I’ve gradually shifted away from Twitter and Facebook over the past few years, migrating to the open alternatives of the IndieWeb and the Fediverse as replacements. I really like them both, both going some way towards providing the things that I want from social media (and being online in general), while removing some of things that I don’t want.

It’s far from perfect yet though. In this post (and more to come probably) I’m reflecting a little bit about my ‘information strategy’ – how to get the stuff I want from the big ol’ world wide web. I am mostly inspired to start on this by reading Ton’s thoughts on information strategies, as well as a vague feeling I have that while I get a lot out of the web, it comes with plenty of pitfalls and its usage can in fact to be to my detriment if unchecked and unmanaged.

As I’m more into the IndieWeb, I guess I’m kind of looking at all this through an IndieWeb lens, but the Fediverse is a bit part of it too for me. Sometimes you hear it referred to as ‘the open web’ as a catch-all.

What I want from the web

I’m totally guilty of being technology-focused (including in this post already…), but I think for reviewing my information strategy it’s better to try to start from a question of ‘where do you get your info from and what do you do with it’ rather than ‘what technology do you use’. So in a really high-level sense, what I want to get from spending time online is:

  • discovery (finding out about interesting things)
  • writing & reflection (producing not just consuming, posting publicly about things I’ve read or seen, and having to think about it before I do)
  • discourse & learning (getting others’ perspective on things, having my horizons expanded and my views challenged)
  • relationships: I think the ‘social’ part of social media should mean forming long-lasting bonds with people, not just being ephemeral blips on each others’ radars

I also want to give back and contribute to a healthy ecosystem – so I want to share helpful information with others, and contribute to others’ discussion and reflection. Good info is good praxis.

What I don’t want

I want to spend my time well, basically. With intention.

So that means avoiding:

  • staring at a screen excessively, doing the zombie scroll of doom trying to get the next hit of information or interaction
  • FOMO
  • information overload
  • filter bubbles
  • feeding of corporate beasts

Discostrat

This post originally also included me delving into my discovery strategy, but with the preceding waffle it started to become a huge post, so I’ve farmed off the discovery bit into a separate post – coming soon (UPDATE: here it is).

I also hope in upcoming posts to think out loud about the other pieces – of ‘reflection’, ‘discourse’ and ‘relationships’. I’m assuming this will all evolve over time, too, so they might actually be different topics by then. Which is where personal knowledge management and a wiki comes in, but that’s also for another day…

Jacobin article starting with ‘yes, capitalism has achieved all of [list of things], but here’s some things it hasn’t done’. It’s a bad premise though – labour did these things, capitalism just distributed the results badly. Also, assumption that only capitalism would have been able to organise labour to make these advancements is a bad one too.
Liked https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2019/10/9594/ by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)

A list of participants of the Amsterdam IndieWebCamp last weekend is available, with the links to their website. Perhaps you’ll find some interesting sites to add to your feedreader.
Below a group picture at lunch time on Day 1. Not all participants are in the photo.
IndieWebCamp Amsterdam 2019 Ph…

‘Repair culture[…] is not a mere side effect of the development of industrial societies.On the contrary, it is one of the very few distributed and consistent niches of resistance against the transformation of all human creativity into quantifiable commodity.’

Felipe Fonseca talks about gambiarra and the culture of repair and how maker culture got co-opted into wastefulness and prototyping lots of new things.

https://is.efeefe.me/stuff/gambiarra-repair-culture