RIP Apollo app

June 8, 2023

On the tech side of things, I’ve very bummed that the excel­lent iOS Apol­lo Red­dit app has announce it will be shut­ting down at the end of the month. The major­i­ty of my use of Red­dit has been via Apol­lo in recent years. It’s been heart­en­ing to see such a thor­ough­ly well-designed app from an inde­pen­dent devel­op­er and I’ve been hap­py to give a month­ly donation. 

Reports are that Red­dit is prepar­ing for an IPO, which means crap­pi­fy­ing every­thing to make it look more prof­itable for poten­tial investors. The result is that it will be less use­ful for many of its users, who are the ones that cre­ate all the real val­ue in the first place. You’d think the ongo­ing Twit­ter melt­down in val­ue (part­ly from killing off its third-party apps) would be instruc­tive but appar­ent­ly not. It’s a les­son Sil­i­con Val­ley refus­es to learn.

I’ve long thought that the Quak­ers sub­red­dit in par­tic­u­lar filled a lot of the func­tion of the orig­i­nal Quak­erQuak­er: a curat­ed list of inter­est­ing, time­ly online con­ver­sa­tions. I’ll still be around. I have my RSS read­er let­ting me know when there’s new posts there and I will often respond to ques­tions via the Red­dit web­site. But a lot of my “hey what’s going on now” brows­ing has hap­pened on Apol­lo and will stop. 

There’s a 48-hour Red­dit boy­cott hap­pen­ing start­ing June 12 par­tic­i­pat­ing. Judg­ing by the detailed account of cor­re­spon­dence in the Apol­lo devel­op­er’s post, it’s unlike­ly to change any­thing, but Red­dit lead­er­ship will at least see just how pissed many of its users are.

QuakerRanter in the Fediverse

November 9, 2022

And I’ve got­ten the Word­Press Activ­i­ty­Pub plug-in work­ing. If I’ve got my lin­go right, this blog is now a Fedi­verse serv­er avail­able on Mastodon. What does this mean? I’m not quite sure but you can fol­low at: @admin@www.quakerranter.org.

A Mastodon Do-over?

November 8, 2022

I joined Mastodon a few years ago but have only been using it for the last week. What­ev­er one thinks about our nois­i­est bil­lion­aire’s evolv­ing alt-right lean­ings and ganja-fueled impetu­ous­ness, the lever­aged takeover of Twit­ter added a bil­lion dol­lars per year in inter­est pay­ments to its expens­es. I’m skep­ti­cal that any new fea­ture or income source could over­come this new-owner tax.

But using Mastodon has remind­ed me of some of the ear­ly dreams about Twit­ter evolv­ing into a kind of inter­net util­i­ty, acces­si­ble and remixed by var­i­ous oth­er user-facing apps. It start­ed this way: the offi­cial Twit­ter app start­ed as an inde­pen­dent app called Tweet­ie and ear­ly on, any app could access the Twit­ter feed.

As a util­i­ty mod­el, you could post and auto-post all sorts of raw infor­ma­tion to the Twit­ter feed. For exam­ple, loca­tion check-ins on Foursquare or song lis­tens on Last​.fm. This would be too much infor­ma­tion for some­one to scroll through, of course (in all this there would also be apps that would fil­ter out all this fire­hose infor­ma­tion and just dis­play con­ver­sa­tions). But cus­tom apps had all sorts of potentials.

For exam­ple, you could have an app that fol­lows the check-in Tweets. As an open sys­tem, it would pull in from not just Foursquare but any geography-based ser­vice that dumped its info into the Twit­ter fire­hose. Say you’re vis­it­ing an unfa­mil­iar city, you could open the spe­cial­ized app, click a tab for “restau­rants” and get a list of near­by eater­ies that peo­ple on your social graph like.

Or music: anoth­er app could find songs that your friends are lis­ten­ing to. They might have all sorts of tastes but you could cat­a­log gen­res and tell your app to cre­ate a spe­cif­ic mix — say 20% oldies, 50% indie rock, 20% jazz, and 10% con­tem­po­rary hits. Mul­ti­ple apps could be access­ing and mix­ing this data and because of the open­ness of sys­tems — any log­ging sys­tem, an open Twit­ter, any music mix­er — there would be no built-in monop­oly walled gardens.

