Are.na Editorial redesign, Naive Yearly series, community news, and more
Hello to you, how is your Monday? Remember last newsletter when we said that Spring was coming? Well, here it is, as promised.
Last month we were thinking about attention, and realistically we still are. One can spend their whole life thinking about attention.
Right now we are listening to perfect storm by spirit blue and also the rain outside. What have you been listening to? What have you been thinking about?
Are.na Editorial Redesign
The big news this month is our newly redesigned editorial section, which we quietly debuted in mid-March. Alongside some subtle layout updates that feel really nice, the major changes are that images and quotes can now be embedded within editorial pieces as blocks, and are connectable to channels right from the Are.na Editorial page. And in the upper left corner of each piece, you can find the channels and references on Are.na that the piece is connected to. This is a significant step in a longer-term plan to integrate Editorial more closely with the rest of Are.na, so we’re very excited about it.
Naive Yearly x Are.na
The first pieces to use the new layout are the essays we’ve been publishing in collaboration with Naive Yearly, a conference on the odd, quiet, and poetic web, organized by Kristoffer Tjalve. These pieces are versions of the talks given at the conference, held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in September 2024. This is our second edition — read Kristoffer’s foreword to the series, as well as last year’s edition, here.
And you can read the new pieces rolling out week-by-week on Are.na Editorial. So far we’ve published:
Tiger Dingsun with a Jungian reading of Minecraft
Charmaine Li on collective dreaming
Kaloyan Kolev on preserving the Bulgarian web.
Coming up next are pieces by Agnes Cameron, Reuben Son, Kim Kleinert, Daniel Murray, and Vida Rucli/Robida collective. The full schedule is on naive-yearly.are.na.
Community News
Elliott Cost is running a fundraiser for his award-winning website and art project One Minute Park. This is a truly serene place on the internet, let’s help keep it there.
Bri Griffin wrote about the communities fighting for healthier, more resilient ways to discover, share, and create online for Laguna~B. As Bri notes in the piece, they started the channel “nice web” to aid in their search. It’s open, if you all have anything to add.
Blacks of Are.na profiled Ra Lee the “Cultural Alchemist of Are.na.” These monthly member highlights are so good — subscribe to the B.O.A. newsletter if you haven’t already.
Marco Norris released Body-Ebro, an artistic project that explores the river as a body, a border, and an archive — a record of a walking journey, a space of collective memory. Congrats Marco :)
If you have any community news for us, you can add to this channel. This is where we select things to run in this very newsletter.
Roadmap
As always, you can check out our roadmap page which goes into the features we're building, our long-term goals, and our current numbers.
There are so many places you can spend your attention, and we’re touched that you spent it reading this letter.
The Are.na Team