schlagetown

I agree, very aware it's way more than just the publishing / email tools! Also posted a top-level comment about building alternatives with https://leaflet.pub and https://standard.site - and yes I think really important to consider the full list of things you get with Substack: blog + email, easy to customize, monetization, social features + network, all in one platform, long tail of features…

Did a short talk on this at a local meetup recently, basically on how we might collectively re-create the entire stack of what Substack offers, in an open ecosystem, with a strong focus on network / distribution, more so than just features.

It's a tall order but I do think there's a big opportunity here beyond what any single app can or should tackle, in building an open alternative to the whole longform publishing stack, combining the tools and the social network side. AT Protocol and the Atmosphere (ecosystem of folks building on it) are pretty well positioned here. Lots of nice ways to get autonomy and ownership with web publishing + distribution and social affordances at the same time.

Of course a big challenge in bootstrapping the network and building the cultural footprint and giving folks flexible ways to make money and reach new readers, but I'm encouraged by how much progress we've made collectively just this past year.

I'm one of the creators of Leaflet - https://leaflet.pub - also mentioned in another comment. We're making a publishing app kind of like Substack or Ghost, but connected to the open social ecosystem building on AT Protocol. There a lot of potential here, and a lot of tools that already exist.

We collaborated with other publishing apps (pckt & Offprint) to make Standard.site - https://standard.site - a simple set of standards for publishing interop that enables something like RSS but on top of a whole social network. More context: https://lab.leaflet.pub/3moomxyjssk2p

Others can leverage this to make e.g. a whole reader app where you can find everything people in your network are publishing: https://standard-reader.app

A key thing is it's very flexible, you can publish on Leaflet, or on a self-hosted blog, and make your content discoverable and subscribeable in the same way. And in either case, you own your content — even if you use Leaflet as your hosted CMS, published data lives in your PDS where you control it, and all the social graph stuff persists even if you stop using Leaflet or we ever shut down.

Self-hosting a website is great but also considerable overhead for many folks, and we want to make it easy to publish and still have control and avoid lock-in. We even see folks doing hybrid approaches, e.g. using Leaflet to publish (for easy to use CMS + nice social features) but also pulling published data to render directly on their own website.

It's very different from what you get with a concentrated single platform like Substack (or Instagram, YouTube, etc) as far as audience reach, and early days with the ecosystem, but I think it's valuable in a different way. It's more aligned with the open web, and importantly, it's more antifragile — there are many ways to reach people and interact with your readers, from Bluesky to Leaflet to other reader apps, search tools, etc. Network effects aren't there yet to the degree of Substack, but a lot of cool things are emerging and it feels like an exciting time to build here together.

They had the licensing requirement until very recently but dropped it since they're now working on Zero (which looks awesome, but we're happy with Replicache for now). I think the docs may not be updated everywhere but see the "status" section on their homepage: https://replicache.dev/

I wasn't the one doing the back and forth on this directly but I think it was at least a few weeks, lots of threads with support etc. Partly on us for something like business address records not matching in different places…we get it b/c I'm sure they're dealing with a ton of spam mitigation but the process could definitely have been clearer / more startup friendly.

(Leaflet cofounder here) - thank you, really nice to hear! It's taken us a long time and several prior products/prototypes to arrive at this, including previous attempts where we had similar aims — make nice expressive spaces for collaboration, creative work, learning — but took very different (and more complicated) directions, e.g. a multi-room chat/note hybrid app with each project as its own database, or a global wiki with live calls built in.

I think Leaflet's by far the most easy to use but also hides a lot of power and expressive potential without being overwhelming, and we're seeing more traction and cool ways people are using, so happy with it so far! In particular finding it really cool how there's a lot of space between very simple notes/docs and rich publishing that gets closer to artifacts more like whole websites but with document-like form factor. And making something that's equally nice and simple to read and to edit/collaborate on with others…a good challenge and design space to explore!

(Leaflet cofounder here) - thanks so much for the detailed feedback here, this is great context and appreciate the specifics on CSS intricacies / naming history I was not aware of! We'll take a look at improving our scrollbar handling. We like the minimalist look without but have gotten used to it and I hear you it breaks a useful and expected affordance. I think we might be able to strike a balance with just vertical scrollbars in pages + maybe eventually do a custom indicator for multi-page columns (more obvious b/c you see them open side by side, and global horiz scrollbar is a lot uglier than per-page vertical ones!)

