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indierpgnewsletter · 2 years

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New Games on Itch.io - January!

This is a post from the Indie RPG Newsletter! Before we get to the games themselves, let me talk about itch.io for a minute. The website was designed for selling videogames but the indie RPG scene adopted it like a hermit-crab chancing upon a toy truck on the beach. This has led to some strange problems. The RPG category is called “physical games”, for example. More generally, it’s a bit confusing to navigate for the average customer.

So why has this eccentric site become the host of this glorious explosion of indie game design and creativity? I can’t say for sure. Maybe its because it was designed as a protest against Steam and turns out that DriveThru has a lot of the same problems. Maybe it’s because the site makes it incredibly easy to publish games. Maybe it’s just a coincidence - a quirk of luck, just network effects compounding into something greater.

But regardless, there’s cool stuff everyday on that site - a LOT of cool stuff. So here’s my attempt at curating the games that came out in January. I found these games either by browsing the site or through people notifying me with this form. Now the important disclaimer is that I haven’t read or played most of these games. This list is me excitedly pointing out things in the shop window, take it in that spirit. My taste is idiosyncratic, so please publish your own lists! And maybe send me a link, I’d love to see them!

Itch.io January Roundup

blasé monotony by Apri describes itself as “a duet game about having conversations while bored at work” but that description hides this dramatic second act. An astronaut and someone in the control room start talking and then things start going wrong… (Free/PWYW)

Lost & Shelved by Donogh McCarthy is a solo game about a librarian finding strange and ephemeral things in the pages of returned books. I’m a sucker for anything about librarians and Donogh McCarthy is a real indie darling as far as I’m concerned.

Undisturbed by GGoldmen is a solo journalling game about dissecting human cadavers. Seems like a very thoughtful game on a grotesque subject! (Free/PWYW)

A Sage’s Salary by krushna is a solo game about a student and their sage. From an Indian designer, sages aren’t neutral figures - they’re a caste. Which makes this more interesting! I started playing but haven’t finished my playthrough of this.

Apocalypse Roadtrip by Mynar Lenahan is a forged in the dark game where you dodge “roaming Kaiju, military bombings, otherworldly cryptids, UFO fleets, and other survivors (friendly and not)”. That sounds like a good time!

5 Act Play by K-Ramstack is a solo roleplaying game where you create a 5 Act Shakespearean play based around prompts.

Dice of War by Torsten Kaltenecker is a comic game about “battles, historians and intellectual disagreements”. Um, yes! Also bonus points for “sulking in a dignified way is recommended”. (Free/PWYW)

The Belles of the Ball is an adventure by boyproblems for Heroes of Myth and Mettle. “A masquerade ball, an ancient mysterious city, a wealthy man playing at vigilante, and the Zool Chamber of Commerce. It's a party you won't want to miss.” (Free/PWYW)

Conflictus Ad Astra by Gabriel Ciprés is an expansion for the very cool (and free) game Space Knights, which is a kind of PbtA Warhammer where each player controls their own legion. (Free/PWYW)

Cold Decisions: The Cult of Namenlos by Mundos Infinitos is a “cult simulator” and honestly, enough said.

Honourable mentions: A complete, final version of Apocalypse Frame, the fast and tactical mecha game, came out this month. Also, D12 and Delve is a dungeon-delving RPG in 12 words by WH Arthur where your character is a business card.

#indie rpg #ttrpg #rpg #ttrpg community #ttrpg design

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lacefuneral · 1 year

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pretend this is a voice memo:

(cw i talk about trans death here but it isn't the main subject of my ramblings)

So. I consider myself to be a kind of amateur archivist in the way that like. A person might have taped a VHS of their favorite TV show back in the early 2000s. Like it's not something that I'm super organized about this kind of shit. But there are some things I'm trying to hang onto and hopefully you know in the future other people can have access to them too

And one of the projects that I am working on - have been working on for a while - is the project where- it's twofold because part of it is for the here and now for people to see themselves and seek solace in during a very politically charged and uncertain time. But the other purpose is for it to serve as a time capsule for this period of time and for it to be helpful for people in the future to see where we were

Anything that we have access to in the here and now, from the past, is something that was preserved in someway. I was able to read things like femme sharks and the transfag rag because someone said "this is important and I need to share this with other people".

and I was having a conversation last night with my friend. And I mentioned something offhand that I have talked about many times in my answers to inquiries sent by gay trans men. to the point where, to me, it is integral reading for transmascs of any kind. And I forget that these are just articles that someone typed up on medium that I happened to stumble across, and not say, a well-known book. And that websites like this are not permanent.

and my friend said that ze had never heard of them before. And I thought to myself OK I'll just look them up on Google and send the links over. and because I'm an amateur archivist, I thought that I would back them up on the wayback machine while I did this. but when I went to grab them, the links were down. The author had deleted these pieces.

and I felt such a strong surge of loss and anxiety. Because this is why people archive things. Because things this important can just disappear out of nowhere. And while I was having a panic attack, my friend calmly checked the wayback machine to see if someone else had backed them up. and to my utter astonishment, both of them had been.

The scary thing too is I know that services like the wayback machine are also ephemeral. in truth, everything is ephemeral. Cloud services could disappear tomorrow. Someday my USB drives will be as worthless as floppy disks. Books go out of print. And it's a scary thing to think about.

if my house suddenly caught fire, all of the trans art and artifacts that I have been slowly accumulating would be gone.

and to be honest, I don't know what the answer is. I don't know what I should do in terms of archiving. Do I download Tumblr blogs? Do I try to rely on a service like the wayback machine that may not be there five years from now or sooner or later? Do I keep physical printed copies of websites? Do I put things on a USB drive and hope that I'll be able to transfer the files from such an obsolete an archaic technology onto something more modern which too, will someday be obsolete.

