A freshly printed magazine has a scent different than a book. A book smells like paper that has been waiting patiently, yellowed and already committed. A magazine smells like a bet. Like ink still making up its mind.

Good Internet Magazine

As some of you may already know, the wonderful publication Good Internet Magazine, which has been running as both a digital and physical publication for the past year, is now on indefinite hiatus.

I cannot overstate how inspiring and important I think the work of Alexandra, the creator of Good Internet, has been. In addition to Good Internet, she is also one of the creators of 32-bit Cafe, one of the only forums I frequent on a daily basis. She also created the collaborative webhosting project Marigold Town. Go listen to her podcast appearance on James' Wonders of Webweaving and support her.

Alexandra wrote an excellent post-mortem on the experience of running Good Internet. As she explains: don't do it alone; plan to spend money you won't recoup; the shipping costs will eat you; your printer's schedule is not your schedule; your health will not hold; and above all else, "establish what your values are early on and stick to them." She also notes, with disarming openness, that "doing this alone is doable but a) you will miss every deadline you set and b) you will burn out." None of this is discouraging to me. To me, this is a map.

Where I Currently Stand

I am in a fortuitous position. After the past couple weeks of getting the writing archive and community fanfiction.lol online, the site already has over 200 registered members and just as many works uploaded. I've found myself already with a diligent mod team who wrangles tags and organizes things, letting me focus on the development work behind the scenes.

I was happily surprised to see that, even with such activity, my underpowered homelab has been able to keep up with no problems at all—over 99.90% uptime and averaging 10% CPU usage. And I'm somebody who enjoys collecting computers, and I have far more powerful ones that I now know how to turn into homelabs with sites up and running just as easily. With RAM and storage shortages and absurd price increases, I recognize how this has become more and more of a privilege and starting projects like this is a way to use that privilege well.

I'm also someone who's run an in-person writing collective for the past several years, and I did the layout and editing for the first two anthologies independently published by the club, featuring dozens of emerging writers. I know what it is to hand someone their first physical copy.

I would have loved to have gotten a degree in journalism in retrospect. But at least I have one in English. And a homelab. And nine of my own books independently published. And a few scars from the process.

All of this is to say that I'm in a position where I feel as though I have the editing, leadership, and technical skills required to start a publication myself—both digital and physical.

The Shape of Things

Now, I am certainly not trying to be opportunistic here. The ideas I have in mind for such a publication don't directly overlap with Good Internet Magazine.

I'm not interested in technology for its own sake. The internet has always been, to me, a vehicle for great storytelling about the condition of being human. One of my biggest influences has been the now-defunct podcast Reply All, which has been described as a "'podcast about the internet' that is actually an unfailingly original exploration of modern life and how to survive it." That's the bar.

I'm interested in creative non-fiction and lyric essays. I'm interested in the confessional, the vulnerable. I'm interested in the new sincerity movement. In the stubborn insistence that earnestness is not naïve, that care is a form of courage, that the Internet is still a place where people tell each other the truth. I'm interested in stories that begin with a forum post or a strange subreddit, and end somewhere near the bone.

I want writing beginning with a GIF and ending in grief. I want reported pieces that start with a server error and arrive at loneliness. I want personal essays from people who are making websites in their bedrooms and can't quite explain why it matters. The digital and the human should be indistinguishable from each other.

The IndieWeb is real to me because the people in it are real to me. And I think those people—including you—deserve a publication that treats that reality seriously.

The View Onward

The working name is Long Horizon. While the term originally came from investment culture, it has been co-opted by the generative AI techbros to describe complex tasks requiring a genAI agent to perform dozens or hundreds of sequential steps to reach an end goal.

And I would love nothing more to reclaim the term for humanity. Tongue-in-cheek, at the very least. For the long horizon is ours and I have the optimism to see it as beautiful. I don't have to tell you there would be zero genAI anywhere in this project. I'm thinking past the refresh cycle. What's worth writing requires time to understand, and the things worth reading require time to absorb.

Long Horizon would operate as a volunteer-run, not-for-profit publication. I would pay writers a stipend/honorarium for any work that gets accepted—not enough, but something. Ink. A subscription. The knowledge that their work appeared in print. I'm not going to pretend I can offer what a well-funded magazine can offer. But I can offer care, and I can offer the thing Alexandra's post-mortem keeps returning to: community. The thing that makes the labor feel like something other than labour.

I've been writing on brennan.day now for over half a year, posting near-daily. Lyric essays, technical write-ups, political rants, pop culture criticism, IndieWeb dispatches. What I've learned from that practice is that I can sustain this. I have more to say than I thought. There are readers who show up. And the essay can hold more than I ever expected. Grief, comedy, code, contradiction, the body, the archive, the screen.

A publication would let me do that in collaboration. Which is the part I haven't yet tried.

You cannot do this alone. You need editors, designers, writers who are braver than you in the places you are timid. You need someone who knows InDesign, someone who knows how to make an email newsletter exciting, and someone who knows how to index a back issue.

And that's what I'm looking for: Writers. Editors. Web developers. Graphic designers. Artists. Hypemen. People who have opinions about fonts. People who want to learn how to have opinions about things like fonts. If you are interested and you are wondering what you have to give, then you have something. I promise that.

There is nothing more exciting to me than starting something new and being bad at it. Than being a beginner once again. I would love nothing more than to sink a lot of time and money into this, even if it ends up going nowhere, even if it fails. At least then I can say I tried.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, please reach out. Comment below or reach out by email or anywhere I have an account. I'm just using Ghost (the web software that will power this) for the first time. I haven't even finalized the name. This is the very beginning, and the very beginning is my favourite place to be.