Steps Towards the Human Web 

So, actionably speaking, what does leaning into the human web actually look like? Here’s what I’m doing and what I’d invite you to consider too, if any of this resonates.

Write for people, not for machines. This one sounds obvious until you realize how much of what lives online is engineered for discoverability, for SEO, and for algorithmic approval. I’m writing here because I have things to say. I trust that the people who find their way here are capable of reading.

Own your domain and publish there first. If you have your own personal site, it can be your canonical source. Social media is a mere distribution layer. If Bluesky implodes, if Mastodon instances defederate and collapse, if platforms bury you, your words are still here.

Use RSS and subscribe to people you actually want to read. RSS is incorrectly seen as an ancient technology in Internet terms. It is glorious because it is boring and human-scale. Nothing curates your feed based on metrics. No ads interspersed. Just the words of people who chose to put something on the internet that day. Find a feed reader you like and start filling it with blogs.

Join a webring or start one. Webrings are human curation. They are circles of sites that have agreed to point to each other. That’s the whole thing.

Link generously and without an agenda. Hyperlinks are the connective tissue of the human web. Link to the people who influence your thinking. Link to the small blogs writing about things that matter. Link to Abram’s Alliance for Wild Ethics. Link to the weird corner of the internet you found that made you feel less alone. The more we link to each other, the less dependent we are on search engines to find each other.

Go outside. I say this without irony and with all the warmth I can muster. The more-than-human world is not on this screen. It’s the songbirds and frigid cold air and the Sun at a specific hour in the bioregion you happen to inhabit. Abram would tell you that part of what makes us susceptible to mistaking AI for intelligence is that we’ve already half-forgotten what the real thing feels like. Get reacquainted with it.

Link to full article: Apathetic, Intentionally. Why I don’t block AI scrapers on my website.