I care so much about this subject because so much of queer history has been lost to time. Partially because of deliberate censorship, partially because in any era ephemera is taken for granted. I care because Leelah Alcorn's blog and Brianna Ghey's tiktoks were deleted after their deaths. And the little insight that we have of these young women and who they were are the words that they posted on social media. And that those words were preserved by other archivists. Blake Brockington i knew of before his death - he was an instrumental figure to me as a GNC trans man - and some of his posts I found were unintentionally archived by long-abandoned trans positivity blogs due to the way that this website works. every reblog is a record. and i was able to see his smiling face again, so many years later.

I hate the idea of people being names on a list. of being abstractions. trans people live rich lives. we are all multifaceted human beings. and we deserve to be known. we deserve to be remembered, to be celebrated, to be mourned.

there is a friend-of-a-friend. not someone i know personally. someone that, i assume, most likely hates me. and i was on their blog one day, out of curiosity. and i saw their meticulous archiving of a friend who had passed away. selfies and text posts. i read their loving words about her, which painted a rich picture of who this woman was. a woman that i would not know existed, were not for their efforts to keep her memory alive.

i feel that this sort of thing is important. our existence as trans people matter. regardless of notability. things like, a teenager's tiktok. like a selfie of a man post-op. a poem written by someone who will never be formally published. a clip of a trans woman singing an original song.

and i feel this sort of. pressure. and this fear also that. while i have narrowed my archival focus to transmasc people, there is so much. and i do not know where to put these things when they are archived. i do not know how i will share them. if i painstakingly export my sideblog - the thousands of photographs and videos and audios and text posts. who will view them?

and am i putting too much pressure on myself? is this anything i should worry about at all? because all life is ephemeral? i do not know.

#jay.rtf

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mitchipedia · 4 years

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What is a “digital garden?”

I encountered the idea of a “digital garden” Friday and was instantly enthusiastic about it and spent some time this weekend starting my own digital garden. Here is the result: mitchwagner.com.

A digital garden is a personal website curated by its author, with essays and information about the subject or subjects they’re excited about. Some are wide-ranging and complex and cover a variety of subjects, while others cover a single subject, such as neurology or books,

Here’s a directory of digital gardens. It’s a digital garden of digital gardens!

Digital gardens provide an alternative to chronological streams such as blogs and social media. Streams are great for finding out what’s happening and whats new now. But they’re lousy for organizing information. Also, streams are terrible for longevity. Once stuff gets pushed down off the top of the stream, it disappears. Digital gardens are places where you can organize information and keeping information available over the long term.

Digital gardens can be very simple, just an index page or a Google Doc. Or you can use sophisticated software to create complex, Wikipedia-like documents.

After a while thinking about this idea, I realized that we’re talking here about the old, 90s “personal website.” People back then would create websites devoted to their favorite bands, or hobbies, or just their own lives and interests. Eventually these got swallowed up by Wikipedia, Google and the various social media silos.

Digital gardens are an extension of, and renaming of, personal websites. That doesn’t make the idea less powerful though.

Digital gardens are exciting to me, personally, because they solve a couple of problems that I’ve been noodling about for years. One problem is that I post a lot of stuff to my streams. Some days I post a dozen or two dozen items. Most are ephemeral – links to breaking news articles, some with comments, some without. Wisecracks. Memes. Old ads and photos from the mid-20th Century.

But some of what I post seems like it should be more long-lasting, whether it’s a book review or the journal of our 25th anniversary safari to Africa last year.

A digital garden solves that problem. I can just put up an index page of links to long-lived and notable content, and let that — rather than the blog or my biography — be my home page. I’ll continue with the blog and keep the bio. But the index page will be the main entrance to my site.

Again, this is not a new idea. Gina Trapani has been doing that a few years, and I don’t think she would say her idea is particularly original to her. But it’s still a great idea — and it’s new to me.

The second problem that digital gardens solve for me is that I’ve been noodling about ideas for projects for, well, several years now. Interviews with people I find interesting, software reviews and how-tos. Occasionally I have even acted on these ideas. But I don’t do it often because I don’t have a permanent home for them.

Resources

My digital garden: mitchwagner.com.

Here’s the article that got me excited, and introduced the idea of “digital gardening” to me: Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet

How the blog broke the web – Amy Hoy provides a brief history of blogs and social media, and discusses why they’re not great ways to organize information.

Hoy says there were only 23 blogs in 1999? Amazing. By late 2001 there seemed like a million of them.

Maggie Appleton: A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden – Apparently the term and idea has been around in various forms for more than 20 years. Not surprising. The internet is a tangled web. Streams and search engines are two great ways to find stuff, but stuff can still be hard to find. That’s not a new problem.

Maggie Appleton’s directory of digital gardeners and digital gardening tools

Maggie’s Digital Garden

Maggie again: A brief overview of digital gardens as a Twitter thread.

A list of artificial brain networked notebook apps – These include a couple of familiar names to me, such as Roam Research and Obsidian. They seem to be a mix of private note-taking apps, Internet publishing tools, and private apps that can also publish to the public web.

This is a take on “digital gardens” that borrows from the philosophy of “zettelkasten.” Put simply, a zettelkasten is a system of note-taking where you write down each idea separately — in its original vision decades ago, you wrote each idea on a slip of paper or index card, though now of course there are digital versions — and then link madly between related notes. Ideas can come from books, articles, thinking, observations, whatever. Zettelkasten advocates say they can come up with fresh insights simply by returning to their zettel and following the links. German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who invented the idea, credited his zettelkasten as a collaborator on many papers and books.

