I quit Twitter a little over a week ago. I'm very good at quitting Twitter - I've done it several times. When I first started ausglam.space as an alternative, I realised that whilst I wanted to get out of the toxic and addictive time suck that is the Twitter experience, I still wanted somewhere to share interesting things I've read or encountered. This was the genesis of the marginalia series on this blog. A trend of the last couple of years has been an upsurge in personal email newsletters, and I've started to see the attraction. I subscribe to Dan Cohen's Humane Ingenuity and Audrey Watters' Hack Education News Weekly, and Seb Chan also has a newsletter called Fresh and new. The common denominator is that this is regular, relatively brief writing, expected to be delivered to and read in an email client. I've read various things about what is driving the move to email newsletters, but for myself it's fairly simple: I don't want to be on Twitter, I don't expect people to subscribe to my blog via RSS, and my Marginalia posts are to a fair degree contextual to a particular time. They're also conceptually quite different to a 'normal' blog post, which for me tends to be more of an essay arguing a point. In Marginalia I might be arguing one or more points, but primarily it's a vehicle to say "Check out this interesting thing, here is my off-the-cuff response to it".
All of which is to say I'm moving Marginalia to an email newsletter. You can sign up at marginalia.hugh.run, and since I'm publishing it using write.as you can also subscribe via RSS and Mastodon/ActivityPub by following @share@marginalia.hugh.run
You can read the first (eighth) post at marginalia.hugh.run/marginalia-8-reality-kindness-and-the-machine