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Birchtree runs on Ghost, and I'm super happy with it; I'd use it even if the company behind it was unremarkable. Thankfully, they're also very cool, and have been supporters of the fediverse for several years now. Earlier this year, they made it so all Ghost blogs could natively exist on the fediverse, and you can follow this site at @matt@birchtree.me on Mastodon or many other ActivityPub apps. Ghost Explore is their new effort to promote those using Ghost. I don't want them to go down the Substack road and turn Ghost into a social platform, but stuff like this is really cool to see. I've been browsing this for like 15 minutes and have found some cool new sites I hadn't heard of before. I'd recommend taking a look and seeing if you find anyone of interest in there. And of course, since Ghost is just a way to host a website, you can follow these sites anywhere, you don't need to use Ghost. The open web remains the best. ❤️

Why am I making an RSS reader? I don't know. There are a thousand RSS readers out there already, and they all read RSS feeds, but none of them work the way I'd like them to. So I'm making my own. It's obviously a terrible idea. So why do it? Mostly for fun. There are all sorts of interesting things being published on the web every day, but they're kind of all over the place. I enjoy sitting down on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee and an hour to myself, but I don't enjoy opening my email inbox to read a newsletter, only to get sidetracked by 5 new emails that I should probably respond to. I don't enjoy wrestling my RSS app, which hasn't been updated in about 10 years and has a horrible reading experience. Reading links from Twitter gets me lost down an algorithm hole. YouTube doesn't even show me new videos from people I'm subscribed to. I wish it were just all in one place. Without all the noise and engagement farming. Just a quiet little spot where I could catch up with things I care about. That's what I'm making. I'm calling it Alcove. If you want to follow along with this questionable side project of undefined scope, I'm sharing live updates of progress on Twitter, here. There's a more than half-decent chance of a disastrous outcome.

A comprehensive look at Mastodon, Bluesky, and the growing ecosystem of open, interoperable social networks.