You don’t have to use dedicated software for a digital garden. Mine is just an index page for my existing blog.

Second Brain – “A curated list of awesome “Public Zettelkastens 🗄️ / Second Brains 🧠 / Digital Gardens 🌱”

Digital Gardens – Another explainer with a couple of examples. The author says:

In basic terms, [a digital garden] is a different format for written content on the web. It’s about moving away from blog posts ordered by dates and categories, into more of an interlinked web of notes.

One of the main ingredients is bi-directional links between those notes, creating a network of notes, similar to Wikipedia.

I would not say that the notes have to be interlinked, Wikipedia-style. Though they can be.

gwern.net – A very nice example of a digital garden covering a broad range of subjects.

Article: My blog is a digital garden, not a blog by Joel Hooks.

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booksandtea · 5 years

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I’m looking at my “Review to Write” list and noticing it’s gotten pretty out of hand, its fine I’ll catch up. It’s one of my main focuses for the month.

Today I plan to lower the count by 7. Yes that’s right I’m going to talk about 7 books I chose to DNF already this year. Keep reading to see which books I didn’t finish and why.

Yep, there’s some uh surprising and new releases on my list. It’s why I’ve been hesitant to post it but also I don’t want to keep repeating myself so here we go. Its down on paper, well, on screen and can be referred too easier.

The Informant by Susan Wilkins Series: Kaz Phelps #1 Genre: Crime | Adult Length: 465 pages Published on 20th November 2014 by Pan Macmillan Purchase*: Amazon | Wordery | Blackwells *these are affiliate links Susan Wilkins: Website | Twitter | Goodreads Received for free from publisher? in exchange for an honest review

Synopsis: Set in London and Essex, The Informant is a story of ruthless criminals, corrupt cops, obsessive love and the villainy that operates on both sides of the law.

As a drug-fuelled teenage tearaway, Kaz Phelps took the rap for her little brother Joey over a bungled armed robbery and went to jail.

Six years later she’s released on licence. Clean and sober, and driven by a secret passion for her lawyer, Helen, Kaz wants to escape the violence and abuse of her Essex gangster family.

Joey is a charming, calculating and cold psychopath. He worships the ground Kaz walks on and he’s desperate to get her back in the family firm. All Kaz wants is a fresh start and to put the past behind her.

When Joey murders an undercover cop, DS Nicci Armstrong is determined to put him behind bars. What she doesn’t realize is that her efforts are being sabotaged by one of their own and the Met is being challenged at the highest level.

The final test for Kaz comes when her cousin, Sean, gets out of jail. He is a vicious, old-school thug and wants to show Kaz who is boss. Kaz may be tough enough to face down any man, but is she strong enough to turn her back on her family and go straight?

I’ll be honest, didn’t even realise this was a proof copy until last month when I picked it up which means this is very possible the first proof I ever got sent.

Its from 2014

Which is around the time I was still in education and was very hit and miss with my blogging schedule so first of all I’m sending lots of apologise to the publishers for letting them down.

And well my taste in books has changed a lot. The last crime book I read all the way through I had a lot of thoughts on and decided I’d probably had enough with the genre.

I tried again for The Informant though and noped out very early on when it was pretty violent but the guy was having a Good Time whilst partaking in the violence. Sorry! I tried even with my doubts.

The Wolf by Leo Carew Series: Under the Northern Sky #1 Genre: Fantasy | Adult Length: 465 pages Published on 3rd April 2018 by Orbit Purchase*: Amazon | Wordery | Blackwells *these are affiliate links Leo Carew: Website | Twitter | Goodreads Received for free from attending a book event

Synopsis: The Wolf is a thrilling, savagely visceral, politically nuanced, and unexpectedly wry exploration of power – and how far one will go to defend it.

Violence and death have come to the land under the Northern Sky.

The Anakim dwell in the desolate forests and mountains beyond the black river, the land under the Northern Sky. Their ancient ways are forged in Unthank silver and carved in the grey stone of their heartland, their lives measured out in the turning of centuries, not years.

By contrast, the Sutherners live in the moment, their vitality much more immediate and ephemeral than their Anakim neighbors. Fragile is the peace that has existed between these very different races – and that peace is shattered when the Suthern armies flood the lands to the north. These two races revive their age-old hatred and fear of each other. Within the maelstrom of war, two leaders will rise to lead their people to victory.

Only one will succeed.

I picked this up from a New Voices event hosted by the publisher, I was really excited for this one! I mean it’s a fantasy book of course I was excited for it.

I even got to talk to the author and it sounded really good.

To be honest, if I were to revisit any of the adult books I DNF it would probably be this one.

But unfortunately the book and I just didn’t get on. There was no major fault with it, I just wasn’t having a good time reading it.

And therefore it ended up on the DNF pile. It’s that simple.

Butting in here to change format a little bit because I picked up Past Life and In Our Mad and Furious City from the same publishing event(s – one was the year later) and had similar issues with them.

The atmosphere and having lovely chats with the authors and publicists is great. It makes me want to try new things. Unfortunately these both fell short on being books I enjoyed.

In Our Mad and Furious City I found myself not enjoying the writing style.

Whereas with Past Life I wasn’t a fan of reading about women in really shitty situations. I’m sure it probably gets better but I gotta prioritise my time y’know.

Okay, I can now move onto the 3 books you’re actually here for.

