Intro

Back in the 2010s, I really enjoyed blogging . On top of the writing, creating and capturing I joined a network of bloggers within the fitness/wellness space, and got onto most social media platforms not only to promote my content, but to consume and curate content that might inspire and inform the next cycle of creation.

I miss those days.

I'm not sure what happened; but it's a safe bet that algorithms and enshittification in general were a major contributor to why there are fewer bloggers or less blogging. There was a period where it seemed like the only bloggers who were still in it were blogging about blogging - and how to make money at it.

I don't really care about making money from a creative work; I have a day job that I'm good enough at to feel secure most of the time. I want to read, write, learn and connect with others about many subjects. Still, it's become apparent that work is data and data can have value, so if I make it, I own it and nobody should be getting any richer than me off it.

Data Sovereignty

Enter the concept of data sovereignty. Most of the discussions about it these days are about non-US nations having cloud or A.I. infrastructure that is not hosted in the US, but the principle could apply to the individual too. I'm interested in self-hosting (and I bought a book to help me on any journey I undertake) things like cloud backup, my old Wordpress blog , a Pi-Hole adblocker, and other projects to try and take back my presence and experience on the Internet.

AT Protocol

I'm also on a journey of discovery when it comes to the Atmosphere and the AT protocol. Decentralized, open standards means more data sovereignty. I'm already on @gandersocial.ca in addition to Bluesky and @leaflet.pub .

I picked Leaflet since it let me create multiple 'channels' for different topics; you might not be interested in more than one of the topics I want to write long-form about, so you can subscribe to only one of them instead of all. I wish it did native Markdown to better integrate with my PKM (see below).

My early impressions of Bluesky is that it's difficult to get a feed together that is going to provide me with content that is interesting to me, but it's always a work in progress. As long as I have control of the feed, I can only blame myself (or a dearth of the right kinds of users on the platform).

There seem to be bots and scams there, but without an algorithm to exploit, they have to do just as much manual work to get engagement as a regular human, or thereabouts.

Personal Knowledge Management

I used to store info on Evernote, but when their corporate structure went through implosions that meant unreasonable pricing on plans, ut was time to migrate. The first step was to get on Joplin , but I later found increasingly sophisticated alternatives like Notion , LogSeq and Obsidian . The Free Open Source nature of the latter enticed me into trying it, and it's been a journey to try and optimize it, and make it more powerful and useful to me (I also want to self-host a cloud sync solution for my vault of notes).

There's a wealth of Obsidian and Personal Knowledge Management 'experts' on the Web; one who's newsletter I subscribe to is Mike Schmitz . Some of his recent issues have described a device he calls the Productivity Flywheel ". Experts like Anne-Laure Le Cunff and Sahil Bloom apparently work out ideas in an online public forum. The half-baked ideas get a kind of curation/mutation through interaction with the audience network, and the whole thing feeds back into more baked ideas. I'll use my leaflet publications and anything else I blog or put out on the Atmosphere, and maybe it'll all seed my digital garden .

The Other Meaning of Untethered

Besides the free-association nature of musing on the above technologies and trends, my background is in wireless communications, so I may find myself making observations about that too. I have a tab open somewhere about MeshCore , a kind of DIY mesh network technology based on LoRAWAN to enable communications when more conventional networks aren't cutting the mustard.

Thanks for reading!