What on earth ?
I just re-wired MailChimp to point at jonbeckett.com instead of jonbeckett.blog. Something a friend wrote in an email to me recently resonated – that all of the big platforms – Wordpress, Tumblr, and so on – really are walled gardens. She had noticed how the circle of readers forms on each platform, and eventually stops growing.
I'm not sure if it's because people have become lazy and accept the feed of content a given platform presents to them – which of course comes from the same platform.
Anyway – getting back to MailChimp – I'm guessing a few people will get this post as an email, and wonder what the hell is going on. “Is he really thinking of walking away from everything AGAIN?” – possibly.
I can't help wondering if blogging as we have known it is dead. When we all started out in the early 2000s, there were no platforms. The earliest version of Blogger was much like Jekyll and Hugo – a script that helped generate a site. Wordpress was a script to run a site – not a platform. Hell – I wrote one of the earliest popular blog solutions – and open sourced it – because everybody was open sourcing everything. I still remember the day I started getting emails from corporates, and discovered Novell had packaged my blog script with their servers without telling me.
The spirit of discovery has gone. Everybody expects everything to be given to them on a plate – and that includes discovery of new or interesting content. We used to find that stuff by going out and LOOKING. It's our own fault that the algorithmic timeline has appeared.
I'm still interested in the email subscription thing. I have an account at Substack that I've played with for a while – I'm wondering about doing a mashup of sorts, and cross-posting between here, and substack.
It's interesting how quickly the tide seems to have turned against Medium. Back when they started, everybody loved that whey were doing. They played the age-old game of playing nicely with everybody else. Nicely enough that lots of peole migrated to their platform – and then of course they lifted the drawbridge. Just like Facebook and Twitter (who both allowed their APIs to discover users from each other in the early days).
Maybe it's time for me to shut up. It turns out a couple of glasses of wine, and a couple of glasses of beer unlock something in my head. I certainly become “chatty man”, but filled with chat about inconsequential rubbish.