"There are currently 5.9 million dairy cattle in Aotearoa, who consume 75% of the total grain and feed in the country; we humans eat only 9%. The herd needs around 20% supplementary feeding [feed provided in addition to grass] and some 50-60% of supplementary feed on most dairy farms is imported."
#ClaireInsley, Vegan and Plant-Based Living magazine, issue 56, Summer 2024/25
Side note: the editorial says this is the last printed issue of the magazine. It's looking more and more likely that I'll see the end of print magazines, at least as the mass medium they've been in my lifetime.
For me this points to the need for a magazine equivalent of podcasting. An open network where anyone can publish using standard formats and distribution protocols, and anyone can write an app people can use to subscribe and read digital magazines.
(1/2)
Bonus points for paid subscriptions, also using open protocols. So any publisher can receive payments from subscribers, and any app can support paid subscriptions, without needing permission from a centralised payment gateway.
(2/2)
@strypey don't we already have this today? Both WordPress and ghost.js are open source and widely supported.
They both provide subscription publishing models. They output RSS feeds, literally the technology that powers podcasting.
Is there a specific magazine feature that you're thinking of that cannot be delivered with that Tech?
Bonus Points: paid subscriptions are always going to be complicated. This is a people problem not a technology one.
@gatesvp
> Is there a specific magazine feature that you're thinking of that cannot be delivered with that Tech?
See:
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/113989018927679816
It can probably be done with existing protocol plumbing, but the UX needs attention, and driving adoption needs a coherent story about what it is, and why and how to use it.
@[email protected] > Wouldn't this be RSS? Yes, that's probably a good plumbing option. Although I'm sure @[email protected] and others would argue for Nostr as another. > For RSS that would just be a feed reader. Existing RSS readers are designed for reading texts, which are a verbal medium. Magazines are a visual medium, and would need a specialized type of app for browsing them properly.
@strypey so you want standardized layouts so that we can have magazines on our phones/tablets/computers/kindles/etc.
Like HTML, but something different?
Like ePub, but not quite?
Is there an opportunity here? Kind of. But experts have literally been trying to solve this problem for 30 years. And they haven't. Because all of the other mediums have some set of trade-offs that other people hate.
The history here is way more than we can capture in a toot.
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@gatesvp
> so you want standardized layouts so that we can have magazines on our phones/tablets/computers/kindles/etc
My goal is for magazines to continue to exist as a distinct medium, beyond the extinction of mass-distribution print. Instead of dissolving into their constituent parts (texts, images, pull quotes, etc) in a digital grey goo.
As a stretch goal, I'd like it to be a decentralised medium akin to podcasting, as opposed to a monopoly platform akin to YouTub, Stopify, etc.
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@gatesvp
> experts have literally been trying to solve this problem for 30 years
I'm not sure that's true. The managerialists who took over the print business in the late 20th century have been mostly sticking their head in the sand. Pretending that digital convergence is something that only happened to other media businesses.
Meanwhile the tech industry has mostly been dominated by VC-funded DataFarmers, for whom media are just "content", bait to attract eyeballs to ad hooks.
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Yes, engineers have worked on various ways of converting documents into digital forms, like HTML, XML, RDF, PDF, OpenDocument, DocX, ePub, etc, and various ways of moving them across the net. But I'm not sure any of those people have given much thought to magazines as a distinct *medium*, nor the UX of people obtaining and browsing them in digital form.
I'm not sure any of that people have given much thought to magazines as a distinct medium
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As someone who is subscribed to both physical and digital magazines for over 20 years, they absolutely have been thinking about this. Back in the 2000s, Wired experimented with exactly what you're discussing. It was basically a website and you could turn the pages as if your mouse was a finger.
It was cool if you were on a computer with a mouse and a horizontal display...
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People enjoyed it and requests poured in for using with a touch screen or a tablet, etc. What about these new e-ink readers? Vertical displays?
It quickly became obvious that capturing a typical print magazine as a digital device was going to be insanely difficult and it all got dropped.
Back in the Comixology heydays, they had (have) a dynamic layout viewer. Like, you could view the whole page at a time, or you could view one panel at a time.
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But the Comixology thing still suffered from some awkward moments when trying to display a full page spread on a phone.
I have a Surface tablet about the size of a comic book page. It works great for PDF and CBZ files, except when it comes to spreads.
And that's probably an accurate microcosm of the problem. If you want to accurately capture the experience of reading a magazine, then you at least need a device that is as wide as the magazine is folded open. A foldable tablet?
(4/?)
If you don't have the magic double wide folding tablet, then you can't recreate the magazine experience. Every digital version is going to have to make some form of trade-off that one group of people is going to deem unacceptable.
Reading it on a computer will cost you a trade-off, reading it on a phone will cost you a different trade-off, reading it on a vertical tablet will cost you yet another trade-off.
It's not for lack of trying, it's just an intractable problem.
(5/5)
You can't recreate a widescreen movie theater experience on a vertical mobile phone.
You can't recreate a magazine experience on a vertical mobile phone.
There's not some magic format change that's going to make these things the same experience. So that's where we are with digital magazines.
Every experience is going to be some set of trade-offs that need to be selected for. It's hard.
"Aotearoa grows over 400,000 tones of wheat every year, 80% of which is fed to the dairy herd. Most of the bread in New Zealand is made from imported Australian wheat, because we can't grow enough wheat to feed both humans and cows."
#ClaireInsley, Vegan and Plant-Based Living magazine, issue 56, Summer 2024/25
That explains why the quality of NZ dairy is going down the tubes. Thanks, Fonterra.
A temperate climate and NZ needs to resort to wheat for its cattle? Stupid.
@canusfeminacanis
> A temperate climate and NZ needs to resort to wheat for its cattle?
Supplementary feed is sometimes necessary, eg during droughts. But doing it as a routine practice is a sure sign of overstocking.
The fact that we're importing commodity grains as feed, so we can export commodity milk powder, underscores just how backwards enforced globalization is. So much "trade" is just shuffling products around, rather than serving real human needs.
Yeah, I know about silage, etc. But yeah, grain isn't supposed to feature regularly. Overstocking? I hadn't thought of here.
Globalization is showing cracks - that might be the only good thing that comes out of the current global chaos.
@canusfeminacanis
> Overstocking? I hadn't thought of here
The dairy industry has been trying to cram as many cows as they can into every square metre of land. Dr Mike Joy explained to me that it's a real estate speculation business, not a food production business.
The more milk solids you can pump out (in the short term) per area of land, the higher the capital value of the land gets. Neither feed imports nor environmental externalities count against that value. It's a classic pump and dump.
Oh, my giddy android. This explains so very many things. How the hell did land value get tied up in milk solids, though? How? When? Who?
Real estate agents/ developers should be shot.
Strypey
Gaëtan Perrault
canusfeminacanis