Notes for February 9th 2024

Song of the week:

• Almost inevitably following my Californian trip last week I've come back bearing gifts for the family. Notably Covid. It's mild, thankfully (thank you, vaccines!), but still very present. Luckily the kids just blasted through it as one of the myriad of diseases they carry at any given moment from crèche.
• I've been using Bandcamp more recently. The fact that unearthed bands and hidden gems are more the norm there has been super interesting for me. Their mobile experience is still a bit wonky, but the overall discovery process is so nice. That said, Apple Music's discovery playlists have been really good of late.
• There's been a lot of interesting nerd chatter about RSS lately. Mostly relating to it's relevancy in 2024. I think RSS has been quietly plugging away, doing unchampioned work while frameworks and serverless stuff takes the podium. But RSS is enormous. No, it's not got a single brand or service that champions its existence. But outside of podcasts, RSS as a default method of sucking down information from a disparate set of destinations is big. It's a huge number of the requests I get on this site. Though I admit the reader here is probably mostly people I know, and in tech.
• Bluesky, the touted "big" and fairly unfederated social network to rival Twitter has gone fully live, accepting users without invites. This is good, and fine. I've had access for a number of months now but my usage is small enough that twice now, iOS decided to delete the app to save space on my phone. It's got a lot of the Twitterati from Ireland on it, but it's not the same. It's a bit cold, and everytime I flash it up to have a gawk I'm immediately presented with political hot-takes and obsession with Elon or Twitter. Mastodon does not present that to me.
  • In some ways, and I'm probably insulting a lot of people here, Bluesky is Reddit while Mastodon is Hacker News. Both have space separately, there is a venn diagram where a subset of users cross over, and that's all completely ok. But their primary audiences are a bit different.
  • Long-term, I think Bluesky will suffer. It's trying to pretend it's an open source esque social network rather than a company. But it's a company, that will need to act like one from a fiduciary standpoint if it's to take on more funding. And from a social media perspective, in terms of moderation and protecting it's users.
  • Either way, other networks and apps will crop up and go away. I feel Twitter is just destined for the bin.
• In $work we're spending time thinking of ways to plug Irish startups into the US ecosystem, knowing a lot of their ambition is to grow out there. It's exciting to get plans together for something like this because it's not really my core job, but I'm a decently sized voice in the room. And it's something really worthwhile for the companies we'll promote and bring out to our NYC office to hang/learn/develop ideas.