Blogging is essential because it provides knowledge and serves as a valuable reference for us and others.
On the other hand, getting recognized as a blogger these days is rarely going to work. People are increasingly consuming different types of content these days, and this is largely due to the way AI is changing the way we interact with the web.
That said, having a blog for thinking out loud is still the best way to learn and then “report” it, even if we’re the only ones reading it.
Here are a couple of highlights from Why I Make Minimal Use of Social Media:
I have a relative who loves to post about their perfect, loving family, filling their Facebook feed with happy family photos. But, as you might guess, they conveniently leave out the reality of their many conflicts and challenges. It’s a polished image that doesn’t show the truth.
Nobody’s gonna share their struggles and failures as much as their fun times, so I think this behavior is just for display. Remember that when you see something like this, it’s just a snapshot of their day. Nothing more, nothing less.
There are other ways to keep in touch with family members and friends. Emails and texts can be addressed to a group of contacts or individuals. By not using social media yourself, you can discourage others from using it as their preferred way to “keep in touch.”
I never emailed any of my friends, but we usually keep in touch via text messages. Texting is like having a peer-to-peer social network.
I just realized that the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress does Fediverse replies inline too. Pretty nice!
All is well in Micro Land! I have my books to read, my locally stored music to listen to. My family to interact with. We have not watched the “news” since November. The house is quieter, the stress is lower.
Since I started to thinker with private Mastodon threading, I’ve been experimenting with using Mona as a private note-taking app.
Hiding the Home tab from Mona makes the app feel more private. I only left the following tabs available because I want to optimize it only for my posts.
I read other people’s posts in Reeder; I use Mona for threading and journaling about ideas privately (and keeping up with my notifications and mentions).
Another thing I did is to replace the ⌘N keyboard shortcut with a custom Keyboard Maestro macro which creates private posts by default. This way, I can work on my threads in a private manner, but still see my notifications if I post something public.
These changes make Mona a note-taking app with built-in discussion features. I don’t know if we have any other app like this.
This is one of the things I love about the Fediverse. In essence, it is just a public place where we post things, but we can make weird mashups on top of it, like a note-taking app.
A few days ago I wrote about getting back to Mastodon, and it’s becoming an unexpected part of my workflow. While I initially set up my instance just to syndicate my blog posts, I found myself using it in ways I didn’t anticipate.
Remember how I loved Gibberish’s chat-like UI for drafting ideas? Well, Mastodon’s thread format accidentally became my new space for thinking out loud. I create private threads where I can ramble about stuff, just like I used to do in Gibberish, but with some nice advantages:
What I find fascinating is how this turned into a lightweight note-taking system. I write posts for myself, bookmark them, and can easily go back to review my thoughts. It’s like a poor man’s Zettelkasten, but the thread format adds this natural, conversational flow to my thinking process.
The best part? Mona’s sliding pane UI feels like it was accidentally designed for this kind of short-form note-taking. The way you can slide between connected thoughts makes it natural to build on ideas. I treat my posts as append-only – while I could edit them, I choose not to. Instead, I add new posts to clarify or expand on my thoughts. This self-imposed constraint helps in capturing the evolution of ideas.
I’m finding myself using Mastodon more and more for drafting ideas, alongside Gibberish. Not what I expected when I set up my instance, but it’s becoming a nice addition to my workflow.
I used this guide (with a little help from ChatGPT) to setup my Mastodon instance.
In this guide we will only focus on using the prebuilt images from Docker Hub.
After years of focusing on my blog and staying off social platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky, I’ve decided to set up profiles there. Why now? Here’s what’s changed.
I’ve mostly set up Mastodon and Bluesky profiles to publish my posts to social media platforms. This could also be a way to have conversations around my content. I might occasionally post short status updates, but the main way I’ll share ideas will continue to be through my blog.
I also want to try out new iOS apps like Ivory, Croissant, and Reeder which are integrating with these services.
If you’d like to follow along, here are my profiles:
Feel free to follow me, say hi or share something interesting.
The blog will remain my main hub for new posts, which are also shared to Mastodon and Bluesky via Micro.blog and replies to these posts should appear as comments here on the blog too.
I’m relatively new to the indie blogging, so I’m always on the lookout for new blogs to follow. What works best for me is when I come across a blog that references another one I almost always click through, check out the “About” page, and skim the article archives to see if their content interests me. If it does, I’ll add their blog to my RSS feed.
This is exactly what I do as well. I have never used any directory to find interesting blogs—okay, maybe once—but the point is that linking to other people is a natural way to discover exciting things.
I love it when I have ten tabs open related to a topic and browse the web as we used to.
Using the web for discovery feels like how time was presented at the end of Interstellar. The past, the future, and the now exist all at once, and you can go anywhere on the timeline.
This is what differentiates blogs from newspapers, journals, and academic writing. This is supposed to be a space where anyone and everyone can express themselves. I’d hate for someone to be put off sharing something because they don’t meet a hypothetical bar of wit.
This is something I also talked about couple of days ago.
