We slow web folks have a problem, and Manu Moreale captures it in Too little, and too much, self-promotion.

How much self-promotion is too much? Substack interrupting your reading experience to remind you to subscribe feels too much to me. An overlay interrupting your browsing to ask you to subscribe to a newsletter is also too much. Am I wrong? Am I crazy in thinking it’s too much?

I don’t think that you’re crazy at all, Manu. I think you’re absolutely correct. That crappy experience of interrupting someone (especially on a reading platform) is rude. It’s kind of like seeing someone reading a newspaper in a coffee shop, pushing the newspaper down, and saying “You don’t subscribe to this newspaper and you really should.”

However, the many of us out here trying to liven up interest for an internet of humans interacting thoughtfully, well, we also have another problem. I am