Hello (Again) World
Hey friends 👋
Welcome to The Thumbs Up Blog. This is a new project I’m working on built from the ashes of my previous endeavours. After years of writing about cryptocurrency and other technologies that enable decentralization, as part of my newsletter Thumbs’ Update, I’ve decided to branch out to new subjects, a new format, and a new home.
I’m a big believer in ephemerality and in revising ideas over time, so I’ve archived a lot of my older posts already—and will probably archive even more over time—but if you do find yourself interested in checking out my older writing, you can find those posts over on my Paragraph.
What’s new?
For years, I’ve just redirected from my domain to other services. First to a Substack then my Mirror blog, and finally to my Paragraph newsletter. This will be my first time that I’ve built a proper site; a place to call my own.
As a result of this being my own thing, it is very much a work in progress. So, especially if you’re visiting this site in the beta testing phase (February-March of 2026), you may notice elements moving around, appearing, and disappearing, and the occasional bug. Whole posts may even come and go.
Note
Please don’t let this impression define your opinion of the blog as a whole. Once I get it how I like it, I don’t intend to make many more changes.
Some cool tech behind the scenes
This blog post is written in my beloved Markdown. It never gets transferred to any blogging software’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor or laid out in a design software. Instead, I push new or updated posts to a private git repository, and they get automagically built in HTML and CSS (and a very very small amount of Javascript) into what you see before you.
This is handled by a piece of open-source software called Hugo which is part of a category of tools known as static site generators. When I push my posts to git, an action is triggered which spins up a temporary Linux virtual machine, runs Hugo, and a few other tools I’ve configured, to produce a fully realized post with styling, custom buttons, and more.
But that’s not all. When I’m confident that the blog is ready to be seen, I plan to toggle on standard.site support, so that my posts synchronize to AT Protocol blog readers like leaflet and pckt. I’ve already configured the underlying pieces of this schema (hopefully correctly), but I’ve had it disabled while I check for breaking errors.
If you’re seeing this on leaflet’s reader mode or read.pckt.blog then you’ll know I’ve succeeded. Speaking of which…
Let’s Talk About Distribution
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, how can they like and subscribe?
When it comes to sharing blog posts with new readers and existing fans alike, I’ve always relied on a two-pronged strategy:
- Sharing the link on microblogging sites (Twitter, Bluesky, Farcaster, etc); and
- Sending out an email newsletter to active subscribers.
At the height of my old blog on Mirror, which included email post announcements but stopped short of the true read-it-in-your-email-client approach to which I’d apply the moniker newsletter, I had several thousand subscribers. When Paragraph bought Mirror, and it became clear they were going to kill it, I ported my mailing list to that new platform. This is the oft-touted point of using email for distributing your writing, instead of say X’s long posts.
I won’t go too deep in this post about why I’ve decided to leave Paragraph (believe me, that post will come), but I will say that in moving to my own custom built solution, I had to make some decisions, including whether I was willing to build on top of an elaborate content management system (CMS) like Wordpress or Ghost, which easily could handle email newsletters, but at the expense of lightness, cost, and complexity.
I made the decision that, as much as I love being able to bring my audience with me, I’m ready to make this our last move. So I will be sending them one final Paragraph email to inform them of my new, and hopefully permanent, home.
Though I’m foregoing email handling, I will be dipping my toes in the burgeoning world of AT Protocol synchronization, and potentially ActivityPub bridging as well in the future. As always, word of mouth and social media posts will be core to my distribution and I’d love for you to share these posts with folks you think might enjoy them. And, finally, an RSS feed is available, and I encourage you to experiment with RSS Readers as a way to step away from chaotic social media feeds once in a while.
Maybe I’ll even do a post about some of my favourite feed readers. With that, you may ask…
What will I be writing about?
The short answer is that this blog will be about whatever I want it to be about. It will combine my trademark long-form, first-person writing style with uncharacteristically shorter pieces. It will be, first and foremost, another left-politics-tinged, technology blog. That’s what interests me and that’s what I’m known for.
What’s different is that, where Thumbs’ Update tried to create long-form contextualized pieces about why oft-derided technology like cryptocurrency, AI, and Bittorrent matter to the left, this blog will explore more technology in a more granular way. Which specific programs are interesting to me and how do I use them?
At the core, will always be the underlying ideology that subverting corporate and government power is crucial to a well functioning society. I will nod toward socialist, anarchist, and broadly anti-authority use cases for many of these technologies, which you can take or leave. Everyone has a bias. This is mine.
I do really want this new blog to feel welcoming to both my long time readers and folks who are just discovering what I do. I think it will appeal most to eclectic, nerdy, lefty folks, but I hope to cover enough topics that there will be people with whom I disagree on many things, who find themselves nodding along, entertained at the very least.
Most importantly I want this blog to be fun for me. I’m very proud of the writing I’ve done over the years and all of the people to whom the written word has helped me connect. But I’ve been losing steam this past year and so more than anything, creating this new blog is about the need for a change.
tl;dr I’m embarking on a new adventure and I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
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