The Beholder by Anna Bright Series: The Beholder #1 Genre: Fantasy | Young Adult Length: 448 pages Published on 4the June 2019 by HarperTeen Purchase*: Amazon | Wordery | Blackwells *these are affiliate links Anna Bright: Website | Twitter | Goodreads Received via trading

Synopsis: Selah has waited her whole life for a happily ever after. As the only daughter of the leader of Potomac, she knows her duty is to find the perfect match, a partner who will help secure the future of her people. Now that day has finally come.

But after an excruciatingly public rejection from her closest childhood friend, Selah’s stepmother suggests an unthinkable solution: Selah must set sail across the Atlantic, where a series of potential suitors awaits—and if she doesn’t come home engaged, she shouldn’t come home at all.

From English castle gardens to the fjords of Norge, and under the eye of the dreaded Imperiya Yotne, Selah’s quest will be the journey of a lifetime. But her stepmother’s schemes aren’t the only secrets hiding belowdecks…and the stakes of her voyage may be higher than any happy ending.

Of all these books this is the one I made the most progress with! So I’m also pretty sad I chose to DNF it because it robbed me of a lot of reading time.

I was definitely interested, I traded a book for this one!

And I still low-key want to know what happens.

But after 100 and something pages… nothing had really happened.

Other than the main character had gotten on a boat.

It was such a slowly paced book and I finally had to accept defeat (and trade it on to someone who was really excited about it so I’m hoping that they’re much happier with it than I was).

The cover is beautiful and I do think there is appeal to it for other readers.

Synopsis: Before, Jessica has always struggled with anger issues, but come sophomore year that all changes when Vivi crashes into her life. As their relationship blossoms, Vivi not only helps Jess deal with her pain, she also encourages her to embrace her talent as an artist. And for the first time, it feels like the future is filled with possibilities. After In the midst of senior year, Jess’s perfect world is erased when Vivi suddenly passes away. Reeling from the devastating loss, Jess pushes everyone away, and throws out her plans to go to art school. Because art is Vivi and Vivi is gone forever.

Desperate for an escape, Jess gets consumed in her work-study program, letting all of her dreams die. Until she makes an unexpected new friend who shows her a new way to channel her anger, passion, and creativity. Although Jess may never draw again, if she can find a way to heal and room in her heart, she just might be able to forge a new path for herself without Vivi.

Lauren reading a contemporary by choice? Oh wow what is this.

Wild huh?! (Buckle up because there is a second one too)

Scrap what I said about The Behold because this is the book I’m saddest I couldn’t finish.

The Meaning of Birds is told in alternating time lines (similarly to my favourite book ever The Bone Witch). After the death of Vivi and before the death of Vivi.

The chapters that were set before Vivi’s death were amazing! I loved them so much. My heart was full experiencing all the emotions you go through when having a new crush.

Agh it was so soft and sweet and I wanted to read it all.

But the after chapters were an actual chore to read in comparison and it made me actually skip them because I was enjoying this f/f romance so much.

But then there was a very large instance of fat shaming that wasn’t addressed and BYE BOOK. Not for me.

The Paper & Hearts Society by Lucy Powrie Series: The Paper & Hearts Society #1 Genre: Contemporary | Young Adult Length: 255 pages Published on 13th June 2019 by Hodder Children’s Books Purchase*: Amazon | Wordery | Blackwells *these are affiliate links Lucy Powrie: Website | Twitter | Goodreads ARC received at work, not requested.

Synopsis: A brand new series from Booktuber Lucy Powrie – about what happens when you give up on trying to fit in and let your weird out! It’s time to join The Paper & Hearts Society …

Tabby Brown is tired of trying to fit in. She doesn’t want to go to parties – in fact, she would much rather snuggle up on the sofa with her favourite book.

It’s like she hasn’t found her people …

Then Tabby joins a club that promises to celebrate books. What could go wrong? EVERYTHING – especially when making new friends brings out an AWKWARD BUZZING feeling all over her body.

But Olivia, Cassie, Henry and Ed have something that makes Tabby come back. Maybe it’s the Austen-themed fancy-dress parties, or Ed’s fluffy cat Mrs Simpkins, or could it be Henry himself …

Can Tabby let her weird out AND live THE BEST BOOKISH LIFE POSSIBLE?

Perfect for fans of Holly Smale and Super Awkward.

I’m actually really nervous to write this review because I think everyone else has loved it.

But, and its a big but.

I don’t usually read contemporaries. I wasn’t planning on reading this either.

As a bookseller we often get sent early copies even when we don’t request them, as I knew it was a release people were excited for I figured I could at least try it. Given it was in my hands anyway?

The tone of voice is a lot younger than I anticipated, that’s not a bad thing at all, and its definitely something that the YA area needs. So I’m really excited for the kids who get to read this and it will be perfect for them.

As I realised it wasn’t going to be a book that worked for me because of these two areas I figured it was best to just give it a new home to someone who was actually excited for it, so away to a friend it went.

I’m glad they enjoyed it.

So just to clarify, nothing actually wrong with Lucy’s book. It just wasn’t written for me and that’s okay. Theres 2938394 books out there that are written for me.

Do you disagree with my DNF choices?

Why I DNF The Beholder, The Meaning of Birds and 5 other books I'm looking at my "Review to Write" list and noticing it's gotten pretty out of hand, its fine I'll catch up.

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getaether · 6 years

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Aether for Redditors

Hey there!

Due to the recent news about Reddit, we've had a few redditors coming to check us out. Which is awesome, so I wanted to write a guide about how Aether compares to Reddit, and what it does similarly, and differently. Likely you'll be fairly comfortable quick, but there are still a few interesting aspects of Aether you might want to keep in mind as you warm up.

We are a small, friendly community, consider this a welcome pack. 🙂

As I hear more and more questions from redditors in the community, this might be updated occasionally.

