Jared White Photo of Jared

Expressively publishing on the open web since 1996.
Entranced by Portland, Oregon since 2017.

Video is the Holy Grail of the Open Web

Thought

The #openweb has conquered all some.

  • You can post text and images directly on the web. It’s very simple to do—even for non-geeks who just use Wix or Squarespace. Blogging is still very much a thing, and now with the rise of decentralized social media, we can claim that too. Even RSS is making a comeback!
  • You can post audio directly on the web and create your own podcast. There are many hosts around which make this straightforward, and everyone is happy to use their “podcast player of choice”.
  • You can launch communities, accept payments, offer games, provide software, and all sorts of other digital goodies through a variety of tools and services on the open web.

But here’s the thing which nobody (*) does directly on the web: video. Video was eaten by YouTube.

YouTube has conquered all. Yes for short form, also TikTok and Instagram. For streaming, also Twitch. But I’m primarily highlighting longer, typically pre-recorded, 16:9 videos. That market is owned by YouTube, no question about it.

And that’s extremely odd when you think about it. What other online medium is so completely dominated by a single platform? It’s so all-encompassing that people will literally describe their profession by the platform’s name: I am a YouTuber. Nobody says “I’m a Facebooker” or “I’m a Twitcher” or “I’m a Spotifier”. But they will gladly promote the fact they are a YouTuber. And even though people’s “blog posts” are indeed part of the open web proper, people’s #vlog episodes are virtually always found at a single destination. Gee that sucks!

I have come to the conclusion that YouTube poses an existential threat to the open web and to our broader society far and away more than any other corporate silo. And it’s not just me—creators on YouTube themselves are increasingly upset with the #enshittification of the platform and the awful moderation policies which seem to punish “wokeness” while rewarding truly bad actors who spew misinformation and hatred.

Does anyone sincerely believe YouTube is getting…better? Or has it been steadily decaying for years? (Yes.) Speaking for myself personally, I find having to engage with YouTube in any way borderline oppressive. I already use it at little as possible directly, and prefer to subscribe to channels through Feedbin. But trying to use a third-party frontend like Invidious is nearly impossible now, and even embedded video playback through Feedbin has gotten spotty. And even having switched off YouTube history entirely so I don’t get that horrible algorithmic front page, I’m still forced to look at a “related videos” sidebar which almost always has one or two videos which are clearly alt-right ragebait or general nonsense peddled by “influencers”. It makes me sick, and I mean that quite literally.

We need to do something about this. And by we, I’m starting with me. I’m going to do something about it. I don’t have anything to announce at this time, but I can tell you honestly: when I contemplate the future of the open web, there’s nothing that’s lighting a fire under me more than how to solve the video problem and wean ourselves off of complete dominance by YouTube. We can’t ignore this any longer. If you’re a fan of RSS, if you’re a fan of ActivityPub, if you’re a fan of blogging and of podcasting, you absolutely can’t ignore the elephant in the room.

Video killed the open web star? Not if I can help it!

* We’re starting to see—and I’ve talked about this before—the rise of creator-friendly indie video subscription platforms. My favorite one is Nebula, and I watch a lot of shows on there. But it’s still a drop in the bucket. We need 10000% more of that.

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Going through an emotional rough patch earlier this week, and then (in an unconnected happenstance) watching Gran Turismo (I’d missed seeing the movie when it first came out in theaters), it started to dawn on me how much I’ve begun to value my “offline identity” relative to my “online identity”. Online, I talk about all the things I pontificate about on social media, blogs, podcasts, etc., and I write lots of code. Offline, I walk/cycle/scoot ( #micromobility has become very important to me!), meet new people, enjoy live music, and engage in a variety of activities with my #family in and around #Portland.

Somehow, the “juice” I get out of life is trending in that direction: IRL. The reason Gran Turismo got me musing on this is because prior to this year, I’d never thought of myself as an “athlete”…never thought of myself as a “fitness buff”.

I think that’s changing. And for this once-chubby nerd, it’s super weird! 😅 But super fun.

The Best of Times

Two years ago today, IT HAPPENED. The worst timeline. Something that I really didn’t expect would actually come to fruition…did.

Elon Musk’s buyout offer for Twitter was officially accepted. 🤡

As I wrote two years ago today:

Back to the #openweb I go. Not that I ever left it…but to be quite frank, it’s so easy to post and get immediate feeback on Twitter that I spend most of my day-to-day “chit-chat energy” there and not on my own website.

