2026-01-21 20:50:00
One of the things that irks me the most when it comes to human interactions, is seeing people judging other people based on moral false dichotomies: you said you enjoy some piece of creative work, that creative work is related to a creator who might have said or done something awful/despicable/debatable/whatever, therefore you either don’t care about the broader issue the creators is involved with (and that’s bad) or you support their awful/despicable/debatable world views (which is worse).
I have no doubt you have seen this happen plenty of times if you have frequented any type of space online and paid attention to discussions and debates happening in those spaces. Here’s the thing, though, the only information I really have when you say you enjoy something is that, well, you enjoy that thing. That’s it. If I decide to assume things about you and the person you are, based on that information, that’s on me.
Now, some preferences can raise eyebrows: if I tell you my favorite book is the Mein Kampf, you have every reason to be perplexed and ask follow-up questions. But if you just assumed, based on that, that I’m a Nazi sympathizer, that would be wrong. Because you don’t actually know what. This is obviously Godwin's law in action, and I’m using an extreme example to make the point clear, but it applies to all sorts of more nuanced scenarios.
Assuming something about someone else, based on your own worldview and without asking questions, is intellectually lazy. And it also prevents people who might have different views from engaging in conversation and exploring differences.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
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2026-01-19 01:50:00
As I mentioned to the supporters on Ko-fi a week ago, I am currently considering the possibility of pausing the series at the end of this third year, with the last interview going live on August 28th. There are a few reasons for this.
The first reason is that running the series is starting to become more annoying and time-consuming over time. I tried to simplify my life as much as possible, recoded part of my site to make it easier to manage and publish the series, but at the end of the day, it’s a project that relies on other people to exist. And that can be a problem in the long run. The number of emails I need to send out, and the number of times I either get completely ignored or ghosted is trending upwards. I’m at the point where I can send out invitations to 10+ people, and I’m not confident that at least 1 of them will result in an actual interview being published. And that sucks.
It sucks because, since day one, I tried to find a good balance between keeping the series running smoothly and not letting guests wait for months and months to get their interview published. But I’m at the point where I can no longer do that. More than a few times, I found myself with the queue completely empty while waiting for dozens of people to get back to me. Every time someone came through in the end, and the series kept marching on week after week, but let me tell you: it’s not fun.
Also not fun is having to chase people. This series is obviously not important in the grand scheme of things, so it’s totally understandable if people forget to reply or can’t find the time to do it. But you’d be surprised by the number of people who, multiple times in a row, emailed me to tell me they were going to send me the answers “next week” only to then disappear into thin air. And I get it, I don’t have hard feelings towards all these people. Shit happens, and we all have busy lives. But it gets tiring after a while.
The other reason is a lack of momentum. If you have worked on any type of side project, you know how things go: you are full of motivation at first, and you can’t wait to get started, and then you slowly lose momentum. And I’m definitely running out of momentum. The main reason for this is that the past few months have been particularly tiring for a multitude of factors, and support for the series isn’t exactly stellar. You’d be surprised by how few people have emailed over the years to either suggest a guest or simply say something nice about it. And if you’re tempted to email me now, after having read this, please don’t.
This brings me to the final reason why I’m tempted to pause the series. I know there are lots of people out there who enjoy it and would love to see it continue. But the reality of the vast majority of projects on the web is that they’re usually either solo projects or they’re run by very small teams that more often than not end up losing momentum and shutting everything down because of a lack of support.
And nothing makes me angrier than seeing people popping up from nowhere to express their sadness when a project gets shut down. Because where the fuck were these people when the creators of these projects needed some help to keep the momentum going? And I’m talking about something as simple as sending a message to them to let them know you appreciate what they do. Sometimes that’s more than enough. And yet even that is so rare these days. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, because it does, but it’s rare.
And so part of me thinks I should stop the series simply because it’s important to remind people that good things can only exist if we all collectively make them happen.
