Press

Don’t Rent, Own

I’m compelled to write something about social media, personal websites, independence. This comes from reading all the bitching about how awful Facebook, Google, Twitter, AI and all the other Big Corp web is. The bitching, plus a longstanding aversion to using BigCorp for communicating.

I agree about the awfulness, but I don’t waste my time bitching about it. I use social media, but understand its limitations. Its basic limitation is, it’s not mine. I don’t own it. Rather, it owns me. Whatever I post at Facebook or other social media platforms is hoovered up by Big Corp so they can build a model of me and relentlessly sell shit to that discorporate model. They also sell my personal information to other Big Corps. They also can just shut me down whenever they feel like it. It’s also designed to be addictive, yay. All one big happy cycle of enshittification.

So, I have a personal website or two (or a dozen). It’s the only way to own my personal presence on the web. I can do pretty much any kind of website thing – blog posts, pages, images, apps, whatever.

www.kevinpadanhayes.com, where you’re reading this right now, or should be reading it, is my primary site, and it’s all mine. It’s almost entirely under my control – the domain name, which is my actual full name, the publishing platform, the web host, everything. Nothing on Big Corp’s servers. Costs me about $150 a year.

I see lots of my creative or small business friends who don’t have any real presence on the web, just a spot on Facebook or Instagram, and think to myself “They could do much better, they need their own place”. I see lots of my politically active friends doing the same and wonder “Why are they advocating for change on Big Corp’s website?”

Having your own place isn’t too hard. Yes, it’s technical, but it doesn’t have to be too technical, and people are available to advise – me being one of those people. It also isn’t free. Remember, if you aren’t paying for a service, you’re not a customer, you’re a product. You’re making money for Big Corp. And BigCorp is my word for those insane billionaires who are fucking everything up right now.

But it also doesn’t have to cost a bunch. I can set people up with their own WordPress website for less than $70 a year. Personal email with your own domain, less than $20/year. Domain name, $20/year. Total, less than $120/year. Simple, secure, performs well. Yes, you can do it cheaper or free, but I don’t advise doing that. You get what you pay for.

Now, I have little bandwidth to do this setting up, but I’m happy to give free advice and will probably write up a guide to doing it yourself. Here’s a work in progress describing the idea in more detail. I’m looking into offering it as a service, to a select group of people. I wouldn’t be making any money on the deal, as I’m not Big Corp and don’t have to relentlessly pursue profit. I also like doing this kind of work, it’s partly a hobby, honed by extensive paid work experience.

Comments are welcome, either emailing me at moc.seyahnadapnivekobfsctd-3390d4@nivek or commenting when this post gets posted at Facebook Big Corp. If you’d like me to make you an offer for having your own place on the web or just advise you based on my experience, let me know.

More Later on Free Press

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–Poles I know pronounce it as “botch”. Mrs. Blueski.

More later . . .

Twitter, Bluesky, all that jangly social media shit

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 publish 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.

Plus, I tend to be 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 the business tools 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. 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 proprietary 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 . . .

The Free Press

Let’s talk about newspapers. They’re dying in the US, with a few exceptions, some big city dailies, legacy papers (NYT, WaPo) and a few outliers. This is clearly a ruling class plan, muddy as it may be. Odd as it seems, there’s a business model in buying papers such as the Buffalo News, killing them and selling off the assets. I’m not clear on how this works for profit.

There are other models for newspapers than Big Corp owning and controlling them.

One is the small “paper”, usually completely online and local, hyper or a little bigger, or with a particular focus. A Buffalo example is Investigative Post, focusing on investigative journalism. It’s run as a not for profit and has been publishing regularly for several years now. Real reporters doing real journalism.

Another example is the B Square Bulletin, in Bloomington Indiana. A scrappy, hard-working, experienced reporter just up and started his own local “paper”, a website covering all the usual local news. Seems to be making it through the small paper minefields just fine.

A recent startup, focused on arts and culture, is The Buffalo Hive (their website is slow, not a good sign). And Newell’s Buffalo Rising is alive and well, rarely political but very much a presence in local journalism.

Another type of paper is where a not for profit corporation owns and runs the publication. The most prominent example is The Guardian, owned by an NFP for more than a hundred years, and to this day a staunch supporter of traditional Liberalism (not the current day definition, but close). The Guardian retains a lot of political independence and has a globally competitive reporting capability.

In the US, a good example is the Baltimore Banner, founded as an NFP in response to fascist control of the legendary Baltimore Sun.

One of the difficulties of starting up a large newspaper is it costs a lot of money. In Baltimore, a local rich guy is funding The Banner. A local fascist rich guy bought The Sun and is running it into the ground. The Banner has more subscribers than The Sun, so clearly they’re doing something right and delivering what people want.

I’m putting this out here to encourage people to support independent journalism. And maybe even consider starting something up or joining something already going.

I subscribe to Investigative Post and throw a bit of money at The Guardian. I can increase this support from my meager funds. I should be supporting The Hive, and I may send a few bucks to The Banner, even though Baltimore is way off my personal radar.

I also send Geoff Kelly at IP any tips about what I’m hearing around town, and I hear a fair amount. This is direct support and welcomed by any competent reporter.

The other part of independent journalism is personal websites, or personal writing on institutional websites. This is actually the largest sector, by far, and to a large extent the most independent. It used to be called blogging, and the term still applies.

A Buffalo example is the regular reporting on the Common Council, produced at Partnership for the Public Good. This one makes me smile. Often, coverage of local government is absent or minimal, and it’s fading away as daily papers fade away. PPG has committed to a regular report on the Council. We need more of this, it’s extremely valuable.

More later . . .