(Leaflet cofounder here) - sorry about that! Are you seeing that with 'canvas' pages, or multiple doc pages open side by side? What device / screen size? I haven't seen issues with horizontal scroll recently but lots of trickiness with slight differences across browsers and maybe things we can improve for particular cases.

Re: scrollbars honestly we just like the cleaner minimalist look and have gotten used to it but I hear you (+ others) that it can be annoying, we'll look into improving.

(Leaflet cofounder here) - agree, code blocks is definitely on our list! Both inline and full code blocks e.g. with CodeMirror. Ideally with syntax highlighting, just need to figure out how to play nicely with our custom themes…though probably fine to start with just a default theme.

(Leaflet cofounder here) - this is a really good point! We actually had an explicit 'delete' button earlier but removed it temporarily b/c it was causing some confusion I think with people accidentally deleting collaborative docs for everyone and not just for themselves. So right now we have 'remove from home' but not full delete. We should add that back and see if we can improve the UX.

Right now all docs are unlisted but anyone with the link can view; we're also thinking about fully private or password protected docs (several people have asked about this) but still exploring the best approach there.

(Leaflet cofounder here) - thanks for sharing that, actually just finished drafting this week! It was fun to make all the different pages with different examples / themes…and also I think a nice demo of our custom domains feature :)

Btw some parts still incomplete e.g. I want to eventually fill out more detail on each page re: how Leaflet compares to other tools, and add more examples and templates. If anyone makes good ones they'd like to share publicly, glad to add!

(Leaflet cofounder here) - thanks, and good idea! Yeah right now canvases are quite minimal, lots we can improve both with basics like selection/drag, and more types of canvas-specific blocks. We'd love to get some kind of freeform sketch block at some point too, though more complex, a few more frequently requested things we want to get to first, like simple tables and font options!

(Leaflet cofounder here) - much appreciated; we spent a lot of time iterating building different versions of apps before Leaflet that were more explicitly around shared social spaces and communities for learning and collaborative projects, which informed some of our aims in making Leaflets both simple docs and shared spaces (lots we can improve there e.g. bringing in live presence features!)

For the RSVP block, yes we're using Twilio - right now it automatically uses SMS for US/Canada numbers and WhatsApp for int'l, bit more cost effective…I think it wasn't a huge lift technically, though took longer than expected mainly b/c we had to wait a while / re-submit some documentation etc. for approval.

(Leaflet cofounder here) - thanks! It's been a lot of fun trying to strike the right balance between "just docs" and things like canvas, outliner, and more interactive social blocks, as well as minimalism vs. customizability etc.

Yes, for updates we have a newsletter here…so far sending alpha updates every week or two; may have to move it to 'beta' soon! https://buttondown.com/leaflet

Good post, a lot rings true in my experience! Twitter is a uniquely good place to meet people, though it requires a lot of work and calibration to use successfully, and it takes practice to be yourself in a public broadcast medium. But I feel like curating a quality follows list and interacting with people you like online has very high ROI. And it's worth taking the initiative — asking good questions, planning casual events, proposing ideas for collaboration — even if not everything pans out, it's about increasing the surface area for serendipity, opening up more possible paths, planting seeds…

Certainly, the majority of books are not worth your time; the same is of course true of YouTube videos, podcasts, blog posts, or any media you may consume. But the best books do offer things you can't get elsewhere.

Crucially, reading book is not just about information intake! Really great books don't just teach you things, they open you up to new ways of thinking, expose new corners of the universe and of experience, stretch your mind, and so on.

If you're reading books filled with "fluff" — read better books! If a book bores you, find a different one! Reading a great book should be a joy.

It's true that most books don't age well — but the converse to this is that books that have been around for a long time and are still popular are usually well-known for good reasons; they've endured on their merits for far longer than any bestsellers of the decade.

Challenge: don't read any more self help books. Instead, read books on education, economics, science, technology, nature, history. Read epics, read science fiction, read poetry.

