Two online services at least became untenable for me last year. The first was Twitter, which was never great, but nonetheless was the closest thing to an online public square that we had. The second was Goodreads. It started well but was acquired by Amazon and it was all downhill from there. I kept it up as a reading list, since it was synced to my Kindle automatically. But it had long lost its ability to recommend books for me.

Ten years ago we bought a field: Just a couple of acres on the outskirts of our village. Then we planted some trees: We planted a lot of trees, and a hedge. Thousands of plants. The trees grew: And now we have a woodland, complete with twisty paths and hidden glades: The children named it “Maze Woods”, and the name has stuck. Why did we do this? Of course, we like trees!

Why Use RSS 🔗I consume a lot of stuff on the Internet. A pretty incomplete list would include: Hacker News Mastodon & other social networks Assorted blogs and newsletters YouTube A number of these come with unwanted baggage, for example spam posts in blogs and newsletters, ads all over the shop and so on. Also, most of these require me to be online (although I can of course use a read-it-later service like Instapaper).