Links Of Interest
Wednesday, August 5, 2026
Naomi Alderman spent a fantastic hour on the You and Yours programme yesterday, talking about her new idea (and trial of) a “Couch to 5k esque” plan to help get back in to reading, in the age of distraction.
I highly recommend taking a look at Naomi’s great introductory post:
First of all, this program, as I’m conceiving it today, is essentially intended for people who have great memories of reading enjoyably but have found that their brains have been sucked into social media and the smartphones. It feels like a long time since they were in a regular enjoyable life-sustaining reading habit. It’s not our fault. When we bought our first smartphone, we didn’t know that they were going to have this addictive or compulsive effect on us.
Saturday, May 9, 2026 →
Nice overview of the new Thundermail service from Kev Quirk:
My Inital Thoughts On Thunderbird Pro - Kev Quirk
If I’m honest, my first impressions are underwhelming. I get that this is an early preview but for the price, services like Zoho and Fastmail are better services, and better value for money.
I don’t regret signing up though - it’s important to support open source services, and as Thunderbird Pro matures, it will hopefully evolve into a service that can contend with the OG’s in this space.
Saturday, May 9, 2026 →
A nice overview of FediForum and 2mr.social - two recent fediverse conferences:
FR#161 – Conference Edition
Across both events, the open social web is widening out a bit. FediForum gave the headline slot to a Dutch MEP and put introductory talks on both ActivityPub and atproto on the program. 2mr.social brought politicians, media and civil society together in Hamburg, and ended with a declaration framing Matrix, the fediverse, and atproto as three parts of one European social stack.
Friday, April 24, 2026 →
Own Your Web – Issue 18: Curators:
So what becomes valuable, in a world like this? Not more content. We are drowning in content. What becomes valuable is someone you trust, saying: This is worth your time. Here’s why.
That’s curation. And it’s not new.
A superb entry from Matthias on blog curation (packed with great links)
Sunday, April 5, 2026
From the first Fast Company article I’ve read in years:
All I know for sure is that using Surf leaves me feeling better about the state of the internet. I am aware that the net is rapidly filling up with AI-generated slop, and that, furthermore, the technology’s impact on search and advertising threatens to disincentivize humans from bothering with the medium at all. But for now, there’s still lots of great stuff out there—and Surf is a refreshingly inventive way to find it.
I’ve been playing with Surf this week. I had the iOS beta months ago, but some kind of bug made me lose interest. Now, however, I’m having great fun making feeds and calmly reading through others. Love it.
Sunday, March 29, 2026
From Thereallo:
The official White House Android app has a cookie/paywall bypass injector, tracks your GPS every 4.5 minutes, and loads JavaScript from some guy’s GitHub Pages.
Put me down as “unsurprised”.
Friday, October 10, 2025
The main person behind Tiny Tiny RSS is to shut down the project on November 1st:
The reasons for this are many but the tl;dr is that I no longer find it fun to maintain public-facing anything, be it open source projects or websites. As for tt-rss specifically, it has been ‘done’ for years now and the “let’s bump base PHP version and fix breakages” routine is not engaging in the slightest.
Sad news, but I’m sure the project will be forked and kept going in some vain.