Taking back control of conversations

I have a goal: eliminate doomscrolling, algorithm feeds, and shitposting. I’m testing slow, high-signal, async discussions and hope to find enough like-minded peers to see if it can work.

Big Social, we have a problem

I love text. Reading and writing make me happy. As well as coding.

Recently, I started organizing my content and ideas with a pipeline to edit, schedule, and post to multiple destinations.

It felt amazing. The writing quality improved, ideas kept flowing, and the schedule filled up fast. But as I focused more, the problem with The Big Social became clear.

Even with better tools, Big Social was still in the way.

I started to cut down on doomscrolling and shitposting. Still, the time and attention Big Social demands are too much for the useful signal I get in return.

Maybe it is just me

I started to look around. What if I could stop engaging with the platforms? But then communication fades, and I do not want to lose communication.

What I want is communication that avoids The Big Social altogether. I don’t want to avoid communication itself. And that seems impossible because The Big Social became synonymous with being connected.

The humans have done it before somehow.

AWS Support recently pointed me to Discord, as they often do.

I’m “Discord challenged”. I really am. It sounded to me like this: “submit an application for visa status change on this government site”. Discord has a login, special content structures, and special demands for adding content and I never had enough motivation to deal with it.

Then I realized: I am not frustrated with Discord itself. I am frustrated with fragmented platforms for communications.

I figured out how to use another similar-sounding platform: Discourse. I even found interesting communities. It still takes a whole bunch of time and effort, and I only use forums it when I really, really want specific information.

I suspect there are a lot of people in a similar state. Being a product on The Big Social, getting forwarded to communication gardens, being overwhelmed with logins, editing demands, and notifications fatigue.

A possible solution (with 3% chance of working)

I want a space for intentionally slow, fully async, high-signal-to-noise ratio communications. This is the exact opposite of the typical Big Social interaction style: doomscrolling, algo feeds, engagement triggers, shallow content, oversized and overfollowed accounts, and excessive notifications.

A place should not put up any demands for registration, confirmations, proofs, clients’ or editor choice, content labeling, or formatting mechanisms.

Some places still work exactly like this. However, they are very specialized. You probably never even heard of them. Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), ASF (Apache Software Foundation), and various dev groups - all use mailing lists. The most related to the cloud is the mailing list of CNCF.

I deal with the public cloud exclusively. And the capital markets. Which is a territory of influencers, Magic Quadrants, MS Teams, and PowerPoint decks. The communication platforms suck in this space.

But the mailing lists do not care about your professional background. They are to deliver substance.

Is there anything else?

I’ve tried to remember all Big Social platforms, ones I use extensively, and possible replacements.

Slack: blinking, no async

Discord: noisy, blinking, and login hell

Discourse: I found some forums I like a lot. There's nothing about the cloud, though.

HackerNews: no “memory”, shallow, special client (web page)

Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and others: fragmented algo feeding

BlueSky: how’s the Twitter clone going to fix it?

Mastodon: same doom-scrolling idea, not async

Telegram: like this one, I see what I subscribed to, the format of the discussions suck

GitHub: descent noise-signal ratio but flat format outdated

The Big Social looks very monolithic. It also makes communication extremely fragmented.

Even within our closest family, it is pretty fragmented! In the USA we have iPhones. Relatives overseas use cheaper Android-based phones. Some like What’s Up, and some on local social platforms which I don’t even recognize.

The solution

We use a two-person mailing list inside the family for school communications, some subscription to services, or if we want somebody to send an email to both of us.

It just works and does not get in the way.

I thought maybe that could scale. A simple mail group. I tried it once at the boutique consulting company Contino for work discussions, when I got overwhelmed by hyperactive Slack.

It did not work. There was no interest. I did not know how to lower the entry barrier.

I’m trying it again, with a broader group. I know what exactly I want out of it. It is open to anyone feeling the same frustration. It has more focused seeding. I can set it up properly using my account.

Underground Cloud (UGC) is a public mail group. The address is underground-cloud@googlegroups.com

How to join? Click on the email link above, it will open your email client. Type and click send.

I’m seeding it now. Would love for you to try it for the sake of giving yourself some space for communication you can control. There are no restrictions or confirmations at the moment, except confirming messages from non-members: I don’t want to have people spammed accidentally.

This is what it looks like in standard Mail on Mac. Just plain email.

My commitment

As I said, this is a simple experiment with extremely low chances to be successful.

And what would a success look like? I guess a few messages per day on average from ten members.

I’m willing to commit my time I’m freeing up from scrolling.

For two months, I’ll answer up to three AWS questions a week — anything from architecture to AWS CDK to consulting

You can ask anything: cloud and apps architecture on AWS, the CDK practices, questions about consulting. I intend to make it as close as possible to what I do normally at my day job.

Final note

If you’ve been thinking of a better way to connect, try this. Let’s see if we can make it work.

Thank you.

PS If you ever run mailing lists - please let me know how to get it going!

Updated text: syntax and spelling fixes.