A pressing need

It’s a very cool world we’re living in right now, I think you’ll agree. At this point, I’m consuming so much well-sourced, well-reported news about Epstein , Bannon, Mandelson, Peter Thiel , AI, and the general enshittification of our democracies and the planet at large that I actually found myself staring at my phone, wondering, ‘Is this what people feel like when they fall down a QAnon or anti-vaxx wormhole? Am I falling for the same shit, but a different flavour?’

Well, sadly, I don’t think so. Or, if I am, then so are seasoned journalists, political leaders across the globe, and, well, pretty much every person I speak to. But it’s healthy to ask, I think. I’ve recently started to follow a lot of new information sources, and it’s worth spending a bit of time actually interrogating them. That’s just common sense.

Sadly, it turns out they’re all proper journalists, providing thoughtful, if alarmed, commentary on the end of democracy, and possibly, the world.

Damn.

Looks like it’s all really going to shit.

I started this little blog to keep some sense of order about my thoughts on what the internet might be, one day, and I’d intended to write a little bit more about my (admittedly extremely layperson’s) view on that, but yesterday provided another object lesson, or two, in fact, about just how fast the sands are shifting below our feet.

First, I woke to find the main headline on the Guardian was as follows:

(alt. text, since Leaflet won't let me add it: Headline reads 'Revealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters. Site takes a cut of subscriptions to content that promotes far-right ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism')

Now, this really isn’t much of a surprise — I’ve already left Substack once because of the whole Nazi bar thing, but I begrudgingly went back because the alternatives were not quite up to snuff (or were prohibitively expensive for a writing newsletter that steadfastly refuses to generate any income). It had always been in my mind to leave, once I found a suitable alternative.

Then, the whole Discord age-verification thing blew up a decent section of the internet.

Now, in principle (and as someone with teenage kids), I don’t actually have an issue with the idea of age verification. But, it’s pretty clear that a) Discord has a terrible history of information security , and b) that the vulture capitalist systems that I am desperate to escape view these as yet another data grab, another piece for the grand sell-off of their favourite commodity — us.

Now, I love Discord. Actually, that’s not right. I’m in two Discord servers that I love, both connected to communities that I cannot imagine dropping out of my life right now. And neither of which I have any control over, beyond my presence and interactions. I have a few others that I’ve joined recently, and I can see them going the same way. In fact, I would say that all of my social media interactions now exist solely within those servers and Bluesky. And one thing was clear: within those servers, there was a lot of talk about leaving Discord.

Now, if this blog aims to explore the possibilities of THE ATMOSPHERE (I will never not type that out while saying it in a Brian Blessed voice in my head), then both of these present something of a challenge. Sure, Ghost.io is already integrating with the Fediverse, but there’s no sign it aims to do anything of the sort with ATProto. It looks like there are some promising newsletter/blog platforms out there, but they’re not ready yet. Similarly, with Discord, it seems like Roomy will be a Discord alternative that’s built on ATProto, but it’s not out yet.

In both cases, it’s unclear how either will work — will they offer Patreon integrations? Will they have data protection built in? Will they even be any good? And most importantly, when it comes to Discord at least, will they be able to tempt people over to them, or will they be too late? Is there already the next Discord out there, waiting to be the landing pad for a few million disgruntled Discord users?

In other words, is ATProto as an ecosystem just not going to be ready in time to take over from the systems that die around us?