Aether is a peer-to-peer network

This is the most major, obvious difference. Aether has no servers. It exists ... nowhere, really. As a result, Aether is an app, not a website. It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and mobile apps are (eventually) coming.

This has a few implications. When you post on Aether, what happens is that your computer starts to share the content you posted. Other computers will get that content from you, and they will broadcast it to other computers, letting your post spread to the network in a sweeping fashion. As of February 2019, a post takes about ten minutes to reach the whole network.

That means Aether app is an app that needs to keep running in the background, like an email client.

If you post something, and then close the app immediately, that content will not be delivered to other people.

If you want to be sure your post is delivered, wait half an hour or so. Aether just stays on the taskbar / menubar (like Discord), so you can close the window and it'll continue to work in the background. In the future this is going to be visible in the UI when your post has spread to the network. (Like double checkmark from messaging apps)

Aether is ephemeral (like Snapchat - things disappear eventually)

Anything you post on Aether will be gone in about 6 months. This is nice, because no one can stalk your decade's worth of Reddit history and figure out where you sleep.

This is both a philosophical and a practical thing.

It is a philosophical thing, because having information gone vastly improves privacy. It also makes people be able to discuss more freely, without being concerned about whatever they wrote will bite them ten years into the future. We all grow up, and we were all less experienced when we were younger. Aether tries to respect the humanity in that by deleting too-old content.

But it is also a practical thing since it's a peer to peer network, it is limited by the disk space of its participants, so we try to be respectful of that as well.

Unlike Reddit, in Aether, moderator actions are visible to users

First of all, before anything, no one can edit your posts except you. It is cryptographically impossible. You'd think no one would do that, but given the current climate, you'd (sadly) be wrong.

Beyond that, when a moderator takes an action (delete a comment, let's say), that action is visible on the community's mod actions feed. This is a feed of events that mods generate that shows exactly what got deleted, and the reason why.

You can disable any mod, and choose anyone as a mod

In Aether, if you don't like what a mod is doing, you can just disable him. Flip a switch, and everything he deleted reappears. You can also choose a non-mod as a mod.

There is a 'front page' list of communities, called SFW list

These SFWlisted communities are the ones that appear on the front page. This is a limited, curated list of larger communities. You can always create your own community without ever needing to get into this front-page-eligible list of communities if you want. You can also disable this list completely by following the instructions in the app if you want.

Like Reddit, Aether is within the jurisdiction of the United States

That means US law applies — it is not a free-for-all. We have to remove copyrighted content via DMCA, as well as illegal (and those with reasonable chance of being illegal) content.

Aether keeps a copy of the whole network on your machine

This is why it can be so snappy: you can post offline, and when you connect, those posts will be spread to the network. The 'whole of the network' is actually very small, because Aether only carries compressed text. It doesn't carry images, videos, or anything else, so you need to post to Imgur or other image hosts, similar to Reddit.

This also emphasises the importance of no-illegal-content mentioned above. Since we all carry the text of the whole of the network, it's in all our best interest to keep the network clean. It's very hard to make text illegal, however, it's up to all of us to keep it as such. If you see something illegal, use the report button, or send an email with a link to it.

(And yes, there are guards to prevent spammers from creating a million posts and bloating the network size, such as required proofs-of-work.)

Aether is a work-in-progress

Despite the UI, Aether is still very much a work in progress. There are parts of the app that are being worked on, such as elections, being able to add a second mod to a community (Aether communities are denoted as b/Community instead of r/Subreddit) and so on. Things will break, and perhaps repeatedly so. At this point (a month after its release in December) things generally work provided that you have a stable internet connection and can keep the app open appropriately. Nevertheless, this is alpha software. If you have any bugs or feature requests, file them at https://meta.getaether.net. b/Meta is also a good place. (The link requires you have Aether installed)

Like Reddit, you can link to Aether from the web

Here's an example link:

aether://board/86e782e80681ac580b4d6d102b12e787c066e59f194fee57bb0bf83cc1e42fc6

(this links to b/Meta)

Notice aether:// instead of http:// at the beginning. As mentioned above, it needs the recipient to have Aether installed, though. We'll eventually have a preview site on the regular web that can show content without needing it installed, but again, work in progress. 🙂

If you want to post on Reddit or Twitter, and have it be recognised as a link, you can shorten the links at TinyURL, which accepts and shortens Aether links. Or if the place supports Markdown, like Reddit, you can always do:

[my link name](aether://board/86e782...e42fc6)

And make it show up as a link that way.

Aether is paid for by the 'unique' (orange) usernames and its business version

Since the current conversation is around how Reddit is funded, I want to be completely transparent about how Aether makes money (it makes very, very little money) as well. Here's how this works.

a) Similar to Reddit's gold, if you want to support Aether, you can buy a 'unique' username (with a checkmark, like Twitter) that makes you the unique owner of that username for the donation duration. If you want to do so, check out the Patreon.

b) Aether also has an upcoming business version, that allows a company to purchase a private instance of Aether for their own internal use. This comes with a few nice additions, like being able to use email to create threads and posts, and get emails back when other people post. It's good as a productivity, tool, and it's much better than Slack because it interrupts your people less. If you're a tech lead and interested in piloting this with your team, please reach out via email and we'll set you up.

Sounds interesting? Try Aether here. Hope to see you around!

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and0rk · 7 years

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Brain Heroin

I remember when I first got hooked on Reddit. It was late in my sophomore year, back when all I did was study, do my cookie-cutter extracurriculars, and play League of Legends. I didn’t have nearly as many vices then as I do now. I can’t remember exactly what drew me there, but somehow I landed on the portal for AskReddit. Specifically, a thread that has since taken off in notoriety and spawned a host of wannabe duplicates: a thread asking Redditors to share their deepest, darkest secret, one that could ruin their lives if revealed.

