After the debacle with Reddit, Twitter, et al some of my friends an I decided to stop posting to corporate walled gardens and instead focus on sharing and co-creating.

I remember reading about modern alternatives for WebRings two years ago, but can't for the life of me find them or remember what they were called! Tiny web? TinyRing? SmallWeb? Does this ring a bell for some of you?

Alternatively, I'd appreciate if you could share ideas and approaches to alternative/indy syndication or agreggation.

Thanks !

EDIT: ding ding ding https://indieweb.org/Micro.blog

I'm looking for ways to make it easier to publish on my personal blog. I've had WordPress blogs in the past, and I find that they set up a constant grind of upgrading — upgrading core, upgrading plugins, reconfiguring the upgraded components, fixing the things the upgrades break...

It was stealing too much of the little time I have to devote to my blog. So, when I built my current blog, I built in on a static site generator (11ty). It took longer to set up than just writing HTML and CSS, but it does make it a bit quicker to get something up since it will build pages from markdown, and it doesn't require a ton of upgrading every time I want to sit down and write something. Sure, I could upgrade a library or two each time I sit down with it, but it's just spitting out HTML so I don't really need to.

That said, it's still more friction than I want. I'm currently obsessed with mmm.page. I love the playful UI. I love the design language it encourages. I love how it makes the tech get out of the way and puts you closer to getting your content out. That said, there are several things I don't love:

1. It's not accessible. I can't pick which elements to use. I can't write alt text for images.
2. It's not open source. This means a lot of things. It means when the developer loses interest, it will die. It means we can't evaluate it. It means we can't self-host it. Speaking of these...
3. Development seems to be slow. There's one item on the roadmap. It was suggested in April. I have a feeling it's not making the money the developer had hoped and they've lost enthusiasm for it.
4. We can't self-host it. Now, this means I'm stuck paying $10 a month. Tomorrow, that could go up to $20, and there's nothing I can do about it.
5. There's no easily apparent escape hatch. I guess I could just download the pages it wrote and host them elsewhere, but that's probably not ideal. If the developer does decide to close up shop or double the price, I want an easy way to take my site and go somewhere else.
6. As far as I can tell, it doesn't support RSS. I am a staunch believer in RSS, and I believe the web sucks without it. I won't want to run a site that doesn't offer it.

All these problems leave me with a web site that provides too much friction and a solution to that problem that leaves many others in its wake. Does anyone know of an alternative that's similar that could address some or most of these issues? I'm a developer and I still would like to be able to publish online without doing developer-y stuff, so it's easy to see how social media has been able to bottle up so much content on the web. I'd love to think there's something that could bring us out of this dystopia... or at least make it easier for me to share a list of the games I've been playing recently. 😅

My girlfriend has started a small business and is looking into a blogging platform. What she has tried so far hasn't been great. She has decided to go the WordPress route and this is where I am involved.

Any suggestions for hosting providers? What features should I be considering or anything else I should be aware of when it comes to picking a provider?
Right now I am looking at Bluehost vs Hostinger. Bluehost just seem to be the most advertised. Hostinger seemed to offer more for the same cost.

Back in the day I was a hardcore Google Reader (RIP) user, and following that I continued to use https://feedly.com/ for many years, but eventually I found myself falling behind on all my feeds and stopped checking it.

Recently, I signed for Inoreader and I've started reading more blogs again. It also has the nice feature of letting you subscribe to email newsletters too, which is quite nice since I find them annoying to deal with in my email inbox but convenient in the feed reader.

