On the tech side of things, I’ve very bummed that the excellent iOS Apollo Reddit app has announce it will be shutting down at the end of the month. The majority of my use of Reddit has been via Apollo in recent years. It’s been heartening to see such a thoroughly well-designed app from an independent developer and I’ve been happy to give a monthly donation.
Reports are that Reddit is preparing for an IPO, which means crappifying everything to make it look more profitable for potential investors. The result is that it will be less useful for many of its users, who are the ones that create all the real value in the first place. You’d think the ongoing Twitter meltdown in value (partly from killing off its third-party apps) would be instructive but apparently not. It’s a lesson Silicon Valley refuses to learn.
I’ve long thought that the Quakers subreddit in particular filled a lot of the function of the original QuakerQuaker: a curated list of interesting, timely online conversations. I’ll still be around. I have my RSS reader letting me know when there’s new posts there and I will often respond to questions via the Reddit website. But a lot of my “hey what’s going on now” browsing has happened on Apollo and will stop.
There’s a 48-hour Reddit boycott happening starting June 12 participating. Judging by the detailed account of correspondence in the Apollo developer’s post, it’s unlikely to change anything, but Reddit leadership will at least see just how pissed many of its users are.
And I’ve gotten the WordPress ActivityPub plug-in working. If I’ve got my lingo right, this blog is now a Fediverse server available on Mastodon. What does this mean? I’m not quite sure but you can follow at: @admin@www.quakerranter.org.
I joined Mastodon a few years ago but have only been using it for the last week. Whatever one thinks about our noisiest billionaire’s evolving alt-right leanings and ganja-fueled impetuousness, the leveraged takeover of Twitter added a billion dollars per year in interest payments to its expenses. I’m skeptical that any new feature or income source could overcome this new-owner tax.
But using Mastodon has reminded me of some of the early dreams about Twitter evolving into a kind of internet utility, accessible and remixed by various other user-facing apps. It started this way: the official Twitter app started as an independent app called Tweetie and early on, any app could access the Twitter feed.
As a utility model, you could post and auto-post all sorts of raw information to the Twitter feed. For example, location check-ins on Foursquare or song listens on Last.fm. This would be too much information for someone to scroll through, of course (in all this there would also be apps that would filter out all this firehose information and just display conversations). But custom apps had all sorts of potentials.
For example, you could have an app that follows the check-in Tweets. As an open system, it would pull in from not just Foursquare but any geography-based service that dumped its info into the Twitter firehose. Say you’re visiting an unfamiliar city, you could open the specialized app, click a tab for “restaurants” and get a list of nearby eateries that people on your social graph like.
Or music: another app could find songs that your friends are listening to. They might have all sorts of tastes but you could catalog genres and tell your app to create a specific mix — say 20% oldies, 50% indie rock, 20% jazz, and 10% contemporary hits. Multiple apps could be accessing and mixing this data and because of the openness of systems — any logging system, an open Twitter, any music mixer — there would be no built-in monopoly walled gardens.
This is not how Twitter evolved. The company wanted to make money out of its unlikely 140-character status updates. It bought one of the popular Twitter clients, added ads to then, then kneecapped the api’s for rival apps so that they didn’t work as well no matter how clever their designers were.
Mastodon is meant to be decentralized and distributed. There are innumerable servers. There’s no obvious way to monopolize things because angry users could just all migrate to another server. If Mastodon takes off, I’m sure there will be swarms of wannabe young Musks trying to figure out how to close it off and siphon off advertising dollars. But it will be hard. If the service could get critical mass it’s possible it could provide a wide ecosystem of interesting services.
Apparently it’s that time of year again. The days grow shorter, the nights grow chillier, and we bemoan the death of blogging.
As someone who’s now well into my third decade of blogging, It’s funny reading the responses. People are talking about markets or about how it’s not the same since big money stopped subsidizing the blogging infrastructure.
