Ok, so I obviously haven’t sent anything out or posted in a long ass time. My bad. An explanation:

I started takeo.news in early 2022 and posted every week for like 4 months straight. Well done, me!

Then, I went on my sabbatical.

I wrote one issue in the middle of the first week of it, but once I acclimated to the time off and doing other things, I just kinda… stopped. Previously, I didn’t really have any hobbies to speak of, and the newsletter was something to do that wasn’t work, and also applied some of the interest I have in things like personal knowledge management and whatnot. However, once I got a hobby, especially one that took me outdoors, I just wanted to use all my time doing that, and the newsletter fell victim to my short attention span.

Fast-forward a few months, and it’s now winter in Portland, which means I have way fewer opportunities to go outside and hit the trails on my onewheel. Compound that with the whole Thing going on with Twitter and, whoops, you have me running my own mastodon instance (takeo.social), switching to my own email domain (takeo.email) with Fastmail, and, naturally, resurrecting my newsletter (takeo.news). The takeo.vanity empire continues to grow.

As a result, in the grand tradition of obsessing over tools instead of actually creating anything, I’ve been dinking around with apps and platforms for reviving the takeo.news newsletter. Here are some of the results of that dinkage.

takeo.email

Spinning up the Mastodon instance gave me the taste of owning my content again, and the email was the net domino to fall. I already had a Fastmail account (because fuck Google), but my dalliance with Hey had left it collecting dust. But, as mentioned, the friction with posting the newsletter got me looking around again. I came across some posts other folks wrote about making the same move, and, for the most part, it works pretty well. Obviously, the workflow isn’t as smooth as Hey’s purpose-built tools, but it’s half the price, and it’s nice being back on a more “standard” email provider. Standards mean I have access to all the “normal” email tools that standard IMAP and SMTP provide, and I can use standard email clients. All the benefits of leaning into the underlying open protocols.

Which brings me to Mastodon.

takeo.social

Just like email has proven over the last 40 something years or whatever, a federated approach with a “protocols not platforms” ethos definitely seems like the right approach. After a couple of decades of Zuccs and Jacks and Brins getting rich by centralizing all our shit, it’s time for a change. At this point, when it comes to “social” media, that pretty much means Mastodon, or, at least, the underlying ActivityPub protocol.

Honestly, I haven’t been posting to Twitter for years now. A couple of tweets here and there, but it was mostly a place to doomscroll every once in a while and try to get new people to see my newsletter issues. Facebook is pretty much only for the marketplace crap these days, and Instagram is all right if curated well, but… meh. And I don’t understand TikTok at all.

After hanging out on Mastodon for a bit, I dig it. For now, it feels a lot like the early days of Twitter, just shitposting with friends, but we’re now a lot smarter about things after 15 years of posting. To me, that means: post stuff, not too much, mostly positive.

So takeo.social is my personal mastodon instance. Is having my own instance necessary? No, not at all. Is it practical? No, not at all. But I like having my own domain and identity, and truly owning everything that goes on in my little world. Sure, it costs a bit of money, but not any more than Twitter Blue™ and all that shit, and I’m not burdening some volunteer running an instance with yet more image storage. And, fuck it, might as well go all in.

My doggs and I also recently spun up a private dogg.zone instance to replace a long-running iMessage group chat. It had become too real-time, too disruptive, and had too much chance of starting discussions that some/most of the crew just did not want any part of. When folks started leaving the chat to take time off, we knew something needed to change. So, we started up an instance of the Hometown fork of Mastodon, which gives us a place for everyone to hang out. We can make posts that are only visible to other folks on the instance, and ignore anything they would rather not see with the content warnings and tag filtering that mastodon provides. It’s been pretty nice.

It’s nerdy, and likely just another echo chamber, etc. but, so far, it’s been a very nice change from Twitter and whatnot. Mostly positive, with tools for having some real talk with folks who get you. It’ll probably never be anywhere near as popular as the centralized services, but that’s also kinda the point. Hopefully, I’ll see you there.

takeo.news

While using Hey for my email, I also used its built-in “Hey World” newsletter functionality in an attempt to keep things “simple”. But, I wasn't happy with the process of authoring the issues in Obsidian and then pasting the HTML into the Hey email composer. It was fine, but it always involved a fair amount of editing after pasting. Not a huge deal, but enough to be annoying. And I wasn’t going to actually write in the email composer, I’m not an animal. So, I gathered ideas and wrote stuff in Obsidian, cobbled the issues together, pasted them into Hey, cleaned things up, posted, and got 16 issues out on a pretty consistently weekly basis.

