz, with some downsides, mostly about me having to engage with clueless people, endlessly explaining why we don’t want their trash and certainly won’t expend any effort to help them with it, even if they paid us, to be honest. I can write about this at length, I think, and may do that, chips fall where they may.

So I closed my Twitter account and opened a Bluesky account at kevinphayes.bsky.social. While the political ambience seems to be better, it’s much the same jangly shit to me. I have enough jangly thoughts in my inattentive head without mainlining it from Twitter or Bluesky or whatever. It’s also no less likely to enshittify than Twitter and Facebook, it’s still venture capital owned and controlled. But it’s healthy to reject Twitter and that insane weirdo Musk.

Mastodon is much more attractive to my Indie Web way of thinking about this sort of thing. Real federation is much better than the existing silos or Bluesky’s propietary implementation. But I’m no more active at my Mastodon account than anywhere else (see my most recent posts, informing the world about the Buffalo Christmas Blizzard of 2022). It’s still too jangly and nobody’s made a mass exodus as they are doing for Bluesky.

I’m old school, I guess, and am very happy with my RSS reader. Minimal jangle. Still a disciple of Dave Winer and his wise thinking about news, writing and publishing.

Now are you seeing why I write and publish on my own website? It doesn’t belong to anyone but me. I can move it around. Nobody can take it down, at least not yet.

More later . . .