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Today is the second anniversary of the founding of Pluralistic, my multiplatform, non-metrics-driven, solo blog, founded in some haste after my unplanned (but overdue and amicable) departure from Boing Boing.

For two years, I've been putting out a new edition nearly every day (550 posts, or 75%). Each edition has one or more posts, and many of the editions have consisted of one or two long essays.

1/

In some ways, Pluralistic's long form essays are the dividends for the 20+ years I've been a daily blogger. All those short pieces I've written over the preceding decades are available for me to search and reference in longer, synthetic pieces. The database isn't solely digital: every time I blog something, the act of writing it up for strangers helps me remember it and bring it to mind later. I call it "The Memex Method."

doctorow.medium.com/the-memex-

2/

Medium · The Memex Method - Cory Doctorow - MediumBy Cory Doctorow

I also run a daily "This Day in History" feature in which I revisit my blogging from one year, five years, ten years, fifteen years and twenty years ago. This is an invaluable tool for understanding the evolution of my own thinking and the long-run changes in the causes I care about:

pluralistic.net/2022/02/18/bro

The "pluralistic" in my Pluralistic strategy is twofold. First, I practice "POSSE" (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere).

3/

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory DoctorowPluralistic: 18 Feb 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory DoctorowBy Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow

That is, while my posts appear as threads on Twitter and Mastodon, and as articles on Medium and Tumblr, the permalinks for each post live on my own site, which I control.

That is a *lot* of work, because the platforms firmly resist it. Platforms want to enclose our work. They don't want to be our distributors, they want to be our publishers, with the power to control our audience's access to us, and our access to our audience.

4/

When I started Pluralistic, I did all the cross-posting by hand. It was an *absurdly* complex process, and I made gross errors every day. Thankfully, a reader named Loren Kohnfelder volunteered to make me some Python scripts that automate vast swathes of that work away:

pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two

(Loren is a cryptography pioneer:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loren_Ko

and he's just published an outstanding book "Designing Secure Software: A Guide for Developers")

penguinrandomhouse.com/books/6

5/

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory DoctorowPluralistic: 13 Jan 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory DoctorowBy Cory Doctorow

Without Loren's scripts, I wouldn't have been able to keep up the pace. Automation's benefits can't be overstated. I also benefited greatly from Mitch Wagner's suggestion of chirr.app, a Twitter thread-composition tool. It's pretty janky, to be honest, but *so much better* than Twitter's own threading tools.

6/

I've plowed the extra time that automation bought me into making Pluralistic better. I added another distribution channel (Medium), and I upped my illustration game, practicing diligently with The Gimp to turn public domain and CC sources into images. I'm especially proud of this "Luddite" illo:

pluralistic.net/2022/01/04/gen

7/

I've also put more energy into metadata, including alt text for those illos. Good metadata isn't just a matter of accessibility, it's also key to avoiding getting slaughtered by predatory "copyleft trolls."

doctorow.medium.com/an-open-le

One thing I *haven't* added is any kind of measurement tools. Neither the pluralistic.net website, nor its RSS feed, nor my newsletter, gather any statistics.

8/

MediumAn Open Letter to Pixsy CEO Kain Jones, Who Keeps Sending Me Legal ThreatsBy Cory Doctorow

I have no idea how many people are reading any of these, nor which articles "perform" better. The metric I focus on is feedback: what readers say and write about the pieces I write. I'm far more interested in the thick, qualitative accounts of the impact of my work than the dubious quantitative residue that remains when you use a stats package to incinerate the waste product of your readership:

locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doct

9/

Locus Online · Cory Doctorow: QualiaLast summer, the pandemic was in its first wave and the nation was in chaos. A lack of federal leadership left each state to figure out how to interpret the science, and many states punted public h…

But the sad reality is that anyone publishing on the web is dependent on those algorithmic, quantitative platforms that have captured so much of online life, creating what Tom Eastman called "a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four."

twitter.com/tveastman/status/1

10/

X (formerly Twitter)Tom Eastman (@tveastman) on XI'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.

Even email (aka "The last open platform") is effectively captured by a cartel that prevents a significant portion of my newsletter subscribers from receiving the daily editions they explicitly (double-)opted-in for.

doctorow.medium.com/dead-lette

That's the other half of "pluralistic" - not just a diversity of publication platforms, but advocacy for diversity in our online and offline lives, freed from unaccountable, self-interested monopolistic control.

11/

Medium · Dead letters - Cory Doctorow - MediumBy Cory Doctorow

That's turned into the focus of much of my activism and writing, both personally and on behalf of EFF:

eff.org/about/staff/cory-docto

My EFF career is almost as old as my blogging career. My 20th EFFaversary just went by, on Jan 24. What's more, my EFF career has largely consisted of figuring out how to use blogging to fight digital dystopia:

onezero.medium.com/the-interne

12/

www.eff.orgCory DoctorowCory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger -- the editor of Pluralistic and the author of young adult novels like LITTLE BROTHER and HOMELAND and novels for adults like ATTACK SURFACE and WALKAWAY, as well as nonfiction books like HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE...

Not surprisingly, monopolism and digital life were featured in very first edition of Pluralistic, two years ago today:

pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/plu

In the two years since, that antimonopolistic view has become more widespread, with exciting stuff happening in the EU, the USA, the UK, and even China. It's a good time to be pluralistic. Thanks to everyone who's on this journey with me, for your feedback, your criticism, and your solidarity. Here's to another 20 years!

eof/

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory DoctorowPluralist: 19 Feb 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory DoctorowBy Cory Doctorow