When blogs started they were incredibly under the radar. We didn’t have big audiences — didn’t really expect them — and we weren’t trying to monetize or brand ourselves. We were telling stories. They were text, they were pictures, sometimes they were videos and audio. For my first few years of blogging I resisted even calling it that because the term was so associated with a kind of self-focused hot take.
According to one recent survey, WordPress is powering 34% of the public internet. That’s not bad for a dead medium. If anything is RIP, it’s a narrow definition of blogging. I’d argue that any creative content that is regularly posted and displayed in a timeline is a kind of blog. When I started blogging in 1997, I was hand coding everything. But now there’s a gazillion services that all look and feel different but have a distinct blogging DNA.
People use Facebook to blog. When people unroll a Twitter for Thread Reader App, it shows just how bloggy Twitter is. Reddit’s the comment section of a blog largely divorced from a blog. Instagram’s nothing more than a photoblog. Podcasts are largely organized as blogs. Mailchimp and Substack are blogs tied to email lists. And of course there’s Tumblr, WordPress, Medium, and other more classic text-based blogs. Nowadays the concept is so diverse and diffuse that it’s become invisible. The important thing is that people have a voice that they can share.
Fiery Feeds has grown into a cleaner, more elegant client that looks nicer on iOS 11 and the iPhone X; at the same time, Burgstaller has been able to extend Fiery Feeds’ appeal with a powerful premium-only feature dubbed Smart Views.
Two things on the internet that I consistently like are NeimanLab and Kottke.org. The former is Harvard’s journalism foundation and its associated blog. They consistently publish thought-provoking lessons from media pioneers. If there’s an interesting online publishing model being tried, Neiman Labs will profile it. Kottke is one of the original old school blogs. Jason highlights things that are interesting to him and by and large, most of the posts happen to be interesting to me. He’s also one of the few breakout blogging stars who has kept going.
So today Neiman Labs posted an interview with Jason Kottke. Of course I like it.
There are a few things that Jason has done that I find remarkable. One is that he’s threaded an almost impossible path that has held back the centrifugal forces of the modern internet. He never went big and he never went small. By big, I mean he never tried to ramp his site up to become a media empire. No venture capitalist money, no clickbait headlines, no pivot to video or other trendy media chimera. He also didn’t go small: his blog has never been a confessional. While that traffic when to Facebook, his kind of curated links and thoughts is something that still works best as a blog.
Although I don’t blog myself too much anymore, I do think a lot about media models for Friends Journal. Its reliance on non-professional opinion writing prefigured blogs. It’s a fully digital magazine now, even as it continues as a print magazine. The membership model Kottke talks about (and Neiman Labs frequently profiles) is a likely one for us going into the long term.
Frances William Browin from the September 15, 1968 Friends Journal.
When I became an editor at Friends Journal in 2011, I inherited an institution with some rather strong opinions. Some of them are sourced from the predictable wellsprings: William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s foundational mid-century style guide and the editorial offices of the Chicago Manual of Style. But some are all our own, logically tested for consistency with Chicago but adapted to Quaker idiosyncrasies.
One of our most invariable (and contested) formats comes from the way we list congregations. Quick aside for non-Quakers: you will often see a Quaker meeting variously named as “Town Monthly Meeting,” “Town Friends Meeting,” “Town Quaker Meeting,” etc. People often have strong opinions about the correct form. Occasionally an author will insist to me that their meeting has an official name (“Springfield Friends Meeting”), used consistently across their publications and business minutes. But after a few minutes with Google I can usually find enough counter-examples (“Springfield Monthly Meeting”) to prove their inconsistency.
To cut through this, Friends Journal uses “Town (State) Meeting” everywhere and always, with specific exceptions only for cases where that doesn’t work — for example, the meeting is named after a street or a tree or isn’t in the town it’s named for (after 300 years identities sometimes get messy). This formatting is unique to Friends Journal—even other Philadelphia-based Quaker stylesheets don’t follow it. We’ve been doing it this distinctively and this consistently for as long as I’ve been reading the magazine. Where does our stubborn naming convention come from?