This is not how Twit­ter evolved. The com­pa­ny want­ed to make mon­ey out of its unlike­ly 140-character sta­tus updates. It bought one of the pop­u­lar Twit­ter clients, added ads to then, then kneecapped the api’s for rival apps so that they did­n’t work as well no mat­ter how clever their design­ers were.

Mastodon is meant to be decen­tral­ized and dis­trib­uted. There are innu­mer­able servers. There’s no obvi­ous way to monop­o­lize things because angry users could just all migrate to anoth­er serv­er. If Mastodon takes off, I’m sure there will be swarms of wannabe young Musks try­ing to fig­ure out how to close it off and siphon off adver­tis­ing dol­lars. But it will be hard. If the ser­vice could get crit­i­cal mass it’s pos­si­ble it could pro­vide a wide ecosys­tem of inter­est­ing services.

And oh yes, I’m at https://​mastodon​.social/​@​m​a​r​t​i​n​k​e​l​ley

Everything’s a blog

October 29, 2019

Appar­ent­ly it’s that time of year again. The days grow short­er, the nights grow chill­i­er, and we bemoan the death of blogging.

As some­one who’s now well into my third decade of blog­ging, It’s fun­ny read­ing the respons­es. Peo­ple are talk­ing about mar­kets or about how it’s not the same since big mon­ey stopped sub­si­diz­ing the blog­ging infrastructure.

When blogs start­ed they were incred­i­bly under the radar. We didn’t have big audi­ences — didn’t real­ly expect them — and we weren’t try­ing to mon­e­tize or brand our­selves. We were telling sto­ries. They were text, they were pic­tures, some­times they were videos and audio. For my first few years of blog­ging I resist­ed even call­ing it that because the term was so asso­ci­at­ed with a kind of self-focused hot take.

Accord­ing to one recent sur­vey, Word­Press is pow­er­ing 34% of the pub­lic inter­net. That’s not bad for a dead medi­um. If any­thing is RIP, it’s a nar­row def­i­n­i­tion of blog­ging. I’d argue that any cre­ative con­tent that is reg­u­lar­ly post­ed and dis­played in a time­line is a kind of blog. When I start­ed blog­ging in 1997, I was hand cod­ing every­thing. But now there’s a gazil­lion ser­vices that all look and feel dif­fer­ent but have a dis­tinct blog­ging DNA.

Peo­ple use Face­book to blog. When peo­ple unroll a Twit­ter for Thread Read­er App, it shows just how blog­gy Twit­ter is. Reddit’s the com­ment sec­tion of a blog large­ly divorced from a blog. Instagram’s noth­ing more than a pho­to­blog. Pod­casts are large­ly orga­nized as blogs. Mailchimp and Sub­stack are blogs tied to email lists. And of course there’s Tum­blr, Word­Press, Medi­um, and oth­er more clas­sic text-based blogs. Nowa­days the con­cept is so diverse and dif­fuse that it’s become invis­i­ble. The impor­tant thing is that peo­ple have a voice that they can share.

Jason Kottke on blogging, 2018 edition

February 14, 2018

Two things on the inter­net that I con­sis­tent­ly like are Neiman­Lab and Kot​tke​.org. The for­mer is Harvard’s jour­nal­ism foun­da­tion and its asso­ci­at­ed blog. They con­sis­tent­ly pub­lish thought-provoking lessons from media pio­neers. If there’s an inter­est­ing online pub­lish­ing mod­el being tried, Neiman Labs will pro­file it. Kot­tke is one of the orig­i­nal old school blogs. Jason high­lights things that are inter­est­ing to him and by and large, most of the posts hap­pen to be inter­est­ing to me. He’s also one of the few break­out blog­ging stars who has kept going.

So today Neiman Labs post­ed an inter­view with Jason Kot­tke. Of course I like it.

There are a few things that Jason has done that I find remark­able. One is that he’s thread­ed an almost impos­si­ble path that has held back the cen­trifu­gal forces of the mod­ern inter­net. He nev­er went big and he nev­er went small. By big, I mean he nev­er tried to ramp his site up to become a media empire. No ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist mon­ey, no click­bait head­lines, no piv­ot to video or oth­er trendy media chimera. He also didn’t go small: his blog has nev­er been a con­fes­sion­al. While that traf­fic when to Face­book, his kind of curat­ed links and thoughts is some­thing that still works best as a blog.

