Season 3, Issue 25: 🐦👻

I’ve never cared much about the presence or not of a blue check by a user’s name, but I do notice when tweets from people I follow make up a smaller and smaller percentage of my feed. It’s as if neighbors of years moved out from my block overnight, replaced by strangers who all came knocking on my front door carrying not a casserole but a tweetstor... See more

A dazzle of Slack bases, Discords, Telegrams, and Circles later, and it feels like we’ve arrived somewhere. Maybe it’s the post-social media era, where people move off the open platforms and into a curated mosaic of niche, private, and cooperative spaces. Or, maybe it’s just that the web we needed was here when we needed it.

It was 2001 and email was still coming into vogue (and slightly suspect—lots of people in my artistic social circle resisted it), but I was obsessive about maintaining an email-based newsletter for the band and for the house parties. I could send out an email to fifty Boston friends, they would spread the word, and two weeks later, hundreds of peop

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