That’s the mental state I’m in right now. Again, if you feel compelled to email me now, I say redirect those good intentions somewhere else and go email someone who works on something else you enjoy and let them know you appreciate what they do.
What’s next for P&B then? For now, the series will continue as usual. There are 6 interviews ready to go at the moment, 12 people have expressed interest in participating, and I have emailed 10 more. I did consider the possibility of making it an every-other-week series rather than weekly, in order to make it less annoying to run. We’ll see what happens. Plenty of time to still think about all this.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
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2026-01-18 17:10:00
The other day, a podcast episode caught my attention. It was titled “Can We Build a Better Social Network”, and it was a collaboration between Hard Fork and Search Engine. I thought it was just a discussion about the state of social networks, but then I read the description of the episode:
Over the past year, we've been working with the podcast "Search Engine" on a project that reimagines what the internet can be. What if instead of rage-baiting, a social platform incentivized friendly interaction and good-faith discussion? Today, we're bringing "Hard Fork" listeners an episode we made with the "Search Engine" team called "The Fediverse Experiment", where we end up creating our own social media platform.
A year of work? Creating a social media platform? Reimagining the internet? Sounds ambitious, and also very interesting. As you probably know, calling me a skeptic of social media would be an understatement, but I’m still very much intrigued by people who want to try different approaches, and so I started listening.
Not even 5 minutes in, the conversation was already off the rails, and they were saying things that made absolutely no sense.
«So the fediverse is a way for people to take back the internet for themselves.» I’m sorry what? «It's a way to have a identity and connect to other things that are important to you online and just not worry about having to fight through a Google algorithm or a Facebook algorithm. In fact, you could bring your own algorithm if you want to. I'm already doing such a bad job of explaining what the Fedverse is.» Ok at least they were aware that it was an awful explanation.
The first interesting bit of the podcast is at around 7 minutes, where they say something I find so infuriatingly wrong that I was about to stop listening.
The story these people told me went like this. Basically all of them, as different as they were from one another, had a shared view of what had gone wrong with our internet. The way they saw it in the nineties, even in the early two thousands, our internet had truly been an open place. Infinite websites, infinite message boards populated by all sorts of people with all sorts of values, free to live how they wanted in the little neighborhoods they'd made. If you wanted to move homes on that internet, say switch your email from Yahoo to Gmail, it was mildly annoying, but not a huge deal.
So far, so good.
But then social media arrived. To access those platforms, you usually needed a dedicated account. Once you started posting on that account, you were now in a game to build as large a following as possible.
Already, the fuck? First, even to access earlier platforms, you needed a dedicated account. Heck, you needed accounts for everything. Forums, message boards, you name it. Also, «Once you started posting on that account, you were now in a game to build as large a following as possible»? Says who? This is what social media became over time, sure, but social media didn’t start this way, and in the early days, it sure wasn’t only a matter of amassing an audience.
But the architects of the Fediverse, they had a more radical idea. The vision they held was that they could take control of social media out of the hands of the Musks and Zuckerbergs and reroute it back towards more open internet where no mogul would ever have the same kind of power they do now.
Did you spot the shift? We started with “our internet had truly been an open place”, and now we’re trying to take back control of social media. I don’t know about you, but to me, the internet ≠ social media. Wild take, I know.
Anyway, they then embark on this journey of, their words not mine, «finish building the fediverse» and I can only hope it was said jokingly. The whole episode is a wild ride if you know anything about these topics, and the very underwhelming outcome of all this is that what they built was…a Mastodon instance. And they’re not even self-hosting it. What they “built” is a Mastodon instance hosted by masto.host and, of course, since this is 2026, they had to use AI somehow to do it. Sigh…
If the episode was titled “We have set up a Mastodon server”, I’d not have bothered listening to it. That said, listening to the episode made me realize how some people have a very narrow view of what the internet is and can be from a social interaction standpoint.