No longer! Now that Elon Musk is buying Twitter and taking it private, I’m done putting serious effort into creating content for walled gardens. Everything, and I mean everything I publish from here on out will start on my own properties and then get syndicated elsewhere.

In reporting at The Verge, Emma Roth and Russell Brandom pontificate “it’s unclear what impact Musk will have on Twitter or where he’ll start with changes.”

Oh boy.

Now while I was extremely pessimistic about the buyout idea and in fact had written the previous day in my diary: “I will f***ing delete my Twitter account if Elon Musk buys Twitter” — I nevertheless spent the rest of summer 2022 ready to be impressed. Maybe, just maybe, Elon would be touched by the better angels of his nature, and find a path forward for Twitter that—if not excellent, at least would not be terrible.

🤡

I’ll save my “two years later” rundown for additional reporting over at The Internet Review, but even my worst fears were quaint by comparison to what actually transpired after Elon took over. As I wrote in The Elon-gate’d Man in November 2022:

Remember all the people who—prior to the official takeover of Twitter—were telling us that Elon Musk would moderate his behavior and behave more like a grown up because too much money and prestige were at stake? Remember all the people who said that because Elon (seemingly) had been unilaterally successful in bringing us fancy new space rockets and fancy new electric cars, he could now bring welcome insight and innovation into a rapidly-degenerating and fractious social media landscape?

Here’s the pertinent question: why do we keep believing this myth? As we’ve seen over recent years and especially recent months, it’s being proven decisively, tragically wrong…over and over and over again.

and in my exhortation of what we should be focusing on instead:

What I am saying is unequivocal: down with surveillance capitalism eroding our trust and access to free and fair online communications. We can do better. We must do better. And increasingly—thanks to Mastodon, ActivityPub, and other open source projects & protocols recently exploding in popularity—we are.

It’s worth noting that arguably the biggest impact being made on social media right now is the competitive response to the downfall of Twitter in the form of Threads, Meta’s broadcast-text-first social network. And the only reason Threads isn’t uniformly horrifying as a product is because it’s the first mass-market social network built with ActivityPub integration from the very start. (So that when #enshittification eventually comes, users and creators will have real options… 😅)

The #Fediverse—the open social web—is growing exponentially, with Threads leading the pact of commercial properties doing a one-eighty from clinging to an outdated “silo” mindset, and Mastodon and other volunteer projects holding their own in providing open source access to social media. Progress! 👏

So while I still lament the death of Twitter, and the incalculable destruction of communities brought on by Elon Musk’s abysmal stranglehold over what is now X, I am also pleased to see how powerfully the momentum has shifted towards the Fediverse. It’s been the Worst of Times…and yet, the Best of Times.

February 2024 kicked me, and then kicked me again while I was down. 😡 I have not been a happy camper. Yet hope springs eternal, and I want to acknowledge a few things I’m currently grateful for:

  • Good Coffee. No, I don’t mean coffee that’s good, I mean the local chain of coffee shops which seems to have taken over some of the best locations in central Portland and even in the ’burbs (hello Cedar Hills!). I’m currently partaking of a particularly tasty blueberry muffin.
  • Bridgetown. No, I don’t mean Portland (though yes it’s rad), I mean the Ruby website framework I develop. After a long dry spell, I’m finally feeling pumped to be working on it again—even the small maintainer-y things that only people who tinker in open source know what I’m talking about.
  • The Tourist. No, I don’t mean a traveler I happened to strike up a conversation with, I mean the Netflix show starring Jamie Dornan and Danielle Macdonald whose first season was truly whacked-out and whose upcoming second season is set in Ireland (woohoo!). I’m a huge fan of Jamie Dornan, but I wasn’t sure if this was the sort of show that would get bogged down under the weight of its rather absurd premise. Thankfully it proved adept indeed, and I can’t wait for the next season.
  • Thoughts. No, I don’t mean simply things I contemplate in my brain, I mean this specific type of blog post which in my content system is any #writing which sits between microblogging and long-form essays. Most of my “thoughts” over the years are safely ensconced in my Day One diary, but I like having a space where more publicly-appropriate musings can see the light of day. After all, what is a personal blog for if not that, am I right? 😊

My relationship with my city changed when I came to #Portland. Before that, I always had the general impression that I lived in my “house” and that house merely happened to be located in a city/town/countryside/etc. But upon moving to Portland, Oregon and really embracing an urban lifestyle, my perspective changed. Now I live in Portland. My house is nothing more than the residence I am physically placed in at various times for sleep, recreation, and remote work. But I also regularly engage in both work and recreation elsewhere in the city, and those places mean every bit as much to me as anywhere I might lay my head at night.