Do some research on the areas that most interest you, and take time to find the very best books you can find — based on Amazon/Goodreads reviews, suggestions from friends, best-of lists, whatever — and pick just a few to spend time with. And keep in mind it's always a better use of your time to read 10 really amazing books than 100 average ones; take your time and have fun :)

I recently took up a Twitter challenge to post 100 opinions about books and reading, and I wrote a lot about the concept of the "antilibrary" — basically, the value of knowing about books even if you don't necessarily read them, and getting good at curating your reading list. You may find some of this useful for how to think about reading:

https://twitter.com/schlagetown/status/1206268052498780160

A handful of these book thoughts that may be particularly relevant here:

1. Every curious person should be a serious reader. Ever serious reader should build an antilibrary.

(Essential vocab for this thread: your antilibrary = all the books you know about but have not read, designating a sort of potential energy for learning / knowledge / reading)

‪2. An antilibrary should exist in both physical form (books on your shelves; books browsed but unpurchased at your favorite bookstores) and virtual form (in digital lists; in tweets and reviews scanned; in your memory).‬

‪3. An antilibrary should have many levels: books you have an urgent desire to read, books you definitely want to read someday, books you find intriguing but may never read, books you've lost interest in entirely‬

‪Categorize not only by topic but by priority / importance / status‬

‪8. We should all be more aware of (& deliberately apply) the many different levels of reading that exist — the spectrum from close reading to skimming a book quickly for major themes / ideas.‬

‪Different books + different contexts demand different approaches for optimal reading.‬

‪17. There aren't that many truly great books you definitely need to read.‬

‪While there are infinitely more good books than you can ever read in a lifetime, you can probably get to a surprisingly high portion of those that are both excellent & a good match for you personally.‬

‪24. Building your "read really big books" muscle is helpful for practicing sustained attention & deep engagement. Living with a text for months on end, whether a particular story or set of ideas, creates a special type of relationship!‬

45. You should have a "non-reading practice" — being intentional about not-reading certain books (just as some authors should not-write certain books!)

Abandon more books. Browse many; read few. Choose to engage w/ books & their ideas outside the text itself.

52. Best books I've read in the last year: Underland—Robert Macfarlane How to Do Nothing—Jenny Odell Go Ahead in the Rain—Hanif Abdurraqib Daemon Voices—Philip Pullman Carceral Capitalism—Jackie Wang So Many Books—Gabriel Zaid The Collected Schizophrenias—Esmé Weijun Wang

53. Best books I've read in the last 10 years: The Moonstone—Wilkie Collins Moby Dick—Melville Infinite Jest—DFW Pilgrim at Tinker Creek—Dillard Impro—Johnstone Time and the Art of Living—Grudin Le Ton beau de Marot—Hofstadter Death and Life of Great American Cities—Jacobs

72. There are many books we should know about for reasons other than the story or info (etc.) of the text itself.

Reasons like: important cultural context, influence on future books, significance to people you love… Such books are prime candidates for antilibrary inclusion!

Very interested to see all these Meetup competitors developing! Seems there are kind of two main buckets here: simple tools focused on organize events, and platforms that are more a two-sided market where event discovery / matching interests and attendees is a factor as well.

For hosting small dinners and learning events, I'm looking mostly for the former, and one tool that's quite new but looks very promising is Mixily: https://www.mixily.com

It's a nice streamlined tool, prioritizes privacy, and has a number of solid features like messaging and event reminders, date polling (like doodle), comments wall, variety of privacy settings. Also some other very cool things in beta, like contact lists, and ticketed / donation-based events.

Love this question. Something I've thought a lot about! My personal reading strategy has a few interrelated parts:

Building an antilibrary

What books should be “on my list”? A while back I started out with making an Amazon wish list and adding any books I found that looked interesting. That soon got overwhelming so I made a smaller, more selective list for my top “antilibrary” picks. Eventually I decided to make a whole website to try to organize this better (https://www.antilibrari.es/).

I think it’s probably worth keeping either a couple lists (by genre, priority, whatever makes sense to you) or at least one high priority list of the books you most want to read. For me it can be helpful to differentiate between “looks super interesting” and “I actually really want to read this soon” — often different! Some books I think are awesome and want to have in my antilibrary but I know realistically I probably won’t read em soon. That’s okay!