The new version of the ActivityPub WordPress plugin lets me reply to comments coming from Mastodon and federate them back as standard replies. I just wanted to install an instance this morning to have a profile that I can use to reply to incoming comments, but this one is way better.
Again, you can follow me on Mastodon by searching for my profile (zsbenke@decoding.io) from your instance.
Minus is a finite social network where you get 100 posts—for life.
I read: What should I do with my Twitter:
I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with my Twitter/X account. I don’t want to leave it dormant, because the current policy is to reclaim usernames from accounts that don’t post, which creates a risk that someone will come along and claim to be me later on.
I was worried about this, but I don’t care anymore.
Then… The idle elite:
At this point, if you’re still on Twitter, it might be time to accept a hard fact about yourself: there’s not a single thing that its leadership could do that would push you off the site. Since the takeover almost a year ago they’ve fired everyone who cared, they’ve invited back 4chan, kiwifarms, and sundry other threat actors, they’ve started revenue sharing with the rape peddlers and insurrectionists, they’ve given priority lanes to every paying NFT and AI grifter, and even outright blamed the jews for their bad finances. That’s not even close to an exhaustive list!
Twitter is the worst “social media” site you can use nowadays. Look at what is happening with Threads and Mastodon over here.
I still don’t trust Meta, though.
Speaking of social media, that’s a very distracting place to post to. You see the feed before anything. It’s far too easy to get sucked into that feed before you remember why you came on there in the first place. At that point, I question what my purpose is being on there at all. You’re there to get attention. Bar none.
I’m still a big believer in having expertise in something and sharing that with your peers.
The future is returning to an artisanal web, where you cultivate your niches and small communities, where maybe you don’t become a millionaire and a star, but you do feel a sense of belonging, and maybe make enough to get by.
But having enough money is what people forget to realize. You can get a nice online side business up and running relatively quickly if you have an interesting “product”. Making that a full-time job is yet another step, but you can still stay a niche without losing your soul.
Notes from Avoiding Distractions in Modern Computing:
Most of the upcoming generation will never experience “slow computing”.
Slow computing can be done in a “distraction” heavy environment like email. It all depends on how we set up our tools and what we let our computers do. I can still control a lot of aspects of macOS and iOS and I don’t feel them distractions, but simple tools.
It baffles me that people buy pricey phones and have no idea what these devices are capable of. All they do with them is browse TikTok and Instagram.
It is like a blank canvas with no outputs, just waiting for a command about what I would like to do next. At this point I might navigate to a blog directory and open a document with my text editor of choice: emacs. When done writing this post I will add it to git, my text versioning system. After this I do whatever I please with the text file. I might push it to my central blog repository where a static HTML file generates on a public area or I may pipe it to some other program. This is the Unix philosophy.
The terminal-based environment can feel like an island of peace. Not because apps are distracting but because it is a limited interface that is very easy to control.
Some people, like me, feel at home with a customized Unix prompt.
Tools I still like to use:
E-mail, text/MMS, RSS, a blog/personal website, podcasts, forums. What did I miss?
These fundamental tools are still around because they are the best tools where you are in control of what you are interested in and what you can discover.
These are some alternatives to Reddit:
Each of them has shallow usage and general topics.
Reddit’s strength, for me, is the niche subreddits that any other social network or forum engine hasn’t replicated. At least they aren’t aggregated like this.
I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Brooks.
Apollo is shutting down on June 30th.
It means that I officially end up using any social network.
I stopped using Twitter when Tweetbot was killed. I’ll do the same with Reddit too – which I liked better because the community was awesome, but I’m not going to visit a site that kills a superior app like Apollo.
All I need nowadays is a blog and an RSS reader and I’m good.
Looks like Space Karen caught up with NetNewsWire too:
Twitter suspended NetNewsWire today because, according to Twitter, “This App has violated Twitter Rules and policies. As a result, it can no longer be accessed.”
I still have a couple of feeds in Reeder, which are working for now, but I don’t expect them to be around that long.
Honestly, I don’t care about Twitter (or social media in general) anymore. I can do everything I want with this blog regarding publishing my stuff on the web.
I still POSSE my blog posts to Twitter using Micro.blog because some people still follow me there. I may turn that off one day because very few people are coming to this blog from Twitter.
I was thinking about installing a new Mastodon instance and creating a new account. Still, this blog is already capable of RSS and ActivityPub, so I’m not sure if I need the social aspect of yet another social network. I simply want to blog. It’s an easy to follow concept, and I have comments open if you want to leave a reply.
There is a way to follow me on Mastodon, though; you can do it by pasting the following handle into Mastodon’s search bar:
@zsbenke@decoding.io
HEY for World can be an excellent idea for those who don’t want to be bothered to set up a blog.
When I write a certain kind of email — aka a blog post — why do I have to address it to someone? Why can’t I just address my thoughts to the world? Direct to the web for anyone and everyone? Rather than define the recipients, I just write and let the recipients find me.
Although we had this before and it failed miserably.
