Last night I realized two things:

  1. I haven’t touched Elfeed in about a month
  2. I’ve been reading and interacting more with people’s posts than ever As I was looking at my Inkwell’s RSS feeds and cleaning up, I couldn’t help but notice how nice it looks:
A reading interface displays a list of posts on the left and an RSS subscription management panel with various feeds on the right.

And, yes, I prefer it over my list of feeds in elfeed, which are stored in an .org file - essentially lines of text with comments and tags.

I’m pretty sure this is the opposite case for most folks who use Emacs. First, Emacs users want to use Emacs more, not less, and second, Inkwell is not available without Micro.blog1.

But I think this is the point I’m getting at: Inkwell belongs in Micro.blog; actually, it is Micro.blog.

When I started using Micro.blog three years ago, I considered it mostly an alternative to running my own static site with Hugo, between fixing issues with Hugo, my CSS, Netlify and understanding attempting to understand git and Magit. Yes, Micro.blog is an alternative to all of that, but it isn’t just a blogging platform; It’s a definition of a contemporary blogger.

If you look at Micro.blog’s set of tools, you’ll see what I mean: it contains tools to keep track and post about books, movies and TV shows, private (encrypted) notes, photos and self-made video clips2, save articles and qoutes from around the internet (pocket style), automatic integration with other social media where possible - all of this around your hosted blog, complete with plugins and a theme (and let’s not forget the AI integration, if you want it and turn it on) you can tweak and take with you - your posts, media, css, everything - wherever you go.

And Inkwell adds an important direction to this mix.

My blogging hour in the morning now continues where I left off the night before, with saved highlights and complete articles from other people I keep track of. The integration between Inkwell and Micro.blog, where my reading turns into writing, still requires some work as the UI and some of the bugs get sorted out, but it’s there. And it’s already better and more intuitive for me than Elfeed, which takes place in its own isolated space.

Elfeed is very good at what it does (and hopefully, what it will keep on doing, with its creator leaving Emacs), and it has been good to me. It still is. But Inkwell, Micro.blog, and my recent adventures with finding out more bloggers and learning more about the Indieweb feel like an evolution. It’s the next step of whatever I’m doing here.

Footnotes

1: I recall Manton borrowed the idea from a different RSS reader, but I can’t find the reference right now

2: Finding an alternative to YouTube these days is not easy, and if you’re not trying to “build a brand” and repeat the chant of “click and subscribe,” the only semi-reliable alternative that comes to mind is PeerTube and (maybe Dailymotion?) - but Manton found a way that seem sustainable, at least for now.