What to read next?

I think it can be a good idea to revisit your list(s) every so often and let the ones you’re most drawn to bubble to the top. No need to actually buy more than a few at a time, but you’ll always have something to draw from. I should also note, honestly lots of the books I buy aren’t ones I’ve had on a list for a long time, but rather ones I found at a bookstore and picked up in the moment…serendipity is always great too!

Same goes for actually choosing what to read next…I don’t plan this out ahead of time, it’s always slightly random based on what I have on hand, what mood I’m in, etc. I think it’s useful to own enough books that you always have a variety to choose from, but past a certain point a great antilibrary list can be almost as valuable as your actual bookshelves.

How to read what and when

I like to read several books in parallel. Often with fiction I’ll read one book straight through, but nonfiction…I have like two dozen books in my nightstand that I’ve started, some way through, haven’t necessarily read for a while, but meaning to return to at some point.

I’m not particularly good at the “when to stop reading” part. I have completionist tendencies and always want to at least try to finish a book. So perhaps the “parallel processing” approach is also just an easier way to abandon books without feeling bad about it. Either way I think haphazardly reading lots at once is great. @edouard wrote a cool post that’s on point here, discussing “reading networks” and how books can inform one another and let you build interesting connections between them.

Different modes / approaches to reading

Also worth thinking about different ways of reading a book…not just the approach to choosing books but the actual practice, because it can be surprisingly varied.

I think in some ways it’s easier to evaluate non-fiction books (vs. fiction, poetry etc.) because they tend to have more structure. Often I can read a couple pages of the introduction, scan the chapter list, and flip through the book (physically or digitally if I’m able e.g. on Amazon) to get a decent overall impression.

I try to read a good number of reviews, on Amazon + Goodreads when available, otherwise see what Google turns up. Of course have to take everything with a grain of salt but it’s usually helpful to see the range of perspectives. Often I think a book with a good number of extremely enthusiastic reviews but some that hate it will be a better pick than one with consistent blandly positive reviews.

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To plug my own site - I started a small forum for talking books, libraries, and reading, and a few discussions come to mind that are very on topic here (and that I've drawn from in my above post):

- Developing a reading strategy: https://athenaeum.antilibrari.es/t/developing-a-reading-stra...

- Reading non-fiction: https://athenaeum.antilibrari.es/t/reading-non-fiction/93

- Personal library organization: https://athenaeum.antilibrari.es/t/personal-library-organiza...

- Developing a “non-reading” practice: https://athenaeum.antilibrari.es/t/developing-a-non-reading-...

This article seems to gloss over possible physical causes for CFS/ME, sort of implying that nobody has any idea what physical basis there might be for it. But that's…not entirely true?

For example, there's at least some evidence linking it to mitochondrial dysfunction, see e.g.: https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Mitochondria

> There is evidence of mitochondrial dysfunction in chronic fatigue syndrome patients. Muscle biopsies have shown evidence of mitochondrial degeneration, deletions of mitochondrial DNA, the reduction of mitochondrial activity, and Sarah Myhill found measurable mitochondrial dysfunction correlating with severity of illness. Myhill also produced improvement by targeting those dysfunctions. Mitochondrial DNA variants correlate with symptoms, symptom clusters & symptom severity.

Far from conclusive, but I think worth at least noting.

From both reading a variety of sources on the topic, and having someone close to me with CFS/ME for many years, I think it's pretty clear that a) there's most likely a physical basis for it, b) we don't yet know how it works, and c) research on this is drastically underfunded.

Considering millions of people are affected, there should be way more resources put towards it. Hundreds of millions of dollars per year, to put it on par with funding of similar diseases. (See: https://www.meaction.net/2017/01/07/dimmock-mirin-jason-esti...)

This book is an excellent resource for learning the basics of typography, happy to see a second edition!

FYI for anyone else who's read the first edition, there's a section at the bottom of the "Introduction" page listing what sections are new in the second edition: https://practicaltypography.com/introduction.html

My current favorite solution for comments is Discourse — they actually have a great plugin for WordPress that replaces the default WP comments. Maybe overkill for some, but really nice when building a real community (ongoing discussion rather than drive-by commenting) is a priority. I could see this being a similarly nice solution for Ghost! Though simpler native commenting support would be cool too.

