David Merfield and Blot.im
I was already a fan of David Merfield and Blot before today, and then I read all the pages in Blot’s Notes section. What a great dude. This is the kind of philosophical, technical, monetary, and aesthetic restraint I want to get better at:
No, I probably don’t want to subscribe to your newsletter. No, I don’t want this, or that. I just want to read your webpage and get on with my life.
We use a text-file (todo.txt) to keep track of tasks. If somebody needs to be notified when a task is complete, I include a link to the appropriate email thread in the task. This text-file is checked into version control which means we can easily summarize our completed tasks — the feed of work completed on Blot’s news page is generated automatically from this todo list.
I’ve used a variety of complicated tools to track tasks in the past but I still prefer a text-file.
Blot/todo.txt at master · davidmerfield/Blot · GitHub
Gaze upon it. A public todo.txt file that he actually uses.
So you accept that free speech causes harm?
Yes, I think that being serious about the principle of free speech means accepting that free speech causes harm. My belief is that the harm resulting from censorship is greater than the harm resulting from free speech. To give up the right to determine which words are acceptable to you is to give up a terrible power.
Blot does not have a presence on any of the social media platforms.
…
One of the desperate ideas I had in the past, was to cold-email a number of prominent people and demo them Blot. I decided against this since it seemed undignified.