These days I have more online conversations on Substack than anywhere else. Substack is good for long-form text, so it is good for deep thinking rather than hot takes. it's the anti-twitter in that respect.
I hang out on Substack Notes more & more. It's social media but very casual, no one is trying to sell anything (mostly) & everyone is a writer (at least the people I tend to read). Another benefit for me is that commenting on other newsletters & on people's notes automatically makes me want to hop over to my own writing. It's like it comes with built-in motivation, sometimes inspiration too. Hope it stays that way for a while.
My number two is Discord though. Some servers (like yours!) I found via Substack, some elsewhere.
My biggest problem with sub stack notes right now is that it seems like I keep getting served a couple of really popular posts from really popular people, and they tend to be kind of sticky? So if I checked multiple times in a day, I'm seeing the same things. I've been following tons of people to try to see more of their stuff but it's not working, I don't have a good intuition for the algorithm yet.
I am mostly on Bluesky these days. There are other Obsidian users over there as well!
I love Substack, but it's a different animal and not really made for micro-blogging...at least not yet. The tools are there, but it's not (yet) a place for daily conversation....at least that's what I find. I do love Substack for slower-paced and deeper conversations, though.
Bluesky and Substack are my favourite places online.
Honestly I forgot about Bluesky! What makes it different from the other Twitter esque services? I had the vibe it was invite only Twitter during the Musk takeover but I was pretty deep in the throes of baby brain tbh
Just a few of the reasons I like it more than Twitter:
- Many more moderation options and ways to curate what one sees.
- You can search for hashtags not just across the platform but within a particular users feed. So if you did your Obsidian Iceberg update posts (with links to the full post) with #ObsidianIceberg, we could click on that hashtag within YOUR feed to find all your update posts.
- User Lists
- Custom feeds: a way of curating even more. I have a custom feed, for example, that searches posts made by users on a curated List with certain emoji combo or terms or hashtags. See my link above for more.
I very much appreciated this post. My current interest in M-ing my PK (is this a thing?) is in linking my Obsidian notes, now organized into a wiki of sorts, to other notes and resources on the web, as a way to have text-based conversations. The web is a big place, things are spread out and around, silos abound, and boundaries are important, and I am wary of just jumping into interactions on the socials amongst people I do not know. Nonetheless, he persists in looking around. The federation bridges among the socials seems like a good endeavor, at least so far.
I definitely like the "federation" style of Substack and ActivityPub (and to a lesser extent Discord!) more than the firehose of a pure one-to-many network mediated by algorithm, but truthfully the increasing silo-ification of the web is really depressing, even though I'm certainly doing my part by having many of my conversations in Discord instead of on the open web. I suspect a lot of that cultural loss has more to do with SEO and robots.txt than social media per se, but I don't know for sure.
I can't vouch for anyone else but personally there is an element of pkm fatigue. A lot of communities when you start are a buzz with infectious enthusiasm, but they tend to live in a relative state of arrested development that has the "eternal september" problem of trending towards the start of a journey.
If you entrench yourself in a hobby for long enough, soon most communities become fine places to hang out, but lose the core reason to join, the learning. Instead you find yourself already well versed in most of the roundtable discussion and feel a general sense of groundhog day.
After a while (in my case it was being a VR developer for 10 years) That general enthusiasm starts to feel exhausting from your side of the table.
TL;DR I try to be a positive contributing member to any community I join, but I (like most people) join them mostly for self improvement and interest. Once that has levelled out to a "friendly rut" I will often question the value of being a regular at cheers, and feel the need to sink my teeth into something more new and personally stimulating.
In PKM once you have run the gamut of the MoCs, Zettles, Antilibraries, JohnnyDecimals, Information theory, Faceted Classification, Para...
Once you have tried every derivation of Obsidian, roam, logseq,tana,tiddlywiki,notion....
There is not really a lot of exciting innovation on a theme. The toys are cool and I like to be up to date, but I can't say I have the same excitement to hear about another 10 plugins I won't use or a different persons first steps discovering the Cornell note taking method or how to setup zotero.
...that's probably why I got lost these last 2 weeks learning about storage, raid, iscsi initators, compression formats and backup strategies.
Groundhog day is a good way to put it. But of course you go away for awhile and come back and it's like... some things are so different, but some things are so the same. Eink-optimized themes are pretty cool! But also I don't really want to debate folders vs. tags anymore... I don't know how the thinkers who are all about pushing one Big Idea do it. I am such a generalist 😅
I don’t know what you think about it, but I feel that influencers who pick a particular topic to talk about are under this constant pressure to find ways to keep reinventing the wheel in order to stay relevant. I have found that over time I don’t really want to listen to yet one more person talk about their obsidian vault or how to efficiently use backlinks etc. what I find more interesting now is specific uses of PKM. For example, I would love to see specific examples of people using PKM in my specific field of expertise rather than just PKM in general.