Immediately, I couldn’t get enough. That thread was peculiar in that, being so popular, new stories kept being shared and kept floating to the top. It transcended the typical ephemerality that characterizes the vast majority of Reddit posts. And young, naïve, impressionable me kept on hitting refresh. Every day I would visit the thread to see what new juicy stories were available. Like the first experience of heroin to a junkie, the effects were devastating. For years I held Reddit as some treasure trove of rich information and enlightening perspectives. After a couple years of lurking on AskReddit, I decided that I could only fully grasp the Reddit experience if I signed up myself and subscribed to subreddits tailored to my interests. Doing so, I believed, would only augment the experience; not only that, it would allow me to better myself by pursuing hobbies and learning useful life skills!

I now sit here, nearly six years removed from that first fateful encounter, in a coffee shop, struggling to state my purpose in applying to graduate school. Every time my brain freezes – which is often – my fingers immediately twitch toward that well practiced combo: alt + tab, ctrl + t, r enter. Without thinking, I know it will bring me to Reddit homepage, where I will be flooded with purple links, rehashed memes, contrite one-liners, and inflammatory hot takes. Along with my then-new account I now have over five thousand comment karma, fifty subreddit subscriptions, Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) downloaded, a few multi-reddits for my browsing convenience, a Reddit iPhone app, and way too many hours logged on the site. And despite my waning interest in and increasingly cynical attitude towards the content offered on Reddit, I cannot help but going back for more.

What is it that draws me to Reddit? It can’t be the content. If so, I wouldn’t procrastinate until 2am, wasting most of my time on – you guessed it – Reddit, then wake up four hours later and, after minutes of getting up, begin browsing on my phone. After all, over those four hours in the middle of the night, very few new posts are made. I wouldn’t ctrl + w, alt + tab close the browser and flip back to my assignments, then reverse the process five minutes later. Again, in those five minutes, am I actually going to see anything I haven’t seen before? But my fingers keep scrolling; my eyes keep scanning; my brain grows sufficiently numb.

Ah. That’s it. Every hit of Reddit numbs my brain a little more. It dulls my senses. It allows me to forget, even if only instantaneously, the issues I have to tackle in the next month, week, day, hour. The site’s neat interface, particularly with RES enabled, packages easily digestible images and blurbs into a steady stream of nothingness. Posters with short attention spans and commenters with shorter ones offer just a few lines to read at a time – fun to skim, but nothing that would inundate me. If I don’t like what I see, I can just back out and read something else. And if, at the end of the day, my brain is too tired to process even the two or three sentences comprising a post, I can switch to looking at pictures of animals and gifs of people doing stupid things.

It’s not that I like the content. For the most part, I’m not actually learning anything new. For instance, when I first subbed to /r/coffee, I felt like I was seeing so much more every day – and I was! But there’s only so many posts you can read comparing a Kalita Wave with a Hario v60, or contrasting a Lido 3 with a Baratza Encore, or asking about the best coffee shops in Manhattan, until they stop offering anything original. But I still keep cycling back to the sub.

Rather, it’s that I love the momentary distraction. I live for the microsecond of bliss when I can open up that Reddit tab and stop thinking about my looming responsibilities and deadlines. It’s analogous to heroin use. The first uses are glory, bliss, elongated periods of ecstasy and joy. But that ecstasy fades to comfort, then satisfaction, then contentment, until it does nothing more than temporarily numb the senses and the pain. Not that I’ve ever done heroin, or know anybody who does heroin. But that’s how they describe it in the books and movies, at least. And also how they describe it on Reddit. Oh, Reddit.

It’s not really Reddit alone, although this post does seem focused on that one website. You could replace it with Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, Candy Crush, porn; whatever it is that you turn to repeatedly for brief distraction and unfulfilling contentment. Even for me, it occasionally swings between various social media sites, the ESPN fantasy football app, sudoku… whatever my distraction flavor of the day is. Reddit is really just a placeholder for the mind-numbing drug of choice. The advent of the internet and then the development of increasingly powerful mobile devices have placed these drugs within an arm’s reach, within a mouse click. It’s as if you had an unending supply of syringes and a lighter and a little bent spoon, and whenever you want, you just heat up and shoot up. And all those syringes just sit next to you as you do your work. Every time you hit writer’s block again, you close your eyes, plunge the syringe, close your eyes, and forget. Except it’s not heroin flowing through the veins; it’s memes flowing through the neurons.

Like most things I write, this brief blog thing doesn’t have a conclusive end or a moral or anything. It’s just some introspection on why it’s so easy for me to be distracted, and some analysis on one of the more major outlets for my short attention span. It was all done stream-of-consciousness while I should be writing my statement of purpose for Stanford. In a coffee shop. Oh well, at least I wasn’t on Reddit.

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mariemary1 · 7 years

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The News Feed is Outdated: How Stories Changed the Way I Think About Social Media

Right now, the standards we expect on the web are being re-written for mobile. The rise of stories across Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger and Facebook is the perfect example of this.

The News Feed is outdated and stories are becoming the default for content consumption.

Very few formats, features, apps, or services are truly unique.

Facebook, for example, didn’t invent the vertical scrolling feed.

For decades, way before Mark Zuckerburg even enrolled in Harvard, online content has been viewed in vertical, scrolling feeds.

From reading content on blogs and news sites to seeing which of your friends had recently made changes on Bebo, we’ve been accustomed to seeing data aggregated vertically for as long as I can remember.