As I refresh my online presence with a new avatar and a new Dribbble profile, it occurred to me that I don’t have a page, which I can hand to somebody, and he/she can see what my work is all about. Not a portfolio, but a more superior page than a simple “About Me” in WordPress.
So I built one, featuring some of my work I did lately and, more importantly, the first web development tutorial I promised a couple of months ago. I plan to extract this article into a separate mini-site just for these tutorials, but for now, it nicely complements my “About” page.
Anyway, check out my work!
It was a long time since I posted anything on Dribbble. In the last couple of years, I did so many exciting things, but I haven’t shown them anywhere; I did show some bits and blobs on Twitter.
Since I like to think about UI interactions and building tools, I should have a platform to show the results. And Dribbble is excellent for that. So from now on, I try to post new stuff I’m working on.
Checkout my Dribbble profile →
(Feedback is always welcome.)
Mióta bekötöttem ide a webmention plugint, azóta minden egyes külső helyről érkező reakció megjelenik itt a blogon a posztok alatt. Ez jöhet mondjuk egy másik blogról vagy egy másik social networkről – bármiről, ami IndieWeb ready.
Sajnos nem minden szolgáltatás ilyen, ami régóta zavar. Az utóbbi években népszerűvé vált elzárt platformszigetek megcsorbították a web nyitott mivoltát, így mától nem fogok direktben kontentet írni egyetlen ilyen zárt platformra sem. Ezentúl a bejövő reakciókra adott válaszaimat is blogon fogom megtenni, tehát a Twitterről fogadott pingbackekre is itt fogok írni.
Az itt megjelenő tartalom ugyanúgy fel fog bukkani különböző helyeken, ahogy az IndieWeb POSSE is ajánlja, viszont a platform ahol a tényleges interakció fog folyni, az teljesen a sajátom lesz, ahogy annak már régóta kellene lennie.
Annak idején nagyon népszerű tartalomfogyasztási forma volt az RSS. Manapság mindenhonnan azt hallom, hogy az RSS egy halott technológia – ami persze baromság – mindenki a social médiát használja. Én is régóta jelen vagyok Twitteren, de az elmúlt 10 év tapasztalata alapján nálam sosem fogja leváltani a social média a feed olvasómat. Sőt, valószínűleg hamarabb fog elhalni nálam a Twitter, mint az RSS.
Craig Mod makes some good point about deleting your tweets:
If an idea is any good, chances are you shouldn’t just be tweeting it, but rather giving it a more solid, fleshed out form as a blog post or essay or zine or whatever. This is out of respect for the idea itself. What I find most dangerous about Twitter is that it can generate similar chemical feelings to having done “the work,” when in fact, you haven’t done the work. You’ve just micro-plastic’d idea potential. Make Twitter ephemeral and it seems to undo this psychic voodoo. (For me, anyway.)
It makes sense to me. Also routinely deleting my old tweets gives me some control over one of my concerns with social media: using an old tweet against me. We’ve seen this before.
Sure, I’m not James Gunn, but because Twitter makes it very easy to post things online, we usually do it without thinking. Having these tweets still available years later can be problematic. We are changing, but our short angry bursts aren’t. These are sitting somewhere on Twitter as a record of a random bad snippet of us.
As Craig said, tweets should be ephemeral.
The original vision of the iPhone was to help in our everyday life, not to became a life broadcaster and receiver device, which we are hanging to 24/7.
According to Cal Newport, we have to return to the original vision of the iPhone, which Steve Jobs showed us when he introduced it in 2007. Be a really good tool for a couple of things, but don’t hijack our attention in a form of notifications and dopamine booster social networks.
We can develop a healthy relationship with this device if we think about it as a tool. It can be a great hammer to solve problems occasionally throughout the day, but after that, it’s very important to slide it back into our pocket and continue focusing on the thing that we’re doing.
Opinion | Steve Jobs Never Wanted Us to Use Our iPhones Like This – The New York Times
Once you’ve stripped away the digital chatter clamoring for your attention, your smartphone will return to something closer to the role originally conceived by Mr. Jobs. It will become a well-designed object that comes out occasionally throughout your day to support — not subvert — your efforts to live well: It helps you find that perfect song to listen to while walking across town on a sunny fall afternoon; it loads up directions to the restaurant where you’re meeting a good friend; with just a few swipes, it allows you to place a call to your mom — and then it can go back into your pocket, or your bag, or the hall table by your front door, while you move on with the business of living your real-world life.
The iPhone is a fantastic phone, but it was never meant to be the foundation for a new form of existence in which the digital increasingly encroaches on the analog. If you return this innovation to its original limited role, you’ll get more out of both your phone and your life.
There is a difference between notifications that I want to receive versus the ones that somebody else wants me to receive.
Triggers that I leave for myself in the future to notify my future presence self are important. Otherwise, triggers made by others are having a very good chance of being not important at all.
When we are using a device, we have to set up notifications in a way to receive way less from the latter one. This way we can preserve the essence of the device as a tool, so we don’t become a tool for someone else who can use our device as a remote to control us.