May I ask, how did Worldbuilding Magazine help you become a better writer? Curious to learn more. Is WorldBuilding only for fantasy fiction topics? (my naive assumption)
Worldbuilding Magazine is an amateur/unpaid hobby project, but it takes a very professional attitude, with deadlines and high production quality. Writers get paired with editors, there are themed editions, applications and what not. I learned a lot about what sorts of habits of mine are hard to parse, what my common failings are in terms of conclusions and making a point, etc. The biggest advantage was that the editors weren't there to trade feedback to get feedback on their own work -- common in writing circles -- but rather to help themselves *become better editors* which is relatively rare.
& It's not just for fantasy! Lots of stuff relevant to hard science gets written about there too.
Well, as always I seem to be in lock step with you on so many topics. Thank you for writing this. You've helped realize I'm not alone in my thinking of where to hang out especially for ideas.
I've noticed this too:
"Apparently the Metaverse algorithms are nicer to you if you use Instagram and Facebook and Threads, but man, that sounds like a lot of work and having a bunch of posts repeated across platforms is off-putting."
Sigh. Anyway, I appreciate the easy informative style of your posts. I will explore a few of your ideas. I kinda started on Mastadon but it didn't click for me. I too find certain Discord servers very help.
My answer to th question above was OTHER. The other being Substack notes for now given I author here too for some things.
I thought we were all hanging out at the Konick bar and grill. A place where everybody knows your name and great intelligent deep conversation happens when not engaged an the D&D adventures in the back room :):):)
Definitely aim for the intelligent conversations and reasonably nice local bar vibe! And may also be working on a collaborative storytelling / rp adventure literally as we speak <.<
These days I have more online conversations on Substack than anywhere else. Substack is good for long-form text, so it is good for deep thinking rather than hot takes. it's the anti-twitter in that respect.
Seems like "Substack for discourse, Discord for conversation" is most common in my circles, if I'm reading the responses right.
I hang out on Substack Notes more & more. It's social media but very casual, no one is trying to sell anything (mostly) & everyone is a writer (at least the people I tend to read). Another benefit for me is that commenting on other newsletters & on people's notes automatically makes me want to hop over to my own writing. It's like it comes with built-in motivation, sometimes inspiration too. Hope it stays that way for a while.
My number two is Discord though. Some servers (like yours!) I found via Substack, some elsewhere.
My biggest problem with sub stack notes right now is that it seems like I keep getting served a couple of really popular posts from really popular people, and they tend to be kind of sticky? So if I checked multiple times in a day, I'm seeing the same things. I've been following tons of people to try to see more of their stuff but it's not working, I don't have a good intuition for the algorithm yet.
Hmm I can kind of see that in my own explore feed too but I just switch to the following tab when I’m fed up with it.
Oh wow, I didn't realize that notes had both! They really hide that little filter don't they...
I don't think I realized notes had both!
I am mostly on Bluesky these days. There are other Obsidian users over there as well!
I love Substack, but it's a different animal and not really made for micro-blogging...at least not yet. The tools are there, but it's not (yet) a place for daily conversation....at least that's what I find. I do love Substack for slower-paced and deeper conversations, though.
Bluesky and Substack are my favourite places online.
Honestly I forgot about Bluesky! What makes it different from the other Twitter esque services? I had the vibe it was invite only Twitter during the Musk takeover but I was pretty deep in the throes of baby brain tbh
I wrote a post with some of the reasons I enjoy Bluesky so much: https://debbieohi.com/2024/03/bluesky-tips/
Just a few of the reasons I like it more than Twitter:
- Many more moderation options and ways to curate what one sees.
- You can search for hashtags not just across the platform but within a particular users feed. So if you did your Obsidian Iceberg update posts (with links to the full post) with #ObsidianIceberg, we could click on that hashtag within YOUR feed to find all your update posts.
- User Lists
- Custom feeds: a way of curating even more. I have a custom feed, for example, that searches posts made by users on a curated List with certain emoji combo or terms or hashtags. See my link above for more.
You can find me at https://bsky.app/profile/debbieohi.com
I prefer Discord as well, and I've been through a lot of chat software (IRC/mIRC in the 90s).
I never got into IRC, but RIP AOL and Battle.net
I very much appreciated this post. My current interest in M-ing my PK (is this a thing?) is in linking my Obsidian notes, now organized into a wiki of sorts, to other notes and resources on the web, as a way to have text-based conversations. The web is a big place, things are spread out and around, silos abound, and boundaries are important, and I am wary of just jumping into interactions on the socials amongst people I do not know. Nonetheless, he persists in looking around. The federation bridges among the socials seems like a good endeavor, at least so far.