Imagine a social platform that’s not controlled by a single billionaire. A platform that’s not powered by a closed-source algorithm. Usernames are unique, the underlying protocol powering it is flexible and very robust. Your profile page is infinitely customizable, and no two profiles need to look the same. It supports DMs and chats. A platform where you can post videos, photos, audio, 3D content, you name it, and where you can follow other people’s pages and be sure that no algorithm will hide that content from you. A platform that's not censored or moderated by arbitrary rules set by a Silicon Valley billionaire.
How good does that sound to you? Because to me, a platform like that looks like a dream, if only we could figure out a way to build it.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
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2026-01-16 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Yancey Strickler, whose blog can be found at ystrickler.com.
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My name is Yancey Strickler. I'm a writer and entrepreneur who lives in New York City. I write about the internet, creativity, and my creative practice. My projects— cofounding Kickstarter, The Creative Independent, Metalabel, Dark Forest Collective, Artist Corporations, and Dark Forest Operating System — bridge those worlds.
I started blogging in 2003. Just before the "MP3 Blogs" era. I was a music journalist and had more opinions to share than places that would print them, so I started an online space as an outlet. The blogging community was very small then. You felt like you knew everyone else who had one.
I kept that going until Kickstarter took over my life in 2009. I no longer had the excess energy to publish — everything went into the project. When I stepped down as Kickstarter's CEO in 2017, I started blogging again. For the first five months I did it without telling anyone. No one had the URL but me. I wanted the feeling of a public writing practice with no one else looking. Eventually I started to share, and that space evolved into my blog and homepage where I've expressed thoughts ever since.
The blog in 2003 was called Get Up Stand Up. I chose The Ideaspace when it returned. This is a phrase Alan Moore uses to talk about the dimension where ideas come from that I learned about in John Higgs' amazing KLF book.
I've used pretty much every platform: Blogspot, Wordpress, Tumblr, TinyLetter, Mailchimp, Substack, and now Ghost. I'm thankful of the import/export norms that developed around blogging from the very beginning. That's what makes portability between writing homes possible.
Calling what I do a "process" gives it too much credit. All of my writing tends to start with a feeling inside of me. That feeling is often one of agitation combined with curiosity. Something I can't quite figure out or I'm having a hard time putting my finger on. Writing is how I work through that.
The first drafts of what I write come out quickly. A mix of prose, outline, even poetry. I let the wider consciousness flow through the scope of the idea before filling things out too precisely. The more you let yourself detach while doing this, the more appears that you didn't expect.
Many of my most "successful" posts, in that people gravitate towards them, are what I think of as "idea sandwiches." You bring together two ideas that are unrelated and smoosh them together. This can lead you to discover something new that people will immediately understand.
"The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet", my most-read piece to date, is an example. It came from putting two separate thoughts together: my own feelings of alienation and anxiety online, combined with the Dark Forest Theory that I was reading about in Cixin Liu's "The Dark Forest" book (part of "The Three Body Problem" trilogy) on how and why societies might hide from one another. I smushed together that feeling with that idea and something new popped out.
In terms of tools, I use a variety of things. When I'm working on a book I use Scrivener. I love the folder/doc structure of the program, the way you can compile your writing into a cohesive whole. If I need to get an idea down quickly I default to opening a Google Doc. I journal every morning in a notebook or in Obsidian. At Metalabel we created our own blogging tool/culture using Notion. We call it "metablogging": internally public blogs where we think through things together. Our collective brain built organically over time.
If I'm writing something that goes deep into a specific subject matter, I'll seek out people I respect and get their perspective. Some of my most impactful work from the past few years came when I wrote something and chose not to publicly publish it. Instead I shared a private Google Doc with specific people who I was thinking of. The results from this form of non-publishing have been remarkable. The ideas behind Metalabel, Artist Corporations, the Dark Forest OS, the Bento, and other projects happened this way. By not rushing to publish an idea in seek of validation, and instead thinking more precisely about who I was most interested in hearing from, those seeds manifested as actual projects and collaborations in the wider world rather than just ideas of them.
