Web Surfer, we need to talk.

How are you! :)

This week I joined a new social media, pi.fyi It’s a spinoff from Perfectly Imperfect magazine, where people can recommend and ask questions to a niche community of cool people. I’ve joined early enough to just be @vu, here’s my referral code.

Like all fledgeling social media, it suffers from the network effect. If I refer two more people I get a mug.

My fears for pi.fyi are twofold. First, there hasn’t really been a new social media since, I guess Bluesky? And in that case the circumstances were really strange. The newest social media I use is letterboxd, which is like instagram for movies (follow me @avasamerica). I think any new social media needs to offer something that Instagram doesn’t, which is really difficult because people live their entire lives on Instagram. I find a lot of these new social medias just end up becoming wrappers for Instagram, with people constantly linking back to their IG profiles.

On pi.fyi, the only two posts you can make are “asks” or “recs” (recommendations). Here is my second concern. Media consumption as diet culture.

Ironically enough, this Instagram reel explains it best—but in brief, as information and media has become over abundant in the same way cheap unhealthy food is, people are “dieting” their media consumption. To quote the reel, “restriction becomes aspirational.” And in a very similar way as being skinny and “what I ate in day” videos are used to show off status, people are media diets and recommendations to show off their taste and education and self control.

This is a pretty concerning revelation for me in particular, who maintains a newsletter where I recommend people things. But it’s even more concerning for a new social media based entirely off recommending things and looking cool. PI.fyi claims to be curation without algorithms, but how is that possible in 2025? The things I recommend on my newsletter are often recommended to me via an algorithm. Of course, I’m not just recommending things my Spotify DJ puts on, but still there is an algorithm along the way. This might be a full essay at some point.

Check out pi.fyi, regardless. It’s a bit of fun for a few hours if nothing else.

The republicans still fighting the last war

My essay for this month is a review of a very short book I read about the republic movement in Australia. I didn’t hate it, but as time went on I began to really sour on it. My essay turned out very critical of it. Despite dealing with some heavy topics, I think I managed to keep it fun, give it a read.