I definitely like the "federation" style of Substack and ActivityPub (and to a lesser extent Discord!) more than the firehose of a pure one-to-many network mediated by algorithm, but truthfully the increasing silo-ification of the web is really depressing, even though I'm certainly doing my part by having many of my conversations in Discord instead of on the open web. I suspect a lot of that cultural loss has more to do with SEO and robots.txt than social media per se, but I don't know for sure.
It's discord for me also.
I can't vouch for anyone else but personally there is an element of pkm fatigue. A lot of communities when you start are a buzz with infectious enthusiasm, but they tend to live in a relative state of arrested development that has the "eternal september" problem of trending towards the start of a journey.
If you entrench yourself in a hobby for long enough, soon most communities become fine places to hang out, but lose the core reason to join, the learning. Instead you find yourself already well versed in most of the roundtable discussion and feel a general sense of groundhog day.
After a while (in my case it was being a VR developer for 10 years) That general enthusiasm starts to feel exhausting from your side of the table.
TL;DR I try to be a positive contributing member to any community I join, but I (like most people) join them mostly for self improvement and interest. Once that has levelled out to a "friendly rut" I will often question the value of being a regular at cheers, and feel the need to sink my teeth into something more new and personally stimulating.
In PKM once you have run the gamut of the MoCs, Zettles, Antilibraries, JohnnyDecimals, Information theory, Faceted Classification, Para...
Once you have tried every derivation of Obsidian, roam, logseq,tana,tiddlywiki,notion....
There is not really a lot of exciting innovation on a theme. The toys are cool and I like to be up to date, but I can't say I have the same excitement to hear about another 10 plugins I won't use or a different persons first steps discovering the Cornell note taking method or how to setup zotero.
...that's probably why I got lost these last 2 weeks learning about storage, raid, iscsi initators, compression formats and backup strategies.
Groundhog day is a good way to put it. But of course you go away for awhile and come back and it's like... some things are so different, but some things are so the same. Eink-optimized themes are pretty cool! But also I don't really want to debate folders vs. tags anymore... I don't know how the thinkers who are all about pushing one Big Idea do it. I am such a generalist 😅
I don’t know what you think about it, but I feel that influencers who pick a particular topic to talk about are under this constant pressure to find ways to keep reinventing the wheel in order to stay relevant. I have found that over time I don’t really want to listen to yet one more person talk about their obsidian vault or how to efficiently use backlinks etc. what I find more interesting now is specific uses of PKM. For example, I would love to see specific examples of people using PKM in my specific field of expertise rather than just PKM in general.
Agreed! What's your field?
I am a Professor of AI. This channel has the tour of content I am interested in but as you can see they don’t post very frequently https://youtube.com/@thinkinginpublic?si=ylbS6P59PeamkFBD
May I ask, how did Worldbuilding Magazine help you become a better writer? Curious to learn more. Is WorldBuilding only for fantasy fiction topics? (my naive assumption)
Worldbuilding Magazine is an amateur/unpaid hobby project, but it takes a very professional attitude, with deadlines and high production quality. Writers get paired with editors, there are themed editions, applications and what not. I learned a lot about what sorts of habits of mine are hard to parse, what my common failings are in terms of conclusions and making a point, etc. The biggest advantage was that the editors weren't there to trade feedback to get feedback on their own work -- common in writing circles -- but rather to help themselves *become better editors* which is relatively rare.
& It's not just for fantasy! Lots of stuff relevant to hard science gets written about there too.
Wow, that's what I've been looking for. Thank you for this description and your use of it.
Well, as always I seem to be in lock step with you on so many topics. Thank you for writing this. You've helped realize I'm not alone in my thinking of where to hang out especially for ideas.
I've noticed this too:
"Apparently the Metaverse algorithms are nicer to you if you use Instagram and Facebook and Threads, but man, that sounds like a lot of work and having a bunch of posts repeated across platforms is off-putting."
Sigh. Anyway, I appreciate the easy informative style of your posts. I will explore a few of your ideas. I kinda started on Mastadon but it didn't click for me. I too find certain Discord servers very help.
My answer to th question above was OTHER. The other being Substack notes for now given I author here too for some things.
Appreciatively
Tom
The idea came to me after a discussion with my husband about compilers vs. transpilers during a grocery run.
Lol
My husband is very kind to indulge my extremely random but also hyper-specific computer questions 😅
I thought we were all hanging out at the Konick bar and grill. A place where everybody knows your name and great intelligent deep conversation happens when not engaged an the D&D adventures in the back room :):):)
Definitely aim for the intelligent conversations and reasonably nice local bar vibe! And may also be working on a collaborative storytelling / rp adventure literally as we speak <.<