It's been almost two years since I made the first release of Platypub, my own little blogging/newsletter platform. I wanted something that gave me 100% control over the design and structure: "themes" in Platypub are actual programs, not just collections of template files. I also … | Continue reading
Welcome to my sporadic newsletter about improving the information environment... and whatever else I happen to be thinking about. I'm Jacob O'Bryant. Hey! It's been a while. My weekly writing habit didn't survive my getting a job; on the bright side, my bank account has been fari … | Continue reading
For a few months back in '22, I was running a Discourse forum as a sidekick to this newsletter. I ended up switching over to Discord because I discovered they had released forum channels, which gave me the structure I liked from Discourse without feeling quite as heavyweight. So … | Continue reading
Welcome to my weekly newsletter about practical ways to improve the information environment stuff. I'm Jacob O'Bryant. Well, it finally happened: I have escaped from entrepreneurship. It was a fun 4.5 years, for some definition of fun. I successfully tricked the fine folks over a … | Continue reading
Lots of exciting stuff has been happening lately: I pulled a muscle in my back on Saturday and took two days to recover. Everyone in my household got sick over the course of a week or so. I got a second job offer and have entered the negotiation phase as I pick which company to j … | Continue reading
Welcome to my weekly newsletter about practical ways to improve the information environment. I'm Jacob O'Bryant. I mentioned a month ago that I decided to finally get a job and do my tool-for-online-speech work mostly in the form of open-source. (If you missed that—surprise!) I … | Continue reading
Welcome to my weekly newsletter about practical ways to improve the information environment, focused on my own work in that space. I'm Jacob O'Bryant. A few days ago I read an article that caused me to question one of my fundamental assumptions: what if discussion apps are more i … | Continue reading
Welcome to my weekly newsletter about practical ways to improve our information environment, focused on my own work in that space. I'm Jacob O'Bryant. So last time I mentioned that I was starting up a TFOS subreddit. However, recent events have made me lose confidence in Reddit's … | Continue reading
Welcome to my weekly newsletter about practical steps towards a better Internet, focused on my own work in that space. I'm Jacob O'Bryant. It's been a slow week for me in terms of my software projects because I was selected for federal jury service on Wednesday . We just finished … | Continue reading
Welcome to my weekly newsletter about practical ways to make the Internet better, focused on my own work in that space. I'm Jacob O'Bryant. Quick announcement: after four years of entrepreneurship, I've finally decided it's time to rejoin the land of the employed. See my resume i … | Continue reading
Welcome to my weekly newsletter about practical ways to make the Internet better, focused on my own work in that space. I'm Jacob O'Bryant. The new version of Yakread has been officially released. Phew. I have a number of additional improvements to make (backlogs are never finish … | Continue reading
Welcome to my weekly newsletter about practical ways to make the Internet better, focused on my own work in that space. I'm Jacob O'Bryant. I'm deep into coding mode, finishing up the last batch of essential features and bug fixes before I release the Yakread rewrite I began seve … | Continue reading
Welcome to my weekly newsletter about practical ways to make the Internet better, focused on my own work in that space. I'm Jacob O'Bryant. As previously discussed, I am currently in the middle of overhauling Yakread's user experience. The plan is to have the default experience b … | Continue reading
Welcome to my weekly newsletter about practical ways to make the Internet better, focused on my own work in that space. I'm Jacob O'Bryant. Last week my mind was sucked into wondering how my ideal social media ecosystem would handle short-form posts. For a while my thinking has b … | Continue reading
Almost a year ago I articulated my career interests in We need better tools for online speech. One benefit of that is it's easier to imagine myself taking different career paths. The goal isn't "create a successful startup," it's "design, develop and promote tools for online spee … | Continue reading
For the past month or two I've been focused on improving Yakread's acquisition + onboarding funnel. Only a certain percentage of people who hit your landing page will end up actually using your product regularly, and the higher that percentage is, the more leverage your marketing … | Continue reading