Must-read article about the concept of "better than free":

http://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/

Kevin Kelly proposes "Eight Generatives Better Than Free": immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, and findability.

This was written back in 2008—very prescient in light of the evolution of content distribution since then, and helpful in articulating what sorts of thing actually manage to add value in this way!

Mindstorms, by Seymour Papert - for understanding the relationship of learning and technology; a smart, humanist, empathetic approach to education [See also: The Children's Machine; Deschooling Society]

Clock of the Long Now, by Stewart Brand - for the concepts of deep time and the long now; appreciating a sense of how we experience time and our place in history [See also: Time and the Art of Living]

Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott - creative parable that's very helpful for conceptualizing abstract concepts of topology and higher dimensions

Thinking in Systems, A Primer, by Donella Meadows - great introduction to systems thinking, which is a useful lens for appreciating the complexity of all sorts of complex phenomena

A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander - great work of urban design, useful framework for looking at design systems and how pieces fit together on different scales [See also: Death and Life of Great American Cities]

Oulipo - A Primer of Potential Literature - nice introduction to the Oulipo and ideas of constraint as creative / poetic device [See also: Exercises in Style; Eunoia]

Impro, by Keith Johnstone - great primer on improvisation, really made me appreciate its impacts beyond just the theater, for example the importance of status in social relations

The Power Broker, by Robert Caro - unbeatably rich and compelling look at how power and politics actually work, for better (power gets things done) and for worse (power blinds and corrupts)

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard - beautiful, meticulously observed study of the natural world close at hand; made me appreciate the power of looking deeply and persistently

Le Ton beau de Marot, by Douglas Hofstadter - remarkable exploration of language and translation, in all its magic and complexity…both deeply personal and deeply researched, a must-read for lovers of language

The Library at Night, by Alberto Manguel - turned me on to the various lenses through which we can conceive of and appreciate libraries; their vast power and potential

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville - for really hammering home the grand, powerful potential of great literature and well-wrought language [ See also: Don Quixote; Infinite Jest]

Love this. I've also been a big fan of the "antilibrary" concept since coming across it in Black Swan a few years ago.

I've actually been working on a site to highlight all sorts of amazing eclectic books in my own antilibrary. I also recently completed a Kickstarter campaign to produce a printed publication focusing on some of these in more depth.

For anyone interested, you can check out the site here to learn about all sorts of fascinating books you may otherwise never stumble upon, but I think are well worth knowing about!

http://www.antilibrari.es/

One obvious answer here: makes far more sense to increase population of NYC outside of Manhattan. Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx combined (excluding Staten Island since it's not accessible by subway) are TEN TIMES the size of Manhattan. Not all this space is a quick commute to Manhattan…but there are plenty of neighborhoods in these boroughs that are nowhere near as densely populated as lower Manhattan, and are still within a ~30 minute commute to downtown.

"Cannot download. This app is not compatible with your device."

Um…what? I'm on an iPhone 5! Not that ancient!

Aiming for ~ a book a week, and have been holding steady around that mark for around the past 3 years (avg. 50 books / year). I got through Ready Player One in a weekend when I had nothing else to do, but it took me a good couple months to get through Infinite Jest this year…try to balance it out with a good mix of fiction / nonfiction and easy / hard books. I waste plenty of time online, too, but average something in the ballpark of an hour / day of book-reading.

Looking forward to reading this! The author, Elizabeth Hyde Stevens, wrote a book I really enjoyed called "Make Art Make Money: Lessons from Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career" — https://www.amazon.com/Make-Art-Money-Lessons-Creative-ebook.... It's full of interesting insights about Henson's approach to not only his art but also the business that enabled him to sustain it. Big fan of Borges, so hoping this is equally great.

I use nvAlt on Mac + Simplenote on iOS.

Easy to sync between the two using plaintext files in a Dropbox folder. About as lightweight and easy to search for simple notes (whie still working on both desktop and mobile) as I've found.

Caveats: not great for longer notes, and keeps things super simple…so mostly great for collecting ideas.

I keep stuff here that I add to frequently; other things I typically move elsewhere to organize / edit…I love Scrivener for this but also use Google Docs for certain things.