What Facebook actually popularized was the algorithmically-sorted feed, which they pioneered in 2006 with the release of their News Feed.

Since the New Feed’s launch, we’ve seen Facebook’s influence on across the web, with many platforms also adopting algorithms to show users more specific, personalized content that some data wizardry has deemed they’ll have an interest in:

In 2016 Instagram shifted to algorithmically-sorted feed

Twitter launched “While you were away” to show tweets you may have missed since you last opened the app

Medium orders your homepage based on content you’ve read/recommended in the past

And now, since Snapchat brought the stories format to prominence, we’ve seen its influence reflected across mobile, with many of the largest social/media products in the world implementing their own version. From Facebook Stories to Medium Series and Twitter Moments.

You see it all the time. When one app or product breaks out and challenges the norm, others will follow. You just need to look at how many Uber-for-X or Tinder-esque apps have been released over the past couple of years.

But why do we see this copy-catting with successful new technologies?

As Wired writer, David Pierce explains, when a system works, it’s just easier if everyone implements it:

Having one broadly adopted system just makes life easier, since people don’t have to learn a new language and dance routine every time they want to try something. It happened a while ago on desktop PCs, for instance: it was eventually decided that keyboards should be QWERTY, interfaces should be graphical, and things should scroll up and down.

Why Stories are the new News Feed

The News Feed is not a native experience on mobile

The News Feed was designed for desktop and was a wonderful place to share text-based statuses and links to your favorite blog posts, the funniest YouTube videos and full albums of your holiday photos. But social media has now moved on.

Facebook now reaches 1.86 billion monthly active users and the biggest driver in revenue and user growth is on mobile. Facebook now counts 1.23 billion daily active users, where 1.15 billion of them are on mobile. For ad revenue, mobile represents 84 percent of the total, too.

In contrast, as mobile has increased its dominance across the web, Facebook has seen a drop in original user-generated content shared to its platform with a 21% decline reported between mid-2015 and mid-2016.

“The way people have been prompted to share for 10 years, it’s very text-centric,” Facebook Camera product manager Connor Hayes explained to TechCrunch. “Even when you look at the way we’ve done this on mobile, you can see half of the screen is still taken up by a place for you to type text.”

Whilst Facebook is seeing a downward trend in user-generated content, Snapchat is reportedly generating more than 10 billion video views daily and over 150m Instagram users are creating stories each day, too.

It seems that sharing to a feed isn’t quite as appealing anymore. Neither is consuming content via a vertical feed.

The camera is becoming the focal point of communication

With the News Feed, users have to put in a lot of work to get any value: Content is surrounded by empty space, you have to scroll to find something that interests you and, often, content doesn’t take up your whole screen, so you have to tap to enjoy the full viewing experience.

“We like to think of the camera as the new keyboard,” a Facebook Product Manager told TechCrunch. And in Snap’s IPO letter to investors, Evan Spiegel wrote: “In the way that the flashing cursor became the starting point for most products on desktop computers, we believe that the camera screen will be the starting point for most products on smartphones.”

Sometimes it’s hard to encapsulate moments or feelings in words and this is where the camera comes into its own as a communication tool. Through photos and videos we can share the fun, fleeting moments of our lives with those closest to us, without needing to sum them up in a sentance or two.

Of course, the camera won’t fully replace our need for a keyboard just yet, if ever. And Facebook see Stories as an “additive,” sitting alongside the News Feed and their other products rather than replacing them. “We’ve tested in markets with Instagram Stories and Messenger Day, and we’ve seen this as accretive. They end up posting more and they like using the Stories format across apps,” Hayes said.

A shift in sharing habits

With the rise of Snapchat, we’ve become accustomed to sharing multiple and frequent updates throughout the day – a way of communicating that just doesn’t fit with a traditional, web-based vertical feed.

With a vertical feed, it’s hard to lace together groups of posts into a cohesive story someone can easily follow along. A case in point here is live sports on Facebook, I often see scores and in-game updates showing in my feed hours after a game is completed.

But with stories, everything is there, in one place from start to finish. Viewers always see the first post in story ahead of the newest or most popular post.

The beauty of stories is really in how easy they are to create and consume. In just a couple of taps and swipes, you can create and share snippets of your day. Stories enable us to share the exciting, vivid moments of our lives in-the-moment. And rather than posting a singular highlight of our day to the News Feed, we can share immersive narratives that tell a story over a 24hr period of time.

Just as the News Feed has been the default way to discover and consume content for the last decade-or-so, I feel all social channels with now shift to stories like, mobile native ways to create and consume content. The ephemeral nature of Stories – they disappear after 24hrs on each channel – also make them must-view content.

“Stories are a format, not an app,” Mills Baker, former Product Designer at Facebook, explained on Quora. “When Periscope and Meerkat, and later Twitter and Facebook (and others) launched “live” video, or when multiple companies offer solutions for “360-degree” videos, we view it as something much nearer to a commodity feature than a unique innovation.”

The launch of Facebook Stories enables Facebook to begin a gradual shift towards a mobile product that’s truly built for the mobile/video world. With stories, the core Facebook product and News Feed continues to work for everyone, but they can now simultaneously support newer users and those with a thirst for sharing, too.

Since rolling out Instagram Stories in August 2016, Facebook has launched variations of Stories across its various platforms with Messenger Day, WhatsApp Status and Facebook Stories.

Additionally, Twitter has launched Moments as a way to stitch together groups of tweets into a narrative and Medium has recently launched Series as a way to encourage users to create stories that unfold over time.

