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This link argues no. I would argue yes, because of a technical solution and a phenomenon I've observed.

The technical problem:

It’s not enough to interleave their posts into a “river” or “stream” paradigm, where only the most recent N items are shown in one big, combined, reverse-chronological list (much like a Twitter timeline), because many of them would get buried in the noise of higher-volume feeds and people’s tweets.

One of the really nice things about RSS is what it doesn't do. It doesn't order your content by obscure algorithms aiming to vacuum you further and further into an advertising-driven time suck, as Twitter now does.

That doesn't mean, however, that your only option is to present behavior chronologically.

The technical solution: I have my RSS reader do a round-robin ordering for each page displayed, so the higher-volume feeds pool at the bottom. This effect is more noted with a larger page size. For me, this works well enough. I don't see why marking "read all" is a bad thing, and I do it decently regularly.

The phenomenon: Navigating directly to lifehacker.com or whatever other high-volume site feels like gambling. All the colorful previews are engaging, and it all seems to grab me more than my staid feed reader's presentation. It's tempting to roll the dice and see if there's something new. It makes me less this to consume everything in my feed reader is what I guess I'm saying. That's valuable to me.

Does anyone else find that their ability to tackle a to-do list scales inversely to the size of the to-do list?

That you end up doing no steps of a multi-step task far more often than one-step tasks?

Sometimes someone will ask me to do something and I will start doing it immediately and they will say, Oh, It's Not Urgent and I don't know how to explain that if I don't do it right then it will fall off the list.

Honestly, I've always loved that you see people from different generations showing up to the club and doing their own things. Not Old Guy Coming To Hit On Women Half His Age--people coming to see their own friends, with their own stuff going on. Seems good for everybody.

I was explaining to my mom once about a monthly benefit night and a separate monthly craft bazaar and she started cracking up, saying it was like a church. My suspicion is that healthy community centers of any community develop similar appendages.

Even small damage to potatoes speeds their rot, so there is an implausible aspect--but I suppose if you're only harvesting small quantities for short-term personal consumption it might be okay?

Honestly I didn't expect to like it.

If we could supplant the original's every installation with it, the world would be a better place.

Here is the picture of the effect.

I would pay for source of all the weird site stuff Gwern has commissioned / developed over the years. I am never sure how much of it it's worth it to emulate in my own site; for instance, cool sidenotes of the kind he and tufte-css have wouldn't fall back as neatly for text-only browsers as the stuff I have now. (counterpoint: I am pretty sure I'm the only person I know to have visited my site with a text-only browser)

Probably better to focus on my content, but by gosh it's cool to see people making this stuff happen.

she might prefer to be classed as writing this as something other than poetry but I have to call this poetry to be able to excerpt this and have you read it like I mean you to:

now, I never get tired of complaining about large-limbed men who tuck their mantid knees up under their pianos and flop their long-fingered hands all over the keyboard like so many giant crystal cave spiders climbing a tiny staircase. I have, me, small soft hands like little early-born Angora rabbits. If they were strong that would be all right, but they are not; they are weak, eager, twitchy, undisciplined; and just like Angora rabbits, if you don’t train them with rigor in their first thirteen years they will never be good technicians in later life. So I get angry at my betters. Jealousy is a powerful emotion, and I believe in it. To disdain jealousy is to disdain gasoline because its dirty extraction method makes it no good for starting fires. I mean: you should disdain it, it’ll ruin the world, but once you’ve got it, however you did get it, it does work. I am F. Murray Abraham as Salieri with the firelight playing across his hard features as he shovels his faith into the furnace and curses God for giving him these tiny feeble hands. but it isn’t an affectation, I am really like that.

I have also been a rabbit-handed pianist in a previous lifetime, and winters I keep myself warm with a generator run on jealousy, so if this isn't quite as good/worth sharing as it reads to me, you'll have to make allowances.

Recently in a chatroom I know people have been discussing using HTML and CSS only without any kind of other markup / templating / build script.

I am not into it.

I do wish there were a better way to define my own mini-extensions to markdown to have the markdown be the properly Canonical form of my content; I have an oembed liquid tag and a linkpreview liquid tag and ideally that'd just be a presentation detail rather than embedded within my markup with liquid... but as it is, I'm quite happy with the flexibility Jekyll gives me given that even my weirdest stuff is easy to express as "turn some markdown into a chunk of html and put that html into a different piece of html" (yes you can see some poorly rendered markdown there, no I do not care enough to fix it)

This resonated with me.

Just like a living system, they eventually die, and that's the natural order of things. In spite of being a digital system. Something that from a technical perspective is immortal. Quite simply, our sites are us, and like us, they come to an end.

This is a lot easier for me to understand since working at a big company. Even if you made something beautiful and perfect, the earth under it will shift, and it will need to change. Tools and architectural choices that were optimal at the time will be supplanted by better options that could simplify the thing. There is no Buy It For Life when you're part of a living system.

And speaking of that...

It's also worth remembering that even though a domain is purchased, it's really only rented from the registrar.

The Indieweb stuff demands a personal domain as step 0.

A personal domain is a domain name that you personally own, control, and use to represent yourself on the internet.

Given that most people on the Indieweb space are tech people, I get that the fees don't seem like a big deal. Having been a non-tech person before I became a tech person, I also remember how they're... not.

In some sense, even if I want to think of the web as permanent, committing to a beautiful File Structure is just more investment into something that I don't own and that I can only temporarily control.

And what of the barrier to entry? Do you really want to explain to someone you're trying to get to leave corporate social media that they have to Commit to Maintain their Personal Data Infrastructure Forever?

Maybe we should fuss less about domain names. Yeah, Neocities could go down and break all the blah.neocities.org links, but I could just as well lose the financial resources that allow me to painlessly rent domains.

Maybe we should fuss less about neat structures. Linkrot is painful, but you've got to give people room to get things wrong without carrying an albatross of 301s around their neck for all eternity.

Questions of archival remain paramount, but they always were.

It took me a while of refreshing to find a real good one (witchcraft, fish, birds) but I recommend the experience.

You know, sometimes Indieweb people say "this is a case for webmentions!" when I'm... not really sure it's a case for webmentions. But this?

This is 100% a case for webmentions.

When I post something on my website, brid.gy syncs it over to Mastodon as well. Then when someone responds, that gets formatted as a webmention, as here. But if someone wants, they can use a webmention to put their reply to something right on their own site (hi matt hope it's okay to use this as an example). The webmention acts as a programmatic notification about it, so I can decide whether or not to link/excerpt on my page and my webmention software handles the paperwork. It's like

[authoring] your own post and [emailing] her to notify her of your thoughts, giving her the ability to add a link to the follow-up discussion.

but made easy.

I remember being a child and stomping about in the forest in wellies and seeing this giant arch of ivy (some tree bent over, maybe, opportunistic climbing invasive species) and the sun filtered through it. I remember thinking "this is the child-magic experience you are supposed to have as a child and I am going to remember this forever". Intentionally standing there for what felt like ages to stare at it and soak in whatever the magic was, desperate to receive.