I like blank spaces. Empty rooms. White walls. Metalabel has a studio where I go everyday. Mostly empty. Lots of plants. Always some sort of meditative music. A very womb-like vibe. A de-dopamined zone.
This isn't 100% necessary. I wrote "What's the difference between an artist and a creator" on two Amtrak trips between NYC and DC. You don't need perfection. But having a place where I feel comfortable to explore and know I won't be interrupted is my favorite luxury as a creative person.
While writing my first book, "This Could Be Our Future", I wrote in several different spaces that were hugely helpful. At the beginning I got a Craigslist sublet for an empty apartment with no internet. I took it for a few months and covered all the walls with post-its and index cards outlining the book. A year later when I was deep in the writing mode, I borrowed a spare bedroom from an 89-year-old friend in LA and wrote there each day while hanging out with her and watching her fix up her house (true story). During another period I took a few 48 hour trips out to 29 Palms, near Joshua Tree, where I spent days doing nothing but alternating between writing and jumping in the motel pool to cool off. Being able to immerse yourself in a project like that, even if just for an afternoon, is always a gift.
These were not always easy times at all. That's part of the reason for the separation. You really have to put all of yourself into the thing to get to the layers of clarity where real wisdom lives. But to have those challenges and eventual breakthroughs so closely associated with specific places that are not your normal everyday creates a very rich, contextual memory of the process.
The blog is hosted on Ghost. Have tried lots of other places, but ultimately like the decentralized nature of Ghost combined with a strong toolkit. I use Umami for analytics, which is free and excellent. I still use Substack as another front page, and often alternate between which service I send emails from. My own personal website and blog are most important to me, but I'll sometimes find myself thirsty for network effects. Ugh. We're getting too close to my anxiety zones. Let's move on :)
Funny, but my first instinct is I wouldn't want to have readers. Of course that's not actually true, but when I think about the things that limit my sense of freedom or play from writing and publishing, asking for the audience's time most holds me back.
Because of my own relationship with email and newsletters, I've come to think of posting something (that also sends an email) as an ask or imposition on someone else's time. I'm saying to them, "Hey pay attention to me. Stop what you're doing and look at me." Which in no way is what my writing or output are about.
This is my own internal non-logic, I realize. People did sign-up. People tell me that my writing is meaningful to them. But this is something I've long carried. We even got pencils made at Metalabel that say: "Love to write. Hate to publish." I have one sitting in front of me right now.
Now this is not my advice to others, but it is where my first thought went. Because when I think about the goals of writing and blogging, it's to be free, it's to explore without limits. Audiences can be affirming for that. And it's generous and important to share whatever wisdom you experience in life. Blogging to me is a specific kind of writing — a personal practice and discipline that makes what's inward outward. Whatever it is that's in you, blogs are what comes out.
My personal feeling is that I don't like doing that if I know people are watching. I get self-conscious. I worry about bothering people. A place and attitude where I know I need to grow. Trying to do a better job of thinking about all the people that do want to hear from me rather than the people who don't.
It does cost. I have about 10,000 subscribers, which means I'm paying Ghost about $1,000 a year to maintain a site with them.
There are cheaper ways to do this. I could make a site with Wordpress or Squarespace. I could use Substack. I could go the whole Craig Mod/Robin Sloan routes and make my own universes. Probably one day when I have time I'll do this and go all the way. But I like the combo of things Ghost gives (and that they started on Kickstarter).
I don't have paid subscriptions for my writing, but in the past 18 months I did experiment with releasing my work as collectible .zip files that people could pay what they wanted for.
First was a long essay called "The Post Individual" that I'd spent several years working on. I published it on my blog and released a limited edition Director's Cut zip file containing a PDF, video file, audio file, and all my research notes on Metalabel at the same time. There have now been 750 editions of these collected, with 400 people doing it for free, and another 350 contributing more than $1,000 for the work. That has felt like a very successful experiment.