Fortunately, thanks to Haverford College’s Quaker and Special Collections we have digital archives going back to the mid-1950s. A few months ago I dug into our archives and used keyword searches to see how far back the format goes. Traveling the years back it time it’s held remarkably steady as “Town (State) Meeting” until we get back to the fall of 1962. The October 15 issue doesn’t have consistent meeting listings but it does announce that longtime Friends Journal editor William Hubben was to begin a six-month sabbatical and that Frances Williams Browin was to fill in as acting editor.
It didn’t take her long to make her mark. Friends Journal came out twice a month in the 1960s and the next issue sees a few parentheses unevenly applied to meeting listings. But by the November 15th issue, nineteen meetings are referenced using our familiar format! There’s the “member of Berkeley (Calif.) Meeting” who had just published a pamphlet of Christmas songs for children, an FCNL event featuring skits and a covered-dish supper at “Swarthmore (Pa.) Meeting” and the announcement of a prominent article by “Kenneth E. Boulding, a member of Ann Arbor (Michigan) Meeting.”
I’ve tried to imagine the scene… Browin situated in her new temporary office… going back and forth, forth and back on some listing… then finally surprising herself by shouting “enough!” so loudly she had to apologize to nearby colleagues. At the end of the six months, Hubben came back, but only as a contributing editor, and Browin was named as full editor. Friends Journal board member Elizabeth B Wells wrote a profile of her upon her retirement from that position in 1968:
Her remarks usually made sparks, whether she was expressing an opinion (always positive), exerting pressure (not always gentle), or making a humorous aside (often disturbing). For in her amiable way she can be tart, unexpected, even prejudiced (in the right direction), then as suddenly disarmingly warm and sensitive.
This sounds like the kind of person who would standardize a format with such resolve it would be going strong 55 years later:
She was so entirely committed to putting out the best possible magazine, such a perfectionist, even such a driver, that her closest colleagues often felt that we knew the spirited editor far better than the Quaker lady.
It’s a wonderfully written profile. And today, every time an author rewrites their meeting’s name on a copyedited manuscript I’ve sent them for review, I say a quiet thanks to the driven perfectionist who gives me permission to be “prejudiced in the right direction.” Wells’s profile is a fascinating glimpse into a smart woman of a different era and well worth a read.
And for uber word geeks, yes our Friends Journal style guide is a public document. While parts of its proscriptions go back to the early 1960s, it is very much a living document and we make small changes to it on an almost weekly basis.
Over time, these challenges to the BME community became increasingly problematic. Members deleted accounts or stopped posting. By 2015, the main community forum – which used to have hundreds of posts a day – went without a single comment for over six months.
Having predicted many of the web’s functions and features, BME failed to anticipate its own demise.
It’s definitely something I’ve seen in my niche world of Quakers. I started QuakerQuaker as an independent site in part because I didn’t want Google and Facebook and Beliefnet to determine who we are. There’s the obvious problems — Beliefnet hiring a programmer to make a “What Religion Are You?” test based on a few books picked up the library one afternoon.
But there’s also more subtle problems. On Facebook anyone can start or join a group and start talking authoritatively about Quakers without actually being an active community member. I can think of a number of online characters who had never even visiting a Friends meeting or church.
Our tradition built up ways of defining our spokespeople though the practices of recorded ministers and elders, and of clarifying shared beliefs though documents like Faith and Practice. I’ll be the first to argue that this process has produced mixed results. But if it is to be adapted or reformed, I’d like the work to be done by us in a thoughtful, inclusive manner. Instead, the form of our discussions are now invisibly imposed by an outside algorithm that is optimized for obsessive engagement and advertising delivery. Facebook process is not Quaker process, yet it is largely what we use when we talk about Quakers outside of Sunday morning.
I think Facebook has helped alternative communities form. I’m grateful for the pop-up communities of interest I’m part of. And there are sites with more user generated content like Wikipedia and Reddit that hold an interesting middle-ground and where information is generally more accurate. But there’s still a critical role for self-organized independent publications, a niche that I think is continuing to be overshadowed in our current attention ecosystem.
The Conversation