December 2024 newsletter: taking back the web
- Trying Vivaldi
- Subscriber goodies update
- The Login Wall
- Music Commissions Open
- Links
Hello! Welcome to another exciting installment of my little monthly newsletter. Links are coming back into fashion. User agency is ascendant. The hot new social network is committed to credible exit.
There is cause for hope on the horizon even as this hemisphere seems to be getting darker every day.
Trying Vivaldi
Trying Vivaldi, the web browser, has revealed to me how much we lost in Firefox's ongoing acquiescence to Chrome's devotion to consumption. Browsers are supposed to be user agents.
We're supposed to be in control. This is the first time I've felt like the browser agrees in a long time. I have more to say here, and will refine my thoughts as I use it, so expect a full blog post linked out in a future newsletter.
Subscriber goodies update
I created a whole page for free stuff for subscribers. In the future, expect more stuff like free music production tools, more TTRPG maps, wallpapers, etc.
The Login Wall
An account is now required to see most posts on the blog. Here's why.
I have a small presence here on the web, people dig what I write, and I think they want to see more of it. While my following on Bluesky has ballooned to over 2300, Bluesky the company is a way off from completing the work to make identity and content portable, and it will be a while beyond that before it's practical. Until then, depending on it to reach people is a risk to my ability to make the stuff you want to see through your support.
My ability to reach more people interested in what I make, with both the will and capacity to support it financially, correlates directly with existing reach.
More followers, more boosts, more reach, more support. Email is still the best way to reach a crowd you've already reached in 2024, but it's not a great way to reach new people. At least until enough are reading this email to create a self-sustaining cycle. I'm lucky if 1% of people who follow me on social media see something I post. Industry standard for email is to an open rate close to 40%.
I had about 100 email subscribers before the change. About 36 of those will open this email. At social media's 1%, that's equivalent to having 3600 followers, and every single connection is at risk if something happens to the platform or my account. As of this draft, it's closer to 120. Even with my ballooning social media following, it only takes a handful of newsletter subscribers like you to outdo it.
About 0-1 people subscribed monthly when everything was out in the open. Being stuck at 100 for over a year was discouraging. People liked what I wrote: they linked it on their blogs, the shared it, and so on. But almost no one subscribed. Now it's closer to 2-3 a week. I can export those and go elsewhere in the event Janis of Magic Pages, the managed host behind this blog, goes evil, but I don't expect that to happen. We seem to be well-aligned in our views on the ethics of technology based on conversations.