I suppose that may sound quite strange to someone who is very emotionally and nostalgically attached to their literal dwelling. Maybe it’s a personality thing… All I can tell you—as someone who is currently a renter—I have owned my own home in the past and…I ended up hating it. Resenting it.

My allegiance is to a city…MY city…not any particular residential unit within it.

It’s hard to look back fondly on the Twitter algorithm in the days when it was still considered a “cool” platform to use. I routinely saw how links to blog posts would get far less engagement than content Twitter deemed worthy of promotion like photos, topical tweets, etc. The whole “post a photo and also a link” instead of just having the link’s graph image come through hack was just that, a hack. (Same issue on Facebook as well.) Perhaps in the early days of the platform this was much less so, but…well, #enshittification.

Blogging and social media algorithms ended up on a collision course last decade, and sadly blogs lost. Thankfully we now have the rare opportunity to correct the mistakes of the past. #OpenWeb #Fediverse #writing

A little late to the party, but I finally watched Shiny Happy People, the documentary series about the Duggar family and the fundamentalist Christian religious world they inhabit.

I have So Many Thoughts, as someone very familiar with this world circa 2004-2016. I hope to share my in-depth perspective soon, but for now I’ll just say this:

We need a LOT more “exvangelical” documentaries. We need more people telling their story. We need these stories represented in art, literature, and cinema. Given the #spirituality dimension we see in American #politics today, it has never been more important.

(Parting thought: we need to hold media accountable for promoting fundamentalism or at least giving it a pass. The Duggars should never have been given a national mainstream TV platform. TLC/Discovery should be ashamed of themselves.)

I’m trying to get back into the habit of posting short thoughts here on my blog and linking to them from Mastodon, rather than simply writing on Mastodon directly. And taking a page from other nerds in the blogosphere, I figured I’d experiment with using my favorite monospaced font, Mononoki. Will that help my new habit stick? We’ll see!

Support Structures for the Extremely Online

I am what some folks might call Extremely Online. I’ve certainly wrestled with this at times, and there have been moments when I feel the need to pull back from incessantly scrolling through whatever timeline is in vogue (for me these days that’s Mastodon) and commenting with meme GIFs.

But I’ve come to accept my fate. Furthermore, this is something I’m good at. Yes that right, I’m good at internetting (for better or worse). What I’m not so good at is occasionally dipping my toe into the water of being Extremely Offline.

Intentionally going offline is vital to my mental health (and yours too). For some people that might not prove such a huge issue as they have family ties or other social commitments IRL to attend to. For me though—except for the times I’m actively involved in playing with/supervising/teaching/going on adventures with my kids—I’m basically a single (divorced) dude who remote works, quit attending church years ago, and whose extended family all live out-of-state.

If I’m going to have a social life apart from opening up yet another chat window, I need to wrangle my own support structure out of thin air.

And so that’s exactly what I’ve been doing this spring and summer. I’ve had to push myself—force myself some days—to get out there and Meet Real People. It doesn’t always come naturally to me, but I’m always glad when I do it.

Shout out to Meetup which—despite a rocky road these past few years first being acquired by WeWork and then being let go among all the zaniness there—still seems to be going strong and providing an excellent way of discovering groups of people IRL doing interesting things.

I’ve gone on hikes, focused on writing alongside fellow artists and creatives, laughed it up playing a wacky party game at a dinner event, and, yes, hung out with some local techies too. I’ve also been keeping an eye out for festivals or other fun community activities I might participate in. What will I be up to next? Who knows!

Having the sense of a local support structure apart from pixels on a screen, being able to look fellow humans in the eye and make a genuine emotional and intellectual connection, is something I simply don’t take for granted. Having lived through a pandemic and been Extremely-Extremely Online for weeks or even months at a time (most of 2020 is simply a blur to me, I can’t remember WTF I was even doing), a couple of hours of levity over a beer or walking along a forest path pointing out a grand vista or a word of encouragement from another creator in the room…these are moments I treasure. And I can’t wait for more.

If you feel like you need more of a support structure where you live, what’s that single first step you might be able to take today?

#lifehacks

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