How Stories changed the way I think about social media

When Stories were first introduced by Instagram, it felt like a bit of a gimmick: “Hey, the cool kids at Snapchat are doing stories. Let’s do them, too.” But stories are much more than a gimmick. They’re a potentially seismic shift in how we create and consume content.

And with the recent launch of Facebook Stories, the format has now been exposed to Facebook’s 1.16 billion mobile users – way more people than have already used stories on Instagram and Snapchat, who both have ~150m people using the feature:

Snap announced in their S-1 filing that Snapchat had 158m daily active users in Q4 2016

Instagram announced that Stories had 150m daily active users in January 2017

Stories, by nature, are more immersive than other types of digital and social content. The experience exists within a single place and doesn’t try to drive you away to new websites and platforms (though Instagram has experimented with links in stories).

The uptake of Facebook Stories in many markets hasn’t been as immediate as the adoption of stories on Instagram, however, I firmly believe that the feature’s launch signals a huge shift in the way we’ll consume content on mobile and the type of content we’ll share.

Creating opportunity for shared experiences

The future of social media will no longer be about sharing only the perfect moments. It’ll no longer be about retweets and how many people like your content. It’s about going deep, not wide: how many people are tuning into your stories each day; how many people share your content directly with their friends and close-knit groups and how we use storytelling to create empathy through shared experiences.

User-generated content has always been valuable for brands, but stories have taken the possibilities to the next level and created a space in which everyone can create and share authentic content in important moments.

For example, Snapchat regularly curates crowd-sourced stories around large and important events, enabling anyone, not ‘influencers’, in a location to share their experiences at scale.

Snapchat has also opened up its search functionality to allow users to search for accounts to follow or stories to watch, based on topics.

This opens up new opportunities for users to discover content that’s relevant to them—whether it’s a local event in their home town or at a huge national sporting event.

Series on Medium, another stories-based feature, also enable shared experiences between the creator and consumer. For example, one series tells the story of someone training to be able to dunk a basketball, documenting his struggle along the way.

Series differ from stories in a couple of ways: Series are permanent and writers can create multiple series at the same time. With Series, you don’t have to publish a long-form piece on content and can instead tell a story periodically in a way that’s mobile friendly to create and consume.

Brands (and dollars) follow attention

Why should brands care about stories?

The stories format has gained velocity as a user behavior and is much-loved by the individual people who contribute on social media: you, me, our friends and family. Shifts like the News Feed and shifts like stories first occur because of demand by individuals. And as more and more people start using a platform or behavior, businesses follow.

In the early days of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, many businesses didn’t quite know how to use these new platforms. But those who did won big.

Social media early adopters knew attention was shifting away from more traditional channels like radio, TV and email and into social. They joined the conversation in an authentic, compelling way and began to build huge audiences, often from nothing, and shifted their budgets over from traditional advertising channels to social.

It feels like we’re about to see a similar shift again, with attention moving away from a vertical scroll and into stories.

Ad dollars will always follow attention. And with the addition of Stories to Facebook’s main app and Instagram, Facebook has created additional revenue streams and opportunities to monetise content separately from the News Feed.

Alongside paid marketing opportunities, there will also be additional opportunities for reach and engagement through stories as it’s the medium that many consumers are going to be using. This has been evidenced by the fast adoption of Instagram Stories by businesses.

“Immersive storytelling through Instagram Stories engages and invites our community to be part of an adventure. Instagram provides us the perfect tools to build awareness around our recently launched product Airbnb Experiences,” says Eric Toda, Global Head of Social Marketing and Content at Airbnb. “By creating and publishing experience-driven stories, we can truly captivate and reach travelers wishing to book aspirational trips on Airbnb.”

Stories and Camera: Two new advertising opportunities

Facebook makes billions of dollars in profit every quarter, largely from its incredible advertising product. And yep, you guessed it, stories bring new advertising opportunities to Facebook as well.

Snapchat and Instagram already include ads between two stories from your friends or other accounts you follow and I don’t think it’ll be long before we see ads between stories on Facebook, either.

The big opportunity here is to create additional ad space in products that have previously been hard to drive ad revenue from, like Messenger and Whatsapp.

Conversations are hard to monetize and if Facebook were to inject adverts in-between instant messages it would probably be met with much anger from users. Adverts between videos, however, is much more accepted. If Messenger Day and Whatsapp Status begin to see traction, Facebook could have ways to increase revenue from both those products.

On a similar note, Series could also provide a route to revenue for Medium with full-screen interstitial ads that showing up between slides.

Driving revenue from the camera

The new Facebook camera also launched with six Snapchat-like lenses from six major Hollywood studios to promote current or upcoming releases:

This is another way for Facebook to create additional revenue from its largest advertisers (who can afford the likely six-or-seven-figure costs associated with these types of sponsorships – Snapchat reportedly sells these sponsorships for between $450,000 and $750,000 per day).

Sponsored Lenses on Snapchat has already proven to be a great business advertising model, with Gatorade’s sponsored Super Bowl Lens which generated over 100 million views over SuperBowl weekend – that’s almost as many views as the game received live on TV (111.9 million).

By using an augmented filter on a selfie, and making themselves a part of the content, brands can create fun, shareable experiences for consumers, instead of adverts.

By integrating stories and launching a new camera, Facebook has opened up new advertising opportunities in places that ads would have previously felt invasive.

Over to you

Have stories changed the way you use social media? Do you find it challenging to come up with content for stories across platforms?

What do you think the future of social media looks like?

Leave a comment below, I’m excited to hear your thoughts and join the discussion

Thank The News Feed is Outdated: How Stories Changed the Way I Think About Social Media for first publishing this post.

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