While I like the format of a newsletter, I think I’ve placed a bit too much emphasis on completionism and having multiple sections per issue. They can get pretty long, and it’s also a lot of pressure to publish on a regular interval with a bunch of content. Which, I guess, is the point. But in this new world of everyone owning their content again, I think having a regular ass blog is a pretty important part of the whole mix. Mastodon is pretty nice for shitposting and scrolling through random stuff. The newsletter is cool for more complete collections of things for people who like receiving them in one dose. A blog seems good for things in the middle – posts about random stuff I don’t feel like putting into a newsletter, but longer than a toot, and people can subscribe if they'd like.

I’m thinking maybe all the posts are just random things, and the newsletter itself could just be an aggregation of the posts I’ve done over the last couple of weeks for people who like that format?

I dunno, I’m probably overthinking it.

Ghost

Either way, I ultimately set up a Ghost account because it does both. It costs some money every month as well, but again, that’s the point. If I want to own my shit, I gotta pay for my shit. I think they’re trying to be like a more open Substack type of thing, where people can subscribe and become “members” and pay you for access to members-only content and whatnot. I’ll probably never use any of that, but it’s nice to know that’s what the platform was built for. It’s a solid blog engine, it can do advanced newsletter stuff, and it’s well-supported in lots of tools. It’s also open source and available to run on your own server, but I think running a Mastodon instance is more than enough for me. Their hosted service costs about the same as a comparable Digital Ocean droplet.

An aside: micro.blog

There were a couple of other tools I was looking at as well. Primarily, I was intrigued by micro.blog since it seems purpose-built for all the stuff I’m trying to do. It’s kind of a hybrid twitter/mastodon/blog/newsletter/photo sharing/bookshelf product. It’s meant to aggregate your stuff from all your feeds and whatnot. And it’s about the same price as Ghost. But, it’s just kinda… rough. It’s pretty barebones and, well, basic. I’m sure I could have dialed it in and gotten it all humming along nicely, but I just didn’t feel like it. Maybe in the future. Now that I’m using personal domains and tools that are open, I can spend as much time as I want getting nerdsniped by this shit.

Ulysses

The main thing that got me to use Ghost, though, is the ability to publish from Ulysses.

Wait, Ulysses? I thought you were an Obsidian maximalist, Toby?!

Yeah, I know. And I still am. But, a few things:

  • It’s all just markdown under the hood. The whole plain text thing has its benefits, and portability is a massive one.
  • Ulysses is super native and super nice. Obsidian is an Electron app, and it’s all HTML/CSS/JS. And, with that in mind, it’s fucking incredible. But, native is native, and Ulysses is extremely native.
  • Ulysses is included in SetApp, so I already have access to it.
  • Ulysses has built-in publishing integration for Ghost (and micro.blog and wordpress and medium). Obsidian, of course, has a plugin that provides similar functionality, but it’s a bit rough. The first time I tried, it gave me some sort of error and, well, I just didn’t feel like digging into it. The Ulysses integration is super smooth and polished, and feels a lot more solid. Hopefully, it’ll let me concentrate on writing and not publishing.
  • Ulysses introduced Projects recently and, while seemingly a small change, is exactly what I was looking for in Obsidian. It basically just lets you create projects in the sidebar, and when you open a project it replaces the sidebar nav with just the listing of content in that project. It really helps with gathering stuff up for specific issues and putting it all together without being distracted by other stuff.
  • And speaking of “putting it all together,” Ulysses has a pretty neat metaphor called “sheets” where you can write e.g., chapters as separate sheets, and then easily combine them all together at publishing time. I’ve always written my issues up with each section as a standalone file, and then had to jump through some hoops in Obsidian to combine them all into one post. In Ulysses, that’s how you’re supposed to work. So, I can open the takeo.news project, start a new issue “group,” and the write each section as separate sheets within that group. Then, when I’m ready to publish, I can rearrange the sheets into whatever order makes sense, select them all, and publish using the ghost integration. It just works.

Anyway, it seems that the Web 1.0 revolution is upon us, and I’m here for it. Blogs and emails and mastodons and rss and all that good stuff. See you out there.