Although I don’t blog myself too much any­more, I do think a lot about media mod­els for Friends Jour­nal. Its reliance on non-professional opin­ion writ­ing pre­fig­ured blogs. It’s a ful­ly dig­i­tal mag­a­zine now, even as it con­tin­ues as a print mag­a­zine. The mem­ber­ship mod­el Kot­tke talks about (and Neiman Labs fre­quent­ly pro­files) is a like­ly one for us going into the long term.

Last blog stand­ing, “last guy danc­ing”: How Jason Kot­tke is think­ing about kot​tke​.org at 20

In praise of an editor past

April 24, 2017

Frances William Browin from the Sep­tem­ber 15, 1968 Friends Journal.

When I became an edi­tor at Friends Jour­nal in 2011, I inher­it­ed an insti­tu­tion with some rather strong opin­ions. Some of them are sourced from the pre­dictable well­springs: William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s foun­da­tion­al mid-century style guide and the edi­to­r­i­al offices of the Chica­go Man­u­al of Style. But some are all our own, log­i­cal­ly test­ed for con­sis­ten­cy with Chica­go but adapt­ed to Quak­er idiosyncrasies.

One of our most invari­able (and con­test­ed) for­mats comes from the way we list con­gre­ga­tions. Quick aside for non-Quakers: you will often see a Quak­er meet­ing var­i­ous­ly named as “Town Month­ly Meet­ing,” “Town Friends Meet­ing,” “Town Quak­er Meet­ing,” etc. Peo­ple often have strong opin­ions about the cor­rect form. Occa­sion­al­ly an author will insist to me that their meet­ing has an offi­cial name (“Spring­field Friends Meet­ing”), used con­sis­tent­ly across their pub­li­ca­tions and busi­ness min­utes. But after a few min­utes with Google I can usu­al­ly find enough counter-examples (“Spring­field Month­ly Meet­ing”) to prove their inconsistency.

To cut through this, Friends Jour­nal uses “Town (State) Meet­ing” every­where and always, with spe­cif­ic excep­tions only for cas­es where that doesn’t work — for exam­ple, the meet­ing is named after a street or a tree or isn’t in the town it’s named for (after 300 years iden­ti­ties some­times get messy). This for­mat­ting is unique to Friends Jour­nal—even oth­er Philadelphia-based Quak­er style sheets don’t fol­low it. We’ve been doing it this dis­tinc­tive­ly and this con­sis­tent­ly for as long as I’ve been read­ing the mag­a­zine. Where does our stub­born nam­ing con­ven­tion come from?

For­tu­nate­ly, thanks to Haver­ford Col­lege’s Quak­er and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions we have dig­i­tal archives going back to the mid-1950s. A few months ago I dug into our archives and used key­word search­es to see how far back the for­mat goes. Trav­el­ing the years back it time it’s held remark­ably steady as “Town (State) Meet­ing” until we get back to the fall of 1962. The Octo­ber 15 issue doesn’t have con­sis­tent meet­ing list­ings but it does announce that long­time Friends Jour­nal edi­tor William Hubben was to begin a six-month sab­bat­i­cal and that Frances Williams Browin was to fill in as act­ing editor.

It did­n’t take her long to make her mark. Friends Jour­nal came out twice a month in the 1960s and the next issue sees a few paren­the­ses uneven­ly applied to meet­ing list­ings. But by the Novem­ber 15th issue, nine­teen meet­ings are ref­er­enced using our famil­iar for­mat! There’s the “mem­ber of Berke­ley (Calif.) Meet­ing” who had just pub­lished a pam­phlet of Christ­mas songs for chil­dren, an FCNL event fea­tur­ing skits and a covered-dish sup­per at “Swarth­more (Pa.) Meet­ing” and the announce­ment of a promi­nent arti­cle by “Ken­neth E. Bould­ing, a mem­ber of Ann Arbor (Michi­gan) Meeting.”

