Monthly Hologram Newsletter

Would you mind if I ask why you have not decided to use push notifications? Unless you own your own email server which you have to maintain and it’s problematic if your mails would be tagged as spam (often for unknown domains) you most probably need to pay for sending a bigger amount of emails, right?

As far as I remember push notifications are completely free and much more modern alternative. First of all there is no worry that a database with email addresses would leak. The Discourse, web chat apps and even mail clients provide push notifications. Did I missed something important?

Yes, push notifications again do cost money if you get a certain amount, they can only contain a small amount of data, and whether or not the full message can be displayed within the notification without opening the app is questionable and might even depend on the device.

Piggybacking Discord or others as notification providers require recipients to have an account on that platform and the software to be installed and their notifications to be set up properly to actually receive them.

Emails on the other hand side are a universally accepted message format, and you can assume everyone on the internet has one. And the messages can be transfered across “providers”. Unlike Discord chat messages, which require Discord…

The biggest blocker is that push notifications are capped at around 4KB total payload - that’s barely enough for a few paragraphs of text, let alone a proper newsletter with all the development updates, code examples, insights, and formatting I want to include each month.

But honestly, even if that limit didn’t exist, I think email would still be the better choice here. The tooling ecosystem around email marketing is just so mature - I get visual editors, templates, analytics, all that good stuff right out of the box with most providers. With push notifications, I’d either be building all that infrastructure myself or paying for yet another service anyway.

On the deliverability front, I’m actually pretty confident with the setup. I’ve got all the proper authentication mechanisms in place (DKIM, SPF, domain alignment, etc.) plus double opt-in, and my provider has been doing this since 2010 with solid track record.

Plus, there’s the permission friction - even if I only ask when users want to subscribe, it’s still a browser popup that gives blanket permission for any notifications from the site, not just newsletters. Emails are way less intrusive, people can read them whenever they want, and they know exactly what they’re signing up for.

The pricing is totally reasonable for what I’m expecting subscriber-wise, and if it grows beyond that… well, that’s a good problem to have!

Oh, I didn’t know we cost so much i.e. I for example have enabled desktop notifications for all 3 forums. Sorry

But honestly … I didn’t heard about costs when last time I was dealing with them, but things change and my information does not have to be up-to-date.

Or just post on forum and let people know there is a forum setting for enabling a desktop notifications.

@bartblast Hmm … I’ve got all your points, but the forum allows you to do all of that absolutely for free and literally without any work from your side. People can enable push notifications or emails in their own preferences page, for example here is one option that 100% match your case:

Email me when I am quoted, replied to, my @username is mentioned, or when there is new activity in my watched categories, tags or topics

All people have to do is to just watch the specific topic.

Of course you may post directly on the forum or just post the quoted summary and simply add a link to your page. Please keep in mind that the community here is rapidly evolving (see changes to library updates). Also I would think about one more things i.e. views. There is much bigger chance that you will have more clicks by cross-posting or posting summary on the forum, so in my opinion posting (this or other way) here is best in long term.

Unfortunately I prefer to not share my email too much. One time I’ve got lesson when my email was exposed and I will rather follow my rules:

Of course it’s your decision. If it’s not best for you it’s fine. Hope you would have a lot of subscribers as you anyway do an amazing work.

There is still RSS feed. I pay way more attention to the feeds I subscribed (1 minute) than email I received (1 second)

Email newsletter is better at delivering ads, RSS is better at delivering contents..

Totally understand being cautious with your email after that exposure. Have you considered using email aliases/forwarding services? Tools like SimpleLogin, Firefox Relay, or even a cheap domain with catch-all forwarding let you create disposable addresses that forward to your real inbox. You can shut down any alias that gets compromised while keeping your main email completely private. Might be a good middle ground for staying engaged in the community while maintaining your security-first approach!

Plus, this way you’ll be able to safely subscribe to my awesome Hologram newsletter!

Actually, this should be totally doable with a relatively small amount of work if we’re talking about static RSS feeds. Thanks for the suggestion, I’ve added it to the backlog!

It’s another topic of type: “theory vs practice”. In theory Firefox looks like a best browser even if other browsers have it’s own good features that should be taken in consideration. In practice what Mozilla is doing is completely unacceptable. M$ and Mozilla have terrible agreements which allow them in fact spying it’s users to power up some AI tool/service which in fact can cancel most of our contracts immediately.

It’s so sad that if some idea is failing we have to lose privacy to fix that. It’s like the more you hear the less motivated you are, you don’t care anymore and it’s fine even if you have to do some things a little bit manual. That’s why I’m still a Gentoo Linux user. So far I’m using a Firefox clone called Zen browser which positions itself as privacy-first and it has a very interesting features btw.

Of course RSS! How could I forgot about it! Even if software or agreements are a complete mess it’s terribly easy to write your own reader. I’m in fact subscribed to many RSS channels. For me that could be a real alternative.

Update: The first issue of the monthly Hologram newsletter has just been sent out!

If you subscribed, be sure to check your email inbox (and spam folder just in case).

New subscribers are always welcome for future updates!

Was great, really appreciate the longer format of it​