There are two main open protocols for subscribing to newsletters and such: email and RSS. They each have their pros and cons—they're complementary. Email has the benefit of massive adoption by end users. Everyone knows what email is and how it works; you can put an email signup f … | Continue reading
I 100% honestly was not planning to spend the entire week on this, but... my personal website tfos.co has been renovated. After my discussion of Michael Nielsen's post How to use a personal website to enhance your ability to think and create? three weeks ago, I started mulling ov … | Continue reading
With Yakread's onboarding flow taken care of, last week I overhauled my internal reporting dashboard. I'm very happy with it. Not necessarily with the numbers it contains—they're OK—but at least the dashboard is structured nicely. There are five sections: Recent signups Self-expl … | Continue reading
The stuff in today's newsletter was all (well, mostly; you'll understand if you read to the end) prompted by a bunch of discussion + help I received from Vikram and Gabriel, who are developing a new product analytics tool. I met them after I read Vikram's post I don't like any of … | Continue reading
Off-and-on I've wondered: should I try to use my writing to introduce people to the stuff I build, or should I use the stuff I build to introduce people to my writing? I've gone back and forth on this, but I think I've reached a definitive answer: the latter. For one thing, I per … | Continue reading
I’m trying out something new: instead of sharing reading recommendations most weeks after the main post, I’m going to dedicate an entire post to recommendations whenever I feel like I have enough good stuff to share. The ruminations will resume next week. If you want to chat with … | Continue reading
Summary: I've made a directory for newsletters that sell self-serve ads. Read on for background info. Now that Yakread's core features are complete and I feel good about the app's design and structure, I've turned my focus towards optimizing retention. It's one thing to make an a … | Continue reading
I've written several times about unbundling social media into its constituent parts. I think that "social media" should mostly be a variety of different publishing apps, reading apps, and small discussion communities, instead of a small number of large, monolithic platforms. My b … | Continue reading
Recently in I'm going to delete most of Yakread's features, I talked about how I was planning to overhaul Yakread to make it more focused on newsletters. Those changes are now complete. Though I ended up not deleting any features; I just moved them out of the way, under the setti … | Continue reading
I like listening to music a lot. On my desk right now there's a set of Beyerdynamic DT 770s, a popular model of studio headphones that you see people wearing in music videos. I also have a couple Sennheisers that I've used previously, starting with the HD 212s that I got when I w … | Continue reading
How's that for a click-bait title! It is probably true, though. I spent last week setting up a bunch of internal reporting stuff so I can understand how people are using Yakread, and I learned a few interesting things: Most people don't use bookmarks, Twitter/Mastodon integration … | Continue reading
Startup accelerators like Y Combinator leave a lot to be desired, and not just because I'm salty about my past 8 applications being rejected. For one thing, accelerators obviously don't do much good for open-source developers or anyone else who is mostly interested in building pu … | Continue reading
Recently I've exchanged a few DMs with someone about which of Yakread's value props to emphasize: should I structure and describe it as a "smart newsletter reader" or as "TikTok for reading?" Right now, the landing page and the app's UI reflect the former. Yakread is an app for m … | Continue reading
It's official; Netcraft has confirmed: Big Social Media is dying. And from their ashes we can begin anew. The opportunity to build a better Internet is here! The Internet wants to be fragmented! And my personal favorite—2023 is a year of new avenues. For my own contribution to t … | Continue reading
Highlights: Mike Masnick: The Opportunity To Build A Better Internet Is Here. Right Now. Reminds me of Robin Sloan's piece which I've now shared three weeks in a row—there's a movement brewing! Thoughts on a "Web Follow" protocol by a member of the Chrome team. It describes a way … | Continue reading
Weekly highlights: A year of new avenues by Robin Sloan. An essay about the opportunity we now have to rethink the way we relate online. I found it deeply inspiring. Join the resistance! Postcard is a simple newsletter service for personal use. It's got a free tier and it has gre … | Continue reading