I pay for a few people's Substacks and buy lots of zines, both on Metalabel and off. I enjoy directly supporting people whose work is meaningful to me.
These days most of my attention goes to my projects, my family, or to books. But I'm always interested in Nadia Asparhouva, Jason Kottke, Ben Davis, Toby Shorin (read Toby's interview), Reggie James.
People who I think could be good to talk to: Laurel Schwulst, Kimberly Drew.
Sure here's my Soundcloud :)
This book that Josh Citarella and I made together on our creative practices is something people might like: On the Creative Life.
Antimemetics by Nadia Asparhouva, a book I edited and published with the Dark Forest Collective, is highly recommended.
A video I made that shares nine reflections from my creative career.
Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.
If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 124 interviews.
Make sure to also say thank you to Cory Gibbons and the other 121 supporters for making this series possible.
2026-01-13 18:50:00
A week ago, after chatting with Kev about his own findings, I created a similar survey (which is still open if you want to answer it) to collect a second set of data because why the heck not.
Kev’s data showed that 84.5% of responses picked RSS, Fediverse was second at 7.6%, direct visits to the site were third at 5.4%, and email was last at 2.4%.
My survey has a slightly different set of options and allows for multiple choices—which is why the % don’t add up to 100—but the results are very similar:
This is the bulk of the data, but then there’s a bunch of custom, random answers, some of which were very entertaining to read:
So the takeaway is: people still love and use RSS. Which makes sense, RSS is fucking awesome, and more people should use it.
Since we’re talking data, I’m gonna share some more information about the numbers I have available, related to this blog and how people follow it. I don’t have analytics, and these numbers are very rough, so my advice is not to give them too much weight.
31 people in the survey said they read content in their inbox, but there are currently 103 people who are subscribed to my blog-to-inbox automated newsletter.
RSS is a black box for the most part, and finding out how many people are subscribed to a feed is basically impossible. That said, some services do expose the number of people who are subscribed, and so there are ways to get at least an estimate of how big that number is. I just grabbed the latest log from my server, cleaned the data as best as I could in order to eliminate duplicates and also entries that feel like duplicates, for example:
Feedly/1.0 (+https://feedly.com/poller.html; 44 subscribers
Feedly/1.0 (+https://feedly.com/poller.html; 45 subscribersIn this case, it’s obvious that those two are the same service, and at some point, one more person has signed up for the RSS. But how about these:
Feedbin feed-id:1391566 - 6 subscribers
Feedbin feed-id:1429582 - 11 subscribers
Feedbin feed-id:1567199 - 702 subscribers
Feedbin feed-id:1748195 - 10 subscribersAll those IDs are different, but what should I do here? Do I keep them all? Who knows. Anyway, after cleaning up everything, keeping only requests for the main RSS feed, I’m left with 1975 subscribers, whatever that means. Are these actual people? Who knows.
Running the exact same log file (it’s the NGINX access log from Jan 10th to Jan 13th at ~10AM) through Goaccess, with all the RSS entries removed, tells me the server received ~50k requests from ~8000 unique IPs. 33% of those hits are from tools whose UA is marked as “Unknown” by Goaccess. Same story when it comes to reported OS: 35% is marked as “Unknown”. Another 15% on both of those tables is “Crawlers”, which to me suggests that at least half of the traffic hitting the website directly is bots.
In conclusion, is it still worth serving content via RSS? Yes. Is the web overrun by bots? Also yes. Is somebody watching me type these words? Maybe. If you have a site and are going to run a similar experiment, let me know about it, and I’ll be happy to link it here. Also, if you want some more data from my logs, let me know.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
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2026-01-12 20:20:00
Learning to appreciate different flavors is something that comes very hard for me. And yet, for some reason, tea is one of those things that no matter how hard it is for my tastebuds, I’ll constantly come back to.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs