From Bear Blog Discover → a blog post titled “More Than Email” → Tuta (Secure Email: Private, Green & Ad-free) → CryptPad (CryptPad is a collaborative office suite that is end-to-end encrypted and open-source.)
“BuT How will i FIND nEw CoOL sTUFF WiThOUt SoCiAL MediA?!?”
By clicking around Bear Blog’s Discover and Bubbles you can find some interesting blog posts, which lead you down rabbit holes to other interesting blogs or products or services.
It’s not served to you on a silver platter like an algorithm, but that’s the point.
Vibe coding is fun and all (here’s my new Hunterthen site), but the behind the scenes work is not.
Updating DNS settings, SSL certificates, troubleshooting your router to not block FTP traffic? SHEESH.
Social media won because it was easy; upload a photo, write a quick bio, and you can upload a video all within 10 minutes.
But if we can’t set up a website in less that 15 minutes then it’s just not worth it.
It’s not that it’s hard, it just takes a bit to figure stuff out. We can do hard things!
I’ve been fiddling around with DNS stuff since the mid 2000s and I’m glad I have Claude to ask about my CNAME settings to properly authenticate my SSL cert.
Then again, this is why everyone doesn’t write a book either. It takes time and patience. Plenty of hurdles.
Either you want to do the thing, and will do whatever it takes, or you won’t.
On Break Up 💔 With Social Media Day on Valentines Day, I deleted the YouTube and Substack apps. I reinstalled the YouTube app one day, lost about 20 minutes to scrolling through Shorts, deleted it again, and have seriously kept the phone plugged in and out of sight most of the time since.
I work from home, don’t drive much, and I answer emails and Slack and Asana stuff when I’m at my computer. Sure, I use my laptop quite a bit, but cutting three hours of iPhone time from my life has felt great.
I spent so much time on the Substack app just “keeping up.” Joining in with conversations, replying, replying to replies, managing DMs, sharing articles I liked. Seriously added up to over an hour a day, easily.
Getting back 7+ hours per week means I can write more. Or repurpose a bunch of the video and audio I’m already making every week. Processing and reflecting on all the calls and interviews I do with people every day.
That’s the work I should be doing, instead of dealing with 100 little pebbles of “engagement” per day on the Substack app.
I still have not consumed content on the phone, three weeks in. That’s awesome, and I want that to stay that way.
That was the killer for me, too – video. Making coffee, put on a YouTube video. Scroll the YouTube shorts. Warming up coffee? Repeat. Eating lunch? Catch up the latest Colbert zingers.
A solid week without all that? Just under 20 minutes of screen time per day? Yeah, I wanna keep this going.
Love this from Rolling Stone: “Johnny Blue Skies, the guy formerly known as Sturgill Simpson, will release a new album only in physical format.”
No streaming, just vinyl, CD, and cassette.
As Steve Vai once said, “I get paid the most.” As more artists call the shots, and resist the allure of giving everything away for free, then we’ll see some actual change in the creative world.
Spotify won’t one day wake up and start paying more. Nor will the general public just stop streaming everything for $10 a month.
MIST: Like Google Docs, but for Markdown files, by Matt Webb.
I want to be able to share a Markdown doc as easily as sharing a link, and have real-time multiplayer editing, suggested edits, and comments, without a heavyweight app in the background.
Rekall is a “A cyber-retro-futurist aesthetic image blog,” and it’s updated every night since 2010 by Steve Gaynor.
We’ve all come across image feeds like this on social media platforms, but.. well, platforms come and go, but our websites endure so long as we keep paying for our domain name and hosting.
