Mycelium Parish News and some thoughts on community

The new issue of Mycelium Parish News (copies are still available on Etsy - details in that last link) arrived on my doormat this morning, full of the interesting things that James Burt and Dan Sumption have seen or heard about during 2025.

It is, as always, a delight to read, and in the interests of transparency and full disclosure I should mention that they kindly include in it my email newsletter (which I really must kick some fresh life into) and the Hastings Weird regular meetup that Scott Wood and I are attempting to run, and which I wrote about on the first day of this year.

Mycelium Parish News is also a great example of community-building just when we need it - when we are all increasingly feeling isolated and adrift. As James and Dan say in their introduction to this issue:

The current times are not conducive to making things. Darkness and intolerance are growing. And even if you do make something, it’s harder than ever to get the word out. Social media took over the world then broke the connections between people, becoming more interested in making money than bringing groups together. It’s easier to sell ads to scared, isolated people who stay indoors to doomscroll than to people who feel good about themselves. It’s easy to sound conspiratorial when you talk about the effects of social media, but algorithmic tools make deliberate choices about which connections they encourage or suppress.

And this got me thinking back to—what, for me at least, was—the glorious summer of Twitter that lasted from around 2012 to 2020. Don’t get me wrong, it’s never been an absolutely delightful place full of universal good intentions, but it did feel like community for a time (once you’d weeded out the idiots and blocked them).

In those days it also helped me get the word out about the artwork I was making, and get some good feedback about it. It definitely helped me publicise my books of artwork and my Rituals & Declarations zine. They wouldn’t have garnered a fraction of the attention and sales that they did without that community.

The current zine explosion came directly from that community. While Northern Earth probably predates some of the antiquities that it documents, I think Weird Walk emerged from that social media community and maybe Fiddler’s Green Peculiar Parish Magazine did as well, followed by my own Rituals & Declarations and Maria J. Pérez Cuervo’s Hellebore. And then suddenly there was glorious abundance: Undefined Boundary; Cunning Folk; Wyrd; Myth & Lore; Lost Futures; Wort; Grimoire Silvanus; Hwaet! and many more. At least something good came out of it!

Of course we all know what happened to Twitter, and about its descent into the hate-amplifying mess that it is now, that caused many people—myself included—to shut up shop there and join the social media platform diaspora, ending up scattered and out-of-touch with so many others. As Joan Westenberg recently wrote:

The internet has run this experiment dozens of times now, and the results are consistent. When a platform dies or degrades, its community does not simply migrate to the next platform, it fragments, and the ones who do arrive at the new place find that the social dynamics are different, the norms have shifted, and a substantial number of the people who made the old place feel like home are gone. LiveJournal's Russian acquisition scattered its English-speaking community across Dreamwidth and eventually Twitter. Each successor captured a fraction of the original user base and none of them captured the culture. The community that existed on LiveJournal in 2006 is extinct and cannot be reassembled. The specific conditions that created it, a particular moment in internet history when blogging was new and social media hadn't yet been colonised by algorithmic feeds and engagement optimisation, no longer exist.

For some time I’ve been trying to suggest Blogs and RSS as a way to maintain connections with your community—I provided some explanations and resources back in December 2024—and I’ve included a sentence about it in every one of my now regular Monthly Link Dump posts here. I do realise that RSS is never going to be fully mainstream, and also that most people are not going to set up their own blogs or websites—even if I think they should—but I will always keep hoping.

The current reality is that the members of that community that I was part of have split mainly between Bluesky and Instagram, with a smaller faction having set up on Mastodon, and some disappearing back into the hellscape that is Facebook. Some have set up Substacks, and I guess some have probably stayed active over on Twitter/X. A handful are only using their blogs—mainly those who already had blogs beforehand.

And on that subject, if you want to set up a website or a blog as a home base then drop me a line (my email address should be somewhere below this post) and I’ll provide whatever technical guidance I can. You still get to have outposts on the social media platforms of your choice, but your website/blog—your home—is protected from the whims of tech-bro billionaires and their disastrous platform choices.