Category: sethwCategory: sethw

Kristen started her Awesome Ladies Project years ago by inviting a few people off of Instagram to be creative together on a Zoom call.

“I wanted to build like a an alt feed where people could feel comfortable sharing the art that they’re making. And that’s been the underlying bridge of everything that I’ve done is I want to have this place on the internet where people feel safe telling the stories that I’m asking them to tell because I ask people to do kind of vulnerable things sometimes and I want to make sure that they have a space where they feel like I’m not, you know, throwing them out to the wolves.” Kristen Tweedale

The internet is a big, wide open world. Building your own community is the opposite of that, where your work and the things you share exist in a smaller space, with the right group of people who can enjoy it in peace.

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You can get all of my latest posts by adding the RSS feed to your RSS feed reader (like NetNewsWire).

I love sending email newsletters of course, but as Seth Godin says, our newsletters “often gets filtered by our evil tech overlords.”

If you’re a musician playing on stage and see several people walk out, you don’t stop and go, “Hey, here’s some pop tunes you’ll like!”

Seth Godin recently said:

“You might be able to get the folks in the back row to smile a bit if you play your hit song just like it is on the radio, but perhaps your objective is to please the real fans in the front row–by jamming on something new.”

Focus on the audience that stays.

The first song you write might not be your finest work. Nor your first sculpture, sonnet, play, or novel. But if you’re course-correcting at the behest of every audience member, you’re not making art, you’re doing color by numbers, trying to please the most people while excluding yourself.

Your direction matters most, so stick with it.

Recently, Joi Katskee missed a friend’s show. She asked about it afterwards, and they said they posted about it on Instagram, which we all know your social media followers miss almost everything you post.

She followed up with success story of her own art installation, and shared about the win on a recent Escape Pod Zoom call:

“I texted probably 15 people about the show rather than posting on Instagram, and maybe over half of them showed up. They were like, Yeah, I’ll be there. Thank you for the invite.”

Posting to the most amount of people always feels like the right move. But if no one sees it, what good does that do? Does it just let you off the hook?

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Meta is gonna do what Meta is gonna do, adding advertisements to WhatsApp: “ads built with privacy in mind.” Apparently it’s only in the Updates Tab, but as John Gruber says, “does anyone believe they’re not going to put ads in the other tabs sooner or later?”

Good discussion ensues on HackerNews about how folks have moved away from WhatsApp:

“I moved my family over to Signal years ago. Anyone new who wants to message me, I simply say “I’m on Signal” and if it’s important enough, they go and install it.”

Read the full thread here.