by Danica Swanson - 24 Dec 2024
As I began this Farcaster-seeded project, I asked myself: Why do I need yet another place to write in public, even though I already have two blogs on Paragraph and I’m active on Farcaster every day?
Short answer: Because all the web2 platforms are subject to enshittification and platform risk, and all the web3 platforms are nascent, high-friction, and still don't work well for what I want to do.
Long answer: On Farcaster, casts are ephemeral by design. Many people consider that a plus, and in some ways it is. But for a long-form writer like me, it’s often a hindrance. Whatever doesn't get immediate attention gets algorithmically de-prioritized. I favor long reads (especially on “evergreen” topics), and I need time to read and digest them with careful attention before returning to respond. By the time I get back to them, usually several days have passed and nobody will even see my comments in the feed anymore. That limits the possibility of carrying on conversations in ongoing “slowcore” ways that facilitate discovery and re-discovery of evergreen material.
As for Paragraph, it’s a newsletter platform first and foremost. As I’ve mentioned before, I find it to be too high-friction for casual writings that are more than a cast, but less than a full blog post. (Side note: Some writers use Substack Notes for this, but I left Substack in 2023… and like several other writers, I never liked the Notes feature anyway).
Anyway, I noticed that more often than not I’d catch myself thinking: “I’d like to write a snippet or a few paragraphs on these ideas, but in a way that can compound over time. If I cast only on Farcaster, it’ll get buried after a few hours and ignored forever after. If I write a blog post and publish on Paragraph, I’ll want to add a summary blurb, keywords, a bunch of hyperlinks, and a cover image. Plus there’s all this extra stuff in the UI, such as subscriber lists and analytics that I wouldn’t even care about for a snippet collection. All that extra window dressing will eat up time, cognitive energy, and attention that I’d rather devote to actual writing.”
So lots of stuff would just never get written. Or I’d write it privately in Scrivener in a list of cast ideas that would never turn into actual casts. Or it would get dropped into half-finished Paragraph posts, which eventually got scrapped.
At some point I realized the problem wasn’t attributable to overthinking it. The problem was that I was trying to shoehorn the notes into the wrong forms, for the wrong reasons. I felt mildly but constantly pressured to fit everything into casts or blog posts when what they wanted to be was collections of snippets. I felt pressure to pursue “building an audience” for the sake of monetization, but I also wanted to write (and share) out of nothing but sheer fascination, curiosity, enjoyment, and appreciation. I wanted sufficient time to give and receive careful attention to reading and writing.
Much as I appreciate Farcaster and Paragraph for what they are, I needed something in-between. I needed a low-friction writing-as-emergent-thinking tool: a space to write a few things here and there in raw unedited form, share them spontaneously on Farcaster (or not), and then return later to review, refine, and (maybe) organize them.
The snippets might turn into casts, blog posts, or essays later on. Or they might not. But in any event, they’ll be collected in one place that I control. I’ve been rugged again and again when I built a home base on web2 platforms. That’s the main reason all my previously published work is scattered all over the internet, and some is now only available through the Wayback Machine. I don’t want to risk that kind of displacement again if I don’t have to.
So I’m writing in Notion, building a collection, and sharing the results as I go. I’ll admit Notion isn’t my ideal place to write, but I’m already using it for business and paying monthly for it anyway… and because I’ve been a paid subscriber since 2019, I have a legacy plan at a lower price point than the current options. So rather than allow interesting thoughts to evaporate because I don’t yet have the right web3 place to write the way I want, or put my work on a web2 platform, or pay yet another monthly subscription fee to yet another blogging platform and go through yet another learning curve so I can publish, I decided on a compromise: a liminal space.