dear email reader,

it's an unusually sunny day in rotterdam. the sky is #75a9ff
topics in this email:

  • life cms / memory sites
  • special fish in 2025
  • pin moment

at the beginning of this year, i did a little audit of my personal website and reflected on what i needed more of from it. i've been really inspired by people* using their sites as life cms' or memory sites. i'm still understanding and defining these terms and what they mean to me. one way i'm doing that is by writing to my memory site.

so far, these are the qualities i'm attributing to a life cms/memory site:

  • mostly written for oneself, leaning more towards a diary than a blog.
  • a way of documenting experiences, memories, ideas, and realizations.
  • contains both short and long form writing and is used as a way to jot down an idea.

in this way, maybe these sites are more similar to a wiki than a blog.

i also think designing or customizing the cms is part of the beauty of these sites. they are more than just the viewable portion.

last year, i was thinking a lot about pinning moments (archiving memories/putting a pin in them), and now i find myself using my memory site as a way of doing this. it feels like these things are merging a little, so i've begun referring to this site as my memory site.

*two sites that have inspired my memory site:
zinzy.website
piperhaywood.com

there's something nice about being able to reference a memory with a url.

although it didn't prompt me in many ways, my memory site is my ideal social media site. i can customize exactly how it feels, and it allows me to explore things i deeply care about while sharing them lightly on the web. i feel grounded when i use it and see it grow slowly over time.

that said, i'm hesitant to call it a replacement for social media. i think this is rather limiting. when i think about it as a website or a memory site, the possibilities seem a little less determined.

building my memory site got me thinking about special fish again. special fish has been around for 6 years and it has basically stayed the same. it's somewhat grounding to think about. wouldn't it be cool if it stayed pretty much the same for another 6 years?

i've been thinking a lot about the community there and how people use it. this year i have two goals for the website...

  1. make special fish financially sustainable: so that i can become a part-time gardener of the site
  2. work with the community in mind: organizing events that create more off-ramps to the irl world, writing residencies, light online writing rooms...

some updates to the fish:

...

i'm excited at the possibility of making special fish sustainable. it doesn't really need more features, but it could use gardening, and i'm excited about becoming the gardener of special fish. i suppose i already am, but i'd love to make it an official job, with some funding and a routine

...

i'm not really sure how to go about making it sustainable, but i have some ideas. it probably won't happen through a single approach. i think company sponsors could be promising

...

personally, i'm not really looking for another social media platform to join, but i am looking to join more websites. maybe being social online could just be an email list, a drawing club, a website group, a forum, a radio chat.

...

the internet phone book is still in the works. even though it's a bit overdue, i think there's something nice about taking our time with this project and not rushing through it. the web feels so fast sometimes that it's nice to be this slow and deliberate.

#bca1f9,
Elliott