Our Community
I found out a couple of days ago that one of the people I communicate with regularly on Mastodon, a fellow by the name of Jim Mitchell (@jimmitchell@mastodon.social) was the creator of an app I used to use back in the day called YASU, Yet Another System Utility. I was fairly surprised to have my real life and my IndyWeb life collide like that. Jim and I are about the same age and have had some similar life experiences, facts we know because we've read each other's blogs.(Jim's Blog) It just felt good to have two parts of my life meet each other like that.
Ten years ago I discovered the community of Apple People who were separate from the company. A lot of them were podcasters like David Sparks and the guys from the Accidental Tech Podcast, John Siracusa, Casey Liss and Marco Arment. There were also the bloggers and writers like Jason Snell and lots of small sites like Tidbits. I wanted to be a part of all that but I was mid-career and settled for being a consumer and not a producer.
When I decided to start blogging again in January of this year, I was motivated primarily by my desire to participate in Robb Knight's Battle of the Defaults. I just wanted to add my favorite Mac and iOS apps to the list that was being built on the Internet. I had no idea where Robb lived, what his politics were, whether he could drive or not and how many kids he had - all of which I now know by virtue of reading his blog and following him on Mastodon. In fact, I met many of the people who will read this blog post by subscribing to the RSS feed Robb created for The Battle of the Defaults. And Robb, he's been kind enough to reach and thank me (!) for telling the story of how he motivated me. It's almost unbelievable.
Every day I find out that the people on the IndyWeb are the same people who've made some of the most important stuff I've ever used. Triptych(@triptych@social.lol) was an engineer at Netscape at the turn of the century. Lisa Melton, the best booster on the Fediverse, helped develop Webkit at Apple. My Mastodon friend Austin Ross is former Apple Store guy with some cool stories to tell. I've encountered other people with the same kind of career I've had in educational IT support and gotten help sorting out a DNS problem from one of them, because as they say, it's always DNS.
I started writing app reviews as a lark on AppAddict and the next thing you know I'm talking to people like Nick Moore the developer behind PopClip, a Mac app I've used for years. And, not just Nick, but several other developers have reached out after I've reviewed their apps. It's been amazing.
In looking for people to follow on Mastodon early on, I found journalist Justin Pot (@jhpot@mastodon.social) who writes for LifeHacker, The Wire, Popular Science and The WSJ among others. Then one day I'm looking at Tinylytics and I see people coming from Lifehacker to read my app reviews and I find out that not only did Justin write up an app I'd found, he also was cool enough to mention my little blog in his article. Then he did it again.
It's so cool how interrelated the whole community is. Bloggers who were inspirational to me like Matt Birchler and Tracy Durnell have turned out to be regular people willing to read what I had to say on stuff and talk about on their blogs, something iI didn't see happening in a million years. This mythical community I was content to sit back and watch is really just a group of humans doing human stuff in the most interesting ways. Nobody is out here trying to sell me crypto or sell me a webinar on blogging or pressuring me to do anything. They're just sharing ideas, opinions and experience and it's wonderful. I'm glad I'm here.
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