This is my, Joel's, selection of newsletters. Most events are related to the arts and new media in The Netherlands, with some focus on Amsterdam, since that's where I live. It's not meant to be an authoritative source in any way, it's my selection. You can make your own selection through self hosting at nowsletter.org. I'm also working on making this easier for non-technical people, please leave a note to get notified when that's ready.

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Newsletters are amazing. They're low-tech: anyone can make one. They're not tied to any specific platform. They're entirely decentralised. They're not private, but also not entirely public: they're for a specific context. The newsletter is a dinosaur from an earlier internet, but nothing else checks all these boxes, so they're still around.

Normally we think of newsletters as a kind of flyer, to be read and thrown away. I think they can be a valuable source of data in a local context. Unlike the open web that is overrun by bots, when sending email, most of the power is with the sender. This makes it harder to hoard newsletter data on a large scale, instead it needs to happen locally. This is the beauty of newsletters, they can't be easily exploited.

My guess is that newsletters contain perhaps 70% of the cultural event data, compared to Instagram. That's a lot! It's enough for some kind of critical mass. If we take those 70% and push it to the fediverse and ATproto, that would be a significant kick-start for better alternatives (local, sovereign, transparent, etc) than what we have today.