A surprising number of people ask me “do you still write?”

Substack has iceberg optics. I think I get almost as many eyeballs on my substack as on my retired Wordpress blog but getting off Twitter* gives it iceberg optics… 90% cozy and invisible. As many people see it (though a different demographic mix) but they don’t see each other seeing it. Sinks below common knowledge threshold. Which is now sky high.

Delver at contraptions.venkateshrao.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

Why this portable social graph thing is exciting. Nobody uses substack comments (why would you instead of tweeting lol) 

But if substack comments were also tweets

s/substack/paragraph yada yada

Is that the chicken or the egg?

Association of platform to graph really strong in people’s minds. Might not apply if that’s decoupled — where else has it been tried effectively?

In a way substack owes its success to porting over another graph (email lists)

Nah, portable social graph doesn’t work socially even though it’s technically doable. People get attached to “common knowledge commons” except for fanboi types who follow Great Man types everywhere. For the rest of us leaving a platform is leaving the bulk of a network behind

related https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/23/23928550/posse-posting-activitypub-standard-twitter-tumblr-mastodon