What Survives When Platforms Don’t
This went out yesterday as issue 27 of The Angelo Report, a weekly newsletter published every Sunday afternoon.
On July 8th, Glitch project hosting was shut down.
As a Glitch alum, that obviously made me feel pretty sad. Glitch tried really hard to bring back the weird, wonderful Internet-with-a-capital-I that I watched grow around the turn of the millennium, and more importantly, it acted as a kind of “View Source” for the modern web. It was about building and learning and, most importantly, community.
But alas, it didn’t last. I don’t have a lot to say about that —I hadn’t been a part of the team since mid-2020— but what this shutdown does mean is that whatever web apps were hosted there are now gone.
That includes the original web version of my iPhone app, Thought Detox. I created it —along with a few other little “self-care” web apps— as side projects during my time at Glitch, a time when I was starting to break away from the lifehack-y productivity nonsense that had been such a big part of my online bubble (I was even interviewed on the topic by then-boss Anil Dash on the Function podcast, if you’re curious.)
Thought Detox was about finding emotional clarity — something that improved my ability to Get Shit Done™ far more than any task management system.
As I said on the podcast:
“[Thought Detox] came about from… realizing that [my ability to get things done] has got less to do with task managers and calendars and really more about wrangling my feelings.”
I built it as a simple utility: write about the noise and unpleasantness that has your mind buzzing like an angry hive, and then just… let it go. Nothing is recorded, nothing is logged — it just disappears. And hopefully, you feel some relief. Hopefully, you find a calmer place from which to continue.
That idea —building for clarity instead of complexity— has stayed with me.
Stepping back, there’s a larger philosophy I hold around the apps I build. I want to create fast and delightful tools, rooted in trust and privacy. Apps that bring solutions, not noise, into your life.
As an aside: the Glitch shutdown also got me thinking about how much of our creative work is vulnerable to increasing shareholder value the changing goals of a platform. I’ve always said that if you’re building a business on someone else’s platform, you’re really just building someone else’s business.
(It’s also why I’m trying to reboot this newsletter; like RSS, email isn’t a platform — it’s infrastructure.)
Anyway, as you can probably tell, I have a soft spot for this app — so it lives on, at web.thoughtdetox.app. Moving it over to GitHub Pages was more than just maintenance; it was stewardship. Longevity in indie software isn’t always about scale. It’s about care.
About that — I’ve been going deeper in thinking about tools that focus on intention, rather than tracking output. Thought Detox was the first attempt. I’ve been working on its successor; more on that in a future issue.
Two Hits of Dopamine
Here are two completely unrelated tracks called “Dopamine” that I’ve had on repeat lately.
https://youtu.be/qlrpeYdm9Ec?si=Y5P-V7HeLdgilFsf