I post our stuff on lemmy because I’m an active user of lemmy and I like it here. I find posting here is more likely to lead to real discussions, as opposed to say Twitter, which sucks, but is where I’d be if I was blasting self-promotion. It’s not like lemmy communities drive major traffic.

Isn’t that exactly what lemmy is for? It’s what I used to love about Reddit 10 years ago, or Stumble Upon, or Digg, or any of the even older internet aggregators and forums: People would put their small, independent stuff on it. It’s what got me into the internet. I used to go on forums and aggregators to read interesting stuff, or see cool projects, or find weird webcomics, or play strange niche web games, or be traumatized by fucked up memes. Now the entire internet is just “5 big websites, each consisting of pics from the other 4” or whatever the quip is, and it’s fucking boring.

So yes, I and a few others are theluddite.org. It’s an independent site written by leftists working in tech and academia, mostly aimed at other people in tech and academia, but also for everyone. It’s not like I’m hiding it; it literally says so in my bio. We are not professional opinion-havers, unlike “mainstream” sources; I personally write code for a living every day, which is something that surprisingly few tech commentators have ever done. That makes it possible for me to write about major topics discussed in the media, like google’s ad monopoly,, in a firsthand way that doesn’t really exist elsewhere, even on topics as well trodden as that one.

And yes, we post our stuff on the fediverse, because the fediverse rules. It is how we think the internet should be. We are also self-hosted, publish an RSS feed, don’t run any ads or tracking (and often write about how bad those things are for the internet) because that’s also how we think the internet is supposed to work.

ah yes, one should expect people to just magically find your blog. Not trusting the site is your choice, but calling out honest, transparent self promotion is ridiculous. The alternative is lying and pretending to be somone else, that’s whats actually gross.