What do I want the future of the Internet to look like?
Last updated 2024 May 19 | More of my big questions
Sub-questions
- What do I want out of the Internet?
- What’s a better way to use the Internet?
- How can I support the independent web?
- What are the social norms around blogging and online interactions?
- How can human-powered curation and discovery work in a genAI era with endless content?
Bookshelf
Related books I’ve read since 2021. Links go to my book review.
Podcasts + Videos
Articles
Articles or longer responses I’ve written. Grouped in roughly reverse chronological order. Stars mark what I think are the best or most interesting pieces, in retrospect.
Blogging
- Things to do with a website
- Choosing between ideas for blog posts ⭐
- The pros and cons of sponginess
- My 20th anniversary of blogging! ⭐
- People you know from offline don’t read your blog
- Reclaiming intentionality in browsing and blogging
- Understanding blogs ⭐
- Blogs are a platform for normal people
- Questions to guide what you write online to help shape the internet you want
- A better word for blogging?
- With a blog, everything is a prompt
The indie web vs. the corporate web
- The IndieWeb’s next stage?
- Self-promotion vs. advertising
- Websites as gardens of the Internet ecosystem
- The unweirding of the Internet
- Packaging people for corporate consumption
- What makes RSS better than social timelines? ⭐
- Reaching the edges
- Twitter Interests and the scam of interest-based targeting ⭐
- Overcoming the societal expectations making it hard for women to leave social media
- Substackification
Community online + the IndieWeb
- Social norms of the IndieWeb: followup from HWC
- Adding a heart reacji to my WordPress theme
- “Webbing” the IndieWeb ⭐
- Reply to Sara: lowering social barriers
- IndieWeb interactions: what builds connection?
- Taking opportunities to connect
- Building community out of strangers ⭐
- Introverted, not antisocial
- Playing together online: reimagining interactions
- Barriers to a more social IndieWeb ⭐
- The IndieWeb as affinity network
- I asked Substack to add Webmention support
- Rebuilding and spreading an independent web
- Getting More Women Involved in the IndieWeb
AI and the web
- Generated content is an invasive species in the online ecosystem ⭐
- Recursive human thought
- Following up on delisting my website from Google
- Pulling my site from Google over AI training ⭐
- AI has poisoned its own well ⭐
Politics + activism + culture online
- What is considered “political”? ⭐
- How momfluencers affect the value society puts on care work
- Letter to my Senator about KOSA
- Who is the internet for? Or, the culture war over adult content
- What happens to activism after Twitter?
- Defending against abuse, violence, and viewpoints of hatred ⭐
- We Need Public Spaces Online
- Diversifying my blogroll
Technologies, platforms + preferences
- To stay or to go?
- My current WordPress plugins and customizations
- Why we block ads
- Adding a spoiler tag to HTML
- Personal website conventions in the East versus the West
- Rethinking utilities
- Digital native generations: analog peripherals versus touchscreen
- Google search sucks
- Internet era life skills ⭐
- Personal Website Aesthetics
Notes
Bookmarks and quotes from articles I’ve read. Roughly reverse chronological order.
- Rewilding for resilience
- It’s just a blog
- Information parasites
- Archives of the digital age
- A bad look for Automattic
- An invitation to wander
- Censorship is a public-private partnership
- The webpunk ethos
- Article pairing: the immediacy of blogging
- In algorithm we trust
- Blogs are written for people, not search
- Websites as tools
- “Wandering into someone’s kitchen” online
- If Threads were a place it’d be the mall
- Controlling the information platforms, controlling the information
- The continents of the Internet
- Article pairing: is blogging self indulgent?
- The hollow banality of the metaverse
- Asserting the right to exist in public online spaces
- Which online bar do you want to hang out at?
- A decentered argument as website
- The Feed vs Community
- Discord, the Internet’s Third Place
- Digestible Persona
7 replies on “Future of the Internet”
I’m a sci-fi writer and graphic designer in the Seattle suburbs. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area but have lived in Washington since 2008. On this site, I track what I read and watch, write commentary on things that interest me, and collect reference information. My professional background is in ecology and…
What’s Tracy up to lately? Updated 25 June 2024 Designing a couple interpretive signs about salmon Creating educational materials for a city business pollution prevention program Posting thoughts and saving bookmarks here — I love having this site 🤓 Editing a sci-fi novel 📝 I’m planning to self-publish Reading lots — I’m digging novellas lately…
I have too many pages to fit in my nav! Here’s a sitemap of all the pages on this website. Blog Mind Garden Index Links to blog about Big Questions Big Questions Balanced Lifestyle Effective Creative Processes Writing Fiction Thinking Better Information Diet Future of the Internet Resisting Fascism Building Community Transforming Capitalism Collections Cool…
Spring is here — it was a big wildlife week in the neighborhood! Heard coyotes howling in the greenbelt and the frogs started their evening chorus, saw a doe in the backyard and a hummingbird out front, and spotted the first bees cruising. But, allergies also hit me hard 🤧
I downloaded my Google Takeout data. I’d forgotten they own Blogger and was delighted to discover they had atom feeds for all of my old college blogs! No photos, but still funny to see what I wrote about twenty years ago. I’ve marked the date of my very first post on my calendar so I can celebrate the anniversary come September 😁🥂
I’ve been working on keeping fewer tabs open on my phone. I was doing pretty well till yesterday but left six tabs open overnight 😂
Stuff I Did:
About eight hours of consulting work
Developed a new revision plan for my novel
Started exploring webfonts for my consulting website
Went to Homebrew Website Club
Watched a webinar about home design
Walked with a friend twice
Baked scones
One appointment
Reading:
Read Alien Mercenary’s Destiny by Mina Carter and re-read The Suffragette Scandal by Courtney Milan
Started reading Effortless by Greg McKeown
DNF’d Breath of Life by Jocelynn Drake and Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
Added five books to my TBR
Words I looked up / concepts I learned:
cognate
caliginous
No free lunch theorem
New newsletter I’m trying out:
Ann Friedman’s newsletter
Pretty things I saw:
Ryan Swierczek of Swierczek Design Co — I like the color palettes, especially the photo tints, and the photo collages on their posters
Roland Kraemer on ThatBloom.com — lots of neat abstract natural photo series, and I thought the inverted cursor overlay was cool looking (although the size changing was a little confusing)
Parag Sahasrabudhe on parag.micro.blog — a series of colorful doors in Puerto Rico
Website Changes:
New organizing section!
I created a new section called “Big Questions” which organizes a lot of my notes and reading under broad questions that I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past couple years:
Balanced Lifestyle
Effective Creative Processes
Writing Fiction – this one hasn’t been populated yet
Thinking Better
Information Diet
Future of the Internet
Resisting Fascism
Building Community
I got some good ideas at Homebrew Website Club that I’ve only started implementing on the ‘balanced lifestyle’ page, so these still have some work to do. I also need to figure out what system I’m going to follow to update them since it’s all manual 😉
New page
I also finally published a page collecting “neat websites” as an addition to my pages for interesting people and cool artists and blogroll. I’d been sitting on it, feeling like it needed more content before I could post it, but whatev, may as well post now and can keep adding 🤷♀️
This Article was mentioned on tracydurnell.com
I’ve previously discussed where I get my ideas for blog posts, but I was intrigued by Sara’s article (and Tantek’s prompt) about how…
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