I’ve tried to imag­ine the scene… Browin sit­u­at­ed in her new tem­po­rary office… going back and forth, forth and back on some list­ing… then final­ly sur­pris­ing her­self by shout­ing “enough!” so loud­ly she had to apol­o­gize to near­by col­leagues. At the end of the six months, Hubben came back, but only as a con­tribut­ing edi­tor, and Browin was named as full edi­tor. Friends Jour­nal board mem­ber Eliz­a­beth B Wells wrote a pro­file of her upon her retire­ment from that posi­tion in 1968:

Her remarks usu­al­ly made sparks, whether she was express­ing an opin­ion (always pos­i­tive), exert­ing pres­sure (not always gen­tle), or mak­ing a humor­ous aside (often dis­turb­ing). For in her ami­able way she can be tart, unex­pect­ed, even prej­u­diced (in the right direc­tion), then as sud­den­ly dis­arm­ing­ly warm and sensitive.

This sounds like the kind of per­son who would stan­dard­ize a for­mat with such resolve it would be going strong 55 years later:

She was so entire­ly com­mit­ted to putting out the best pos­si­ble mag­a­zine, such a per­fec­tion­ist, even such a dri­ver, that her clos­est col­leagues often felt that we knew the spir­it­ed edi­tor far bet­ter than the Quak­er lady.

It’s a won­der­ful­ly writ­ten pro­file. And today, every time an author rewrites their meeting’s name on a copy­edit­ed man­u­script I’ve sent them for review, I say a qui­et thanks to the dri­ven per­fec­tion­ist who gives me per­mis­sion to be “prej­u­diced in the right direc­tion.” Well­s’s pro­file is a fas­ci­nat­ing glimpse into a smart woman of a dif­fer­ent era and well worth a read.

And for uber word geeks, yes our Friends Jour­nal style guide is a pub­lic doc­u­ment. While parts of its pro­scrip­tions go back to the ear­ly 1960s, it is very much a liv­ing doc­u­ment and we make small changes to it on an almost week­ly basis.

The demise of online subcultures?

March 31, 2017

An inter­est­ing pro­file of a niche com­mu­ni­ty affect­ed by the shift of atten­tion from community-led sites to Face­book, “How Face­book – the Wal-Mart of the inter­net – dis­man­tled online sub­cul­tures.”

Over time, these chal­lenges to the BME com­mu­ni­ty became increas­ing­ly prob­lem­at­ic. Mem­bers delet­ed accounts or stopped post­ing. By 2015, the main com­mu­ni­ty forum – which used to have hun­dreds of posts a day – went with­out a sin­gle com­ment for over six months.

Hav­ing pre­dict­ed many of the web’s func­tions and fea­tures, BME failed to antic­i­pate its own demise.

It’s def­i­nite­ly some­thing I’ve seen in my niche world of Quak­ers. I start­ed Quak­erQuak­er as an inde­pen­dent site in part because I didn’t want Google and Face­book and Beliefnet to deter­mine who we are. There’s the obvi­ous prob­lems — Beliefnet hir­ing a pro­gram­mer to make a “What Reli­gion Are You?” test based on a few books picked up the library one afternoon.

But there’s also more sub­tle prob­lems. On Face­book any­one can start or join a group and start talk­ing author­i­ta­tive­ly about Quak­ers with­out actu­al­ly being an active com­mu­ni­ty mem­ber. I can think of a num­ber of online char­ac­ters who had nev­er even vis­it­ing a Friends meet­ing or church.

Our tra­di­tion built up ways of defin­ing our spokes­peo­ple though the prac­tices of record­ed min­is­ters and elders, and of clar­i­fy­ing shared beliefs though doc­u­ments like Faith and Prac­tice. I’ll be the first to argue that this process has pro­duced mixed results. But if it is to be adapt­ed or reformed, I’d like the work to be done by us in a thought­ful, inclu­sive man­ner. Instead, the form of our dis­cus­sions are now invis­i­bly imposed by an out­side algo­rithm that is opti­mized for obses­sive engage­ment and adver­tis­ing deliv­ery. Face­book process is not Quak­er process, yet it is large­ly what we use when we talk about Quak­ers out­side of Sun­day morning.

I think Face­book has helped alter­na­tive com­mu­ni­ties form. I’m grate­ful for the pop-up com­mu­ni­ties of inter­est I’m part of. And there are sites with more user gen­er­at­ed con­tent like Wikipedia and Red­dit that hold an inter­est­ing middle-ground and where infor­ma­tion is gen­er­al­ly more accu­rate. But there’s still a crit­i­cal role for self-organized inde­pen­dent pub­li­ca­tions, a niche that I think is con­tin­u­ing to be over­shad­owed in our cur­rent atten­tion ecosystem.