Platform-Brain is brutal. It is nearly impossible to escape. The Fediverse is a fine example: let's remake all the platforms... but more ethical? Bad move.

Twitter is both horrible and perfect. Posts the size of a punchline plus the ability to @ anyone is the perfect cocktail for hot takes and dunking. But the "ethical" version of this is just... boring.

But boring is good. Boring is right, boring works. Boring clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. It's platform-brain that convinces us that we need the ethical colosseum. And it has a powerful lobby. One that can only be defeated by giving up reach, the dopamine of "likes," and ultimately, attention itself.

Good luck with that.

While writing discover I constantly challenged my own platform-brain. And let me tell ya... it was fucking hard.

As its "clever" name reveals: discover is about discovery. How do I find blogs I want to read? And given those blogs, can I build a non-algorithmic feed that takes the place of platform algorithms? The premise itself had me skating perilously close to the open ice of platform-brain.

"Likes" for example. People LOVE likes and it is trivial to add a script that could track likes on blog posts in the directory. But likes are a keystone of the colosseum. Dopamine that rewards performance. Not evil in and of itself... until it becomes a measurement. Now you’re pitting the sword of a post about AI against the wood block of a post about 19th-century typography.

So I replaced "Likes" with Mentions. If you REALLY like something, write a response and link to it from your own blog; your own platform_. It’s "boring" because it requires effort. It's the web's slow drip of dopamine delivered by the enemy of platforms: RSS.

My respect for RSS led somewhere I never expected. I made a quiet rule: if a feed doesn't deliver the full post text—no "read more," no clickthroughs—I don't add it to discover. Controversial? Maybe. I mean, I understand why people do this. All good.

But the discovery was this: writers who DO publish full-text feeds are the ones I really want to read. They're writing for—and clearly over—themselves. It's the antithesis of Twitter's punchline economy; proof that boring and generous attract my favorite voices.

To paraphrase Mike Watt: I welcome anyone to fork discover and curate to their taste; their rules. It's hilariously harder than it looks. If you do, hit me up. I'll add a shared playlist feature to share playlists between instances (and also mentions). Federation by fork!