The creator economy trap: why building on someone else’s platform is a dead end — Joan Westenberg
Craig and Jason are walking the walk here:
- Build your own damn platform.
- Treat social media like the tool it is.
- Build your technical skills.
Click Around, Find Out – Dirty Feed
If you care about the indie web growing, by all means write, by all means create, by all means curate. But most of all, just read. Or listen, or experience. Spend an afternoon clicking around, like everybody used to. The more people who do that, the more everything else will slot into place without even having to think much about it.
Related links
Social, I love you, but you’re bringing me down
Posting in a space I control isn’t just about the principle anymore. It’s a kind of self-preservation. I want to preserve my attention and my autonomy. I accept that I’m addicted, and I would like to curb that addiction. We all only have so much time to spend; we only have one face to maintain ownership of. Independence is the most productive, least invasive way forward.
Indie Newsletters – Registry of cool personal and independent email newsletters
You are viewing a humanly curated list of fine personal & independent email newsletters that are updated regularly. No algorithms ever!
And remember: you can subscribe to most newsletters via RSS rather than email.
Where have all the websites gone? – Chris Coyier
I know I sound like an old man when I go on and on about RSS, but really, it’s sitting right there and is apparently what a lot of people miss.
Curation is the last best hope of intelligent discourse. — Joan Westenberg
The return of RSS and POSSE points to a revival of the personal website ecosystem that thrived in the early blog era. Writers, researchers, technologists and more are relaunching their independent homepages, complete with feeds, as both a public notebook and a channel for sharing insights. The personal website is the ultimate sovereign territory online, enabling creators to share content on their own terms.
I feel like Joan Westenberg has come up with the perfect tag line for personal websites (emphasis mine):
By passing high-quality, human-centric content through their own lens of discernment before syndicating it to social networks, these curators create islands of sanity amidst oceans of machine-generated content of questionable provenance.
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