Writing Substrates
Thursday July 16, 2020 — Brooklyn, New York
I mentioned in my introduction that I have a lot of places to write already, but they all feel pretty different. I realize that I’ve never actually tried to define how each substrate for writing feels, so this is an attempt to take a look at how I interact with each of the places I write, and what works well and doesn’t work well about each of them.
- Technical
- Longform writing
- Audience feels large, often gets posted to HN or Lobste.rs
- Infrequent posts, trying to be high-quality
- Short snippets
- Audience feels small
- It’s like twitter, but nobody can @ me
- No RSS feed, so people have to explicitly go to the page if they want to see new thoughts. This makes it feel safe to post dumb/unimportant/asinine things, since it’s peoples own fault if they go and look for it.
- Lots of my friends have thoughts pages as well which is pretty cute
- Lots of followers, but I’m not sure what they want me to tweet?
- Lots of tech bro followers, this is probably my main audience unfortunately
- Lots of Recurse Center people
- Some people who I have crushes on and want to think I’m cool
- Some people who I know in person and apparently decided to follow me based on that
- Some of my coworkers‽
- Random people can @ me
- There are lots of cool people who I want to be friends with but that seems hard to make happen if you aren’t Extremely Online
- Good place for feelings and opinions that will get me cancelled
- A few friends who will reply to things I post
- Pretty good!
- I wish a few more people followed me
Mailing list
I started a mailing list a while ago. I wrote the software myself so it’s very cumbersome to use and I sent one post with it and had to deal with Gmail spam filtering and just sort of stopped. I would like to get back to it, but my focus is on my notebook right now.
The Recurse Center’s Zulip chat instance has lots of streams that I like, but I have a particular affinity for #consciousness,The “stream of consciousness,” get it? It’s very funny :) where every person has their own thread for talking about whatever’s on their mind. There’s a sort of community, where people will respond to each other’s posts, but the community is small and nice enough that feels good.