I’ve gotten away from writing regularly, but I’m trying to get back to it. I flew out to Boston for work last week, and on the flight there I read “Enshittification” by Cory Doctorow. I enjoyed it and it sort of resonated with me—all these platforms that we use every day are just bad. I see more ads than updates from friends. Even when the posts are from humans, they feel like they’re gaming the system. They’re writing things that are trying to get views rather than trying to connect with people. So yeah, I don’t really enjoy social media much anymore.
One of the topics in the book was the idea of moving to more private, small community media. That’s actually something I’ve been doing for years. I run a Discourse server for a small group of folks who met through a Seth Godin workshop. We formed a bond and wanted to keep talking and getting together, so we did. Seth’s workshops tended to use Discourse as their platform, and it worked really well. As I dug into it, I realized that Discourse was an open source platform that was incredibly well supported. Like weirdly so. So I set one up, and it’s been a phenomenal place to gather and communicate. It’s pretty low maintenance. I log in once a month or every other month as an administrator to apply updates. Very rarely do I need to even SSH into the machine to troubleshoot things. It’s generally rock solid. It runs on a $10/month DigitalOcean machine, and it has for years now. It’s a great platform and a great service.
I need to write up directions on how I set it up. It wasn’t that hard, but I think it’s a matter of pointing people to it and realizing that these platforms do exist. You don’t need to post only on Facebook or Twitter; there are other places that allow you to build a bit more of a community. You can grow the community—it’s got all the moderation and that sort of thing built in—but it’s also really easy to lock it down and make it an invite-only platform that can be great for communicating with a small group.