Digital Crossroads

Making the Web a little more open - one story at a time.

Digital Crossroads is a mishmash of the coolest updates, deep dives, and quirky insights from across the digital realm. We cover topics like RSS, the Fediverse, and the latest and greatest in the world of social media. Crossroads is for anyone who's ever been curious about the behind-the-scenes of the Internet, the future of online privacy, or just loves a good tech tale.

Croissant! Building a No-Framework Web App

10 hours ago

If you subscribe to my notes you’ll know I’ve gone a little crazy building an RSS aggregator web app over the past week. My side project code-named Croissant has been a delightful challenge. Working with web standards is wonderful! I planned nothing which is why I went on a side quests involving […]

Newsletters That Regularly Hit my Inbox These Days

2 days ago

The things you subscribe to change over time. This time I simply wanted to list (and advertise) the newsletters that hit my inbox these days. Next to the podcasts I listen to or websites in my RSS reader, of course ;) Especially in times, where social media is so fragmented, I love a good read, when...

The potential downsides of platforms…

2 days ago

Expect enclosure; expect a few big winners; expect advertising, with all the attention-hacking that will demand. Expect, also, that writers will continue to mold their work to fit Substack’s particular ecology, rather than “merely” use the tools to pursue their independent visions and ambitions. We ...

Site News

2 days ago

Site News – 9th July 2025 Many behind-the-scenes changes are happening at the moment, which will likely continue through to September. Apologies in advance if any of them break or… The post Site News appeared first on the5krunner • tri bike run. The full post can be read now at the5krunner • tri bik...

5 days ago

I saw that Matt backed off from porting Tumblr to run on top of WordPress, basically turning WP into an OS. I thought it was a brilliant idea, but probably overwhelming in complexity. But it was the right idea. We need fewer runtimes. If you can merge two runtimes, go for it. Anyway, this is all rel...

Source

Pressure on Substack

6 days ago

Rebecca Falconer, Axios: Veteran journalist Terry Moran, who abruptly left ABC News after calling President Trump and top aide Stephen Miller “world-class” haters, announced Wednesday that he’s moving to the newsletter platform Substack. Jessica Testa, New York Times: In January, the start-up best k...

P&B: Nick Simson

7 days ago

This is the 97th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Nick Simson and his blog, nicksimson.com To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan ...

Spanfelled

8 days ago

G/O Media, the company that tried to get Deadspin to stick to sports, bows out. They leave behind a scrappier media ecosystem with more business-savvy writers. I mostly saw the rise and fall of the 2010s digital news era as an outsider, a guy who kept insisting that his little site was worthy of jus...

Cloudflare is on the offensive against AI bots

10 days ago

Matthew Prince announcing a major new effort at Cloudflare to block AI crawlers: Cloudflare, along with a majority of the world’s leading publishers and AI companies, is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content. I’m concerned that this default goes too far...

PublicSpaces, and ECAS Day

11 days ago

The PublicSpaces conference in Amsterdam saw engaging conversations on decentralised social networks, and meaningful discussions with friends and colleagues on the future of our civic spaces.

Exploring Datapacks

11 days ago

I was skeptical when reading Will Larson’s datapack concept: a static export of content on a specific topic, uploaded as a file to an LLM client. In a world where LLMs are trained on the entire web and MCP servers can provide structured access to any site’s content, why would we need yet another med...