I’d love to say happy new year, internet friends, but 2025 is getting off to a rocky start, between the war crimes and wildfires, maga nonsense and our own brand of political bs here in Aoteaoroa. But none of that is what prompted me to write to you, you can get enough of the doom and gloom literally everywhere else.
No, instead it was Zuck’s mask-off reveal that Meta’s products would circle the drain like everything else, unlocking a slur pack and chasing a more “masculine energy” for his company.
Anyway, you don’t need me to tell you that these platforms are rotten — I’ve been talking about it since Webstock in 2019. You can read great writing on this loads of places (Cory Doctorow calls it “enshittification”, Ed Zitron calls it the “rot economy”).
Instead I want to talk about the good internet, the internet we make, and that we used to build ourselves.
I first started thinking about this when I read Molly White’s great piece “We Can Have a Different Web”:
The walled enclosures that crowded out much of that acre of developed land still reside within an infinite expanse of possibility. There are no limits to the web — if it has borders, they are ever expanding. We may feel as though we are trapped in a tiny, crowded, noisy space, but it is only because we don't see over the walls.
It inspired me at the end of last year to build my second ever website (my first was in 2002, a place to host my West Wing fanfiction). I built this single-serve site to help me plan a new layout for my LEGO city. It was a wild journey involving a lot of chatgpt as my sometimes-helpful coach, and I’m still thinking about writing it up because i’m sure I’m not the only person who’d like to make something and has never tried or has forgotten how.
Anyway this little website wound up being a finalist in the Tiny Awards, which:
exist to celebrate the personal internet, the other web, the one that is small and handmade and isn’t trying to sell you anything or monetise anything but which instead is about people using the digital tools we all have access to to make the sorts of small, personal experiences that you tend not to see ‘in feed’.
This is what I want to focus on this year. This other web.
You’ll have noticed some cute new branding up above (thanks Lou!) and I plan on following that up on my website. My strategy for all of this is to get as close as I can to POSSE - Post on your Own Site, Share Everywhere. I want to wrest back control of the things I’m sharing, and to stop finding that articles I’ve written are gone because the publication is, or the podcast is no longer hosted, or the platform is now full of nazis. I’ve copied all my conference talks to my own YouTube channel, and that’s more or less it. I’ll write here, I’ll post on my own site. And for now, I’ll share links on Bluesky.
The obvious challenge with all of this is audience — if a tweet falls in the woods, etc.
I’ve been thinking about audience a lot as I play around with tiktok to share bits and pieces of the work I’m doing on my book about the history of online fandom. In fandom circles “reach” has historically just been a function of the community you’ve built around you. In my earliest fandoms, being “popular” came with writing and posting a great story people liked. As the scale of the fandoms grew — and with it the concept of big name fans — recognition came with connection: friends who pimped your stories, mutuals on tumblr. It’s easy to see how algorithims throw all that out the window. While tiktok influencers will tell you how to influence tiktok in a tail-eating ouroborous of hashtag “content”, the reality is you just have to hope a mysterious black box takes your ideas and shows them to someone who finds them meaningful.
But honestly? Word of mouth worked in the old days, and I don’t need an audience any bigger than you all and the people you think will enjoy this enough to forward it to, so that’s what I’m going to do. Share the things I’m thinking about, that I’ve read and think you’ll get a kick out of. Sharing our favourite things is a love language. And I hope in return you’ll hit reply when you see something and it makes you think of me.
this “bibliomancy” exercise from Alexander Chee (screenshotted for those who feel about substack the way that I do)
a fab deep-dive from bestie Elizabeth Minkel over at Fansplaining about the Endless Appetite for Fanfiction. As the appetite for fic seems to be increasing exponentially on all sides, where does that leave the writers who create it?
“How to get your joy back”, a really thoughtful answer from Mike Monteiro.
last time I wrote, I talked about the controversy in the fanbinding community around etsy shops flogging mass-produced bound copies of fanfic without permission. one of the good outcomes of this (and with tiktok’s ongoing obsession with owning hard-bound copies of Manacled) is a huge rise in the number of people trying bookbinding, and sharing their techniques. I’ve been meaning to try fanbinding for AGES but the rise in rebinding pushed me over the edge and I got started before Christmas.
one from my old life: if you’re collaborating on any kind of project that might one day make some money, you should have something written down agreeing to some basics. Way back in 2013 I came up with Back of a Napkin: answer five simple questions and it will generate you a proper, legal pdf to sign. I’ve always been super proud of this, and it’s lovely to see my old firm give it a makeover this month.
