On the first day of 2017, I published my first blog post; I’m posting the 620th. I also sent out the 1st edition of Dealgorithmed because I guess I’m a sucker for starting projects on the first day of the year. It does make it easy to remember when there’s an anniversary to celebrate, though.

I genuinely think this is going to be my last digital project. I said it many times before, but this time it does feel different. I don’t know about you, but I’m seriously starting to feel digital fatigue. I’m cruising towards my 15th year as a freelancer—I’ll officially hit that milestone on July 1st, 2027, even though I started working solo at the end of 2011—and I find myself reflecting a lot on the possibility of completely changing career and doing something completely different that has nothing to do with the digital world. Time will tell if this stays an idea or it becomes a concrete plan.

I do know that no matter what I end up doing, I’ll still continue posting on this blog. Because blogging is fun, it’s therapeutic, and more people should do it. Plus, I want to become one of those oldheads with a blog that is 30 years old!

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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Since this is the first edition of Dealgorithmed, it’s likely going to be a longer newsletter than the ones that will follow. Apology in advance, and please be patient with me today. To be honest with you, I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing with this newsletter, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out together if you want to stick around for the ride.

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Precisely 8 years ago, on January 1st, 2017, I pushed my blog online. I had no idea what I was doing at the time (if there’s one constant in my life, that’s probably it), but I can safely say that it was one of the best things I did in the context of the online side of my life. Having a place that truly felt mine, where I could express myself freely, was transformative. If Laurel’s website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge, mine is a tea room.

For years, I was obsessed with the site itself, as a digital object. I spent hours of my life polishing it and optimizing it to extreme lengths, to the point where everything was compressed into 1 single HTTP request. I was constantly trying to find new ways to shave bytes. Not kilobytes, single bytes. Why? Because I could, I guess. Refactoring can be fun when you’re not forced to do it.

But at some point, something changed. Maybe it was just me getting older, or maybe it was the web around me that changed. The site itself became almost an afterthought, fading in the background of my digital life, and I started to be a lot more interested in the people that are out there, and the wider personal-web sphere (blogosphere?).

In September 2023, I started my People and Blogs series because I wanted to push against the narrative that “blogging is dead,”, something that I knew for a fact to not be true. Quite the contrary, in fact. Blogging was, and still is, very much alive. Phil Gyford has collected thousands of them on his ooh.directory, and I’m playing catch-up on blogroll.org.

Collecting and curating sites is a worthy endeavor in my opinion. Everyone who’s spending time curating a directory of some sort is an unsung hero in the context of a healthy, open web. Still, the more I collected sites, the more I thought I had to do more. Because let’s face it: we’re all busy, and we’re all a bit lazy when it comes to searching for content online. It’s easier to doomscroll the same 3 sites than figure out how to find interesting content while simultaneously fighting search engines that are getting worse by the day.

As it’s often the case in my life, I need to be annoyed by something in order to get my shit together and start working on projects. That something ended up being hearing the dead internet theory getting mentioned every other day.

That’s pretty much why Dealgorithmed exists: to prove that the human internet is not, in fact, dead. And that the web is also not filled with just bots posting AI slop. Don’t get me wrong, there’s P L E N T Y of that, but there’s also more than that.

A lot more, in fact. The problem is that it seems we have all just accepted that this crappy version of the commercial web we have is inevitable and there’s nothing we can do about it: the beautiful web of the old days is lost, corporations took it, and capitalism won. I don’t know about you, but I’m a stubborn mother fucker, and I refuse to accept this. Because yes, the web is a mess at the moment. If you surf it without an adblocker or a Pi-Hole, the experience is excruciating.

At the same time, though, the web is still a fucking awesome place. Sure, you can spend an hour doomscrolling Instagram, but you can also browse antique maps and atlases, play delightful word games, watch mesmerizing wind patterns simulations, listen to radio stations from all over the world, generate wacky typographic animations, or learn how to survive a drone.

The web is vast, the web is unpredictable, the web is weird, the web is very much alive. And the people who use it, who inhabit, who create on it and for it, people like you, are amazing. You’re all awesome, but you’re pretending you’re not.

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So what is this newsletter? I genuinely don’t know, but I have two goals in mind. The first is to help you discover weird and interesting digital places, to combat this stupid dead internet theory. The second goal is to act as a relay: if you have found something awesome and you think more people should know about it, send it to me, and I’ll be happy to rebroadcast it. The web is better when things are connected, and my secret hope is that by connecting digital places I can also help connect people, in a way that feels more profound than whatever the fuck social media is doing these days.

Again, apologies for the long editorial. It’s the first one, I promise this is the exception, not the rule.

— M

Carnivals, Prompts, and other events

It’s January 1st, which means a new IndieWeb Carnival has begun. This month Jeremiah is hosting it, and the topic is “Meaning of life”. Maybe this is a good excuse to dust off that blog of yours.

Also, Mark is hosting January’s edition of the IndieWeb Book Club and the chosen book is The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club. As much as I love the web, I think we should all spend less time in front of screens and more time in front of books.

And since it’s the first day of the year, what better time to start doing 100 Days To Offload. Imagine how much better the web would be if we all posted 100 essays on our blogs, about things we care about, rather than shit posting on social.

Mystery links

The point of this newsletter is to help you discover new digital places, so let me end this first edition with a bunch of mystery links. No goatse, no rickroll, you have my word.

1. Mystery Link
2. Mystery Link
3. Mystery Link
4. Mystery Link
5. Mystery Link
6. Mystery Link

Thanks to my wife and daughter, I've got some new gear which will let me set up the studio in a more logical and effective manner. This will, hopefully, allow me to be more productive and consistent.

I just want to say thanks to anyone who has played, liked, shared, bought any of my work this year, or supported it in any way.

See you in 2026!