I'm wondering what blogs and newsletters folks on Tildes subscribe to.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Blogs:

• bellingcat: Independent investigative journalism often based on online "open source intelligence." e.g. The Boogaloo Movement is Not What You Think
• BLDGBLOG: Geoff Manaugh's blog about everything related to the space we inhabit, both built and natural. e.g. Underground Cathedrals of Radiation and Zones of Irreversible Strain
• Flowing Data: Nathan Yau's blog about data visualization. e.g. Racial Divide
• Idle Words: The blog of Maciej Cegłowski, creator of the Pinboard bookmarking service. Covers tech and lots of unrelated topics. e.g. Superintelligence: The Idea that Eats Smart People

Newsletters:

• BIG by Matt Stoller: A newsletter about economics and in particular the economics of monopolies and disruptive startups. e.g. The Slow Death of Hollywood
• Data is Plural: A weekly newsletter of fun/weird datasets.
• Normcore Tech: Vicki Boykis' newsletter about tech and tech-related things. e.g. The Reign of Big Recsys
• Uses This: Brief interviews with all sorts of creators about what tools they use to do what they do.

This is just a slice. I can share my entire list if people are interested. But I'm curious about what feeds others enjoy, on anything from film and furniture to "movie-set" urbanism. What are you reading?

Introduction

I hate medium and I think it should die a slow death. I tried to get some information on the subject to substantiate my belief.

What Medium Does Bad

Medium is slow

On Gmetrix, medium.com has a F PageSpeed Score, with a 11.8MB Total Page Size and a Fully Loaded Time of 12.4s . A random article got a little better, with a D score

Pingdom gives Medium a B score, with a page size of Page size 12.4 MB and Load time 2.15s (much better). This is from San Francisco, USA.

Probably because I’m closer, the results for São Paulo, Brazil, are marginally better. The B score remains, but Load time dropped to 1.68s.

Tildes gotta a C on GTmetrix and an A on Pingdom. On Google, Tildes got a 98 and medium.com got a 48.

What is probably more concerning is that builtwith.com’s lists 106 different technologies at use on a single Medium page, ranging from AngularJS to Subversion, Wordpress Grid (aren’t they competitors?), Microsoft Azure and AliExpress. Tildes list only 13 technologies.

Medium is annoying

I’m sick and tired of opening a random Medium article and being bombarded with an immediate call to action for me to subscribe or to sign into a useless mailing-list. No: I do not pardon the interruption.

It’s 2019: I don't wanna sign-in just to read a free fucking article.

Medium weakens your brand

On Medium, you’re not a content maker. Your a Medium contributor. There’s a great difference. There are little customization options, but you’re encouraged to strengthen the Medium brand instead of your own.

Medium does not support Markdown

In 2019, this is utterly ridiculous. I should be able to write my posts in Emacs, Vim, VS Code, whatever. Markdown is a universal format that simply works and not supporting it natively is unacceptable.

The Default Editor Sucks

It forces you to write in a certain (clunky) way and it doesn't work at all.

Too Much White Space

Medium uses space poorly.

Not FOSS

Wanna host your own? No can do amigo.

Your content is not (really) yours

Wanna export your Medium posts? Should be easy, like a single button, right? NOPE. And it can stop working at any time.

Most Content is Shit

I don’t wanna generalize, there are some good things on Medium. But most Medium articles are bellow 300-words, full of unnecessary subtitles with nothing more than obvious statements I could easily get from Google. Most Medium articles are from developers trying to leverage their status by showing knowledge of trivial technologies.

What Medium Does Right

A Social Network With Content Instead of Content With Social Networking

This is something no amount of Wordpress widgets will ever top. Medium is a social network. It gets views, it gets you “applauses”, it gets you validation. It’s the Instagram of text content. Medium makes you feel good about yourself, and give you the shot (illusion?) of exposure. Maybe you can be in a publication, which is just an assortment of posts within Medium itself! See, you’re growing! You’re reaching a larger audience! They might even read your stuff!

The Alternative

It is obvious that Medium does a lot of things right. It is an actual social network that engages people like no other current blogging tool. People that know better use Medium to their advantage. People use Medium to talk trash about Medium. So we need another Medium. One that is just as social, but that is faster, less annoying, less of walled-garden and respects your content. I’m not in a position to do such a thing yet. But I certainly wish it existed.