Océane (@oceane)

eng., caps lock, salty about the French press crisis

Custom Feeds on Bluesky are created in quite complex ways, with many variables.

HOW ABOUT WRITING A DOCUMENT IN #NYXT AND GETTING THINGS DONE INSTEAD??

Jesus Christ, and French people are complaining about a press crisis. Can we make the #BullshitOrg hashtag mainstream?

www.newsmastfoundation.org/app/uploads/2024/05/Mapping-Social-Web-Communities-2.pdf

eng., caps lock, salty about the French press crisis

JFC yes, there's a press crisis; yes, unpaywalled media are underfunded. But who would pay for that ChatGPT-grade garbage?

www.marieclaire.fr/demonstration-affection-en-public-couple,1476230.asp?utm_source=pocket-newtab-fr-fr

And anyway, with my adblocker disabled I get about 8 ads in a single page, with an autoplay video, and a consent request to send me notifications (for ads redirecting me to literal ChatGPT-generated articles, directly suggested “from Marie Claire”. I understand times are hard but I promise you that whenever there's a gleam of cooperation with an actual human people suddenly get all cooperative and wouldn't consider stealing e.g. an NPO or a cooperative. That's how NVC works!

So good luck with your “press crisis” – built on decades of SEO optimization – I guess

eng., caps lock, salty about the French press crisis

Do you want to get more funding? Pay a psychologist, pay a sociologist IDC, to build an intentional community of readers.

An intentional community is literal a community whose members willl defend the community's interests along with their own selfish ones. (That's directly, but fortunately tendencially only conflictual with mental illness because in my fresh, and not humble enough opinion mental illness is characterized with self-centeredness. A high potential person might be neurodivergent but as soon as they start making it all about it a form of mental illness, neuroses or something else joins the party.)

Everyone has neuroses. Make communities that heal. Make communities that people will think are good, because it will be good to their (mental) health.

Sorry for the rent.

Mediapart is highly successful not only because they provide paywalled contents, but also because they provide blogs (that will give more exposure to their readers), a solidarity pricing, and they're discussing every suggestion they get, including private RSS feeds.

They make two public streams per week where they present their work and answer to questions. And this is how you build a successful media with an 8-figures/year budget.

eng., caps lock, salty about the French press crisis

After setting up a Ghost instance at web.domain.tld, the second thing I'm going to do will be to implement the server infrastructure that will complement the technology that I'm recommending to my readers (e.g. an RSS feeds reader pre-configured for Elfeed, or an IRC bouncer).

I'm going to provide them with a cool shared Unix server and listen to feedback from my community because I'll afford it BECAUSE I WILL BE PAID FOR IT.

Zero ads. GDPR-compliant metrics, thanks to @plausible. In-depth blog posts about complex issues, that will be fed from my Zettelkasten thanks to Denote.

And I'm committed to keep as few actual blog contents from the public – i.e., I'm not going to tease them for a life-saving paywalled blog post.

(And what about teenagers, what about abuse victims you absolute garage builder?)

Some of my work will be gatekept for my paid readers but I really want this to be technical work, deploying free software implementations of public domain standards instead of pathetic attempts at not subconsciously sabotaging my public blog posts quality to keep the good stuff for my paid readers…

eng., caps lock, salty about the French press crisis

Anyway, the main takkeaway here is that people won't throw you under the bus if your business is collaborating with them, rather than commodifying them.

I'm not being judgmental here with people poorly managing their Patreons, I'm just saying they lack some community management skills.

For example, I've complained yesterday about having been thrown under the bus by carnists (meat eaters?) by a student NPO, while my vegan comrades were supporting me. But I was utterly incompetent about the stuff I was advocating for as a paranoid person; I was just asking for a conversation about accessibility (to which I was entitled). I'm not defending productivism but even in the context of the sharing economy, or in the context of a neurodivergent, mentally ill white trans woman facing transphobia and mobbing by an anticapitalist org, we need to live with the fact that our society is productivist, and that if I can't elevator pitch my comrades about free software, my paranoia and I can fuck off.

Another example is the lack of adoption of the Bépo layout because the official website hides resources in a spaghetti of a wiki, there's no straightforward, interactive way to learn it as on [Ergol][ergol.org), it's a mere improvement over Azerty instead of a truly ergonomic layout, the brain doesn't feel relieved while looking at the layout so people will just move along. It's kinda pointless to insist on other people to use your stack while it's only properly implemented for niche use cases with software baring the marks of a huge, huge UX debt (looking at you, Emacs).

And then, honestly I'm sorry for excellent journalists over here merely discussing the press crisis, I don't mean to tell them that they would deserve it or be responsible for it. I'm just saying that our news orgs are completely rotten, that their entire model is broken, that people are distrusting the press, and that we need to spin-up our own (which is easier said than done, but unskippable).

eng., caps lock, salty about the French press crisis

And then there are of course other ways to fund a mostly publicly accessible news org, e.g. frustrationmagazine.fr has several tiers with physical rewards and a bimestrial topical print for the highest tier, while the entire website stays public. Frustration has set a strong brand on the French web so people can hope that their comrades will notice their high-quality print as any fandom member would notice a rare collectible item. They're also transparent about their funding because, well, collaboration, so whenever their funds are low people help them reach an equilibrium.

This model lets them post public, high-efforts contents and thus to have decent standards with their staff, so French leftist media are still among the highest quality contents that are available for free on the web ; they might be lacking funding but merely because their niche is poor instead of a mere lack of trust from the public. On the other hand I really wouldn't mind Marie Claire going bankrupt.