I have just added an RSS-based recommendation feature to Yakread. If you sign in and go to the share page, you can select a few of your favorite blogs/newsletters. Then you'll get a spiffy recommendations page you can share with all your friends (wink wink): Those are screenshot … | Continue reading
On a couple of occasions I have described my Grand Vision For How Social Media Ought To Be, which is roughly that there should be a bunch of different: publishing services, like Substack and Ghost reading apps, like Gmail and Matter community platforms, like Slack and Discord and … | Continue reading
A few weeks ago I finished writing a tutorial for a web framework I've built. The tutorial teaches programmers how to create a barebones, toy version of Slack/Discord/etc. I called it "eelchat." Finishing that little project has been enlightening. In particular, any excitement th … | Continue reading
Both! As I planned last week, I've made a Major Update to Yakread's timeline. It is now mostly chronological. The most recent posts from your subscriptions will always show up first, or at least near the top. Same for articles you bookmark. But there are some key differences from … | Continue reading
Last week I discussed some tweaks I made to Yakread's home feed in an ongoing attempt to make it . My spiritual advisor made an additional suggestion: switch to a traditional scrolling timeline instead of the current fixed batches of five links. My immediate reaction to this was … | Continue reading
This post started as a Hacker News comment. The biggest immediate danger for writers of Substack's centralization is that they've introduced some subtle lock-in with their reader app. Substack is quick to say that you can always export your email list and move to a different news … | Continue reading
My aspiration for Yakread is to have it be default app you check whenever you have some time to read. Social media apps are good at this, but part of how they do it is by giving you primarily short-form content. Chips instead of salad, to make a food analogy. Tech is good at maki … | Continue reading
The newsletter is formatted a little different today: I'm officially launching Yakread, and this is the announcement. It would mean a lot to me if you shared the link. Thank you! About three months ago I started building Yakread, a web-based reader app. It has about 25 daily acti … | Continue reading
Last week I somewhat impulsively built Discord Forum Publisher, a Discord bot which creates a publicly viewable version of your Discord server. You click a link to add it to your server, then within 10 minutes, the contents of any forum channels will show up at discord.tfos.co. H … | Continue reading
I recently discovered that Discord's new forum channels are available to anyone who upgrades their server to a "Community" server (which is free, you just need to go into settings and do some stuff). This is excellent because most online communities are designed for real-time cha … | Continue reading
I'm writing this post on my phone with a bluetooth keyboard that my wife has had laying around forever and it's awesome. Makes it super easy to write blog posts and such while I'm sitting on the couch watching my daughter. Downside: sometimes I shift position and my phone slams f … | Continue reading
I've finished working on Yakread's discovery features. (Or at least, the first draft of those features has been completed.) I've also updated the landing page accordingly: In other words: the default, path-of-least-resistance flow is that you simply sign up to Yakread and then we … | Continue reading
Quick announcement for The Sample: I've noticed that in some cases, it's taking a long time to export your subscribers CSV, and sometimes it never finishes. I'm planning to fix that today. If you've ran into this, thanks for your patience! Last week I got sucked into re-architect … | Continue reading
Last week in Yakread: I improved ebook handling so that the chapters are (sometimes) broken up into smaller sections. Also we get the correct chapter titles now. I'm interested in doing more break-up-long-stuff-into-shorter-things more generally in the future, but for now I've de … | Continue reading
Hey! If you're reading this, you're probably a Findka Essays user. I recently launched a new product called Yakread, and I'd like to eventually merge Findka Essays into it. I'll share some details below, and I'd really appreciate any feedback you have. Send me an email. First a b … | Continue reading
I made a small update to The Sample's algorithm last week. It will now do a better job of distributing forwards to different newsletters more evenly, without decreasing the total number of 1-click subscribes that occur. Specifically, I've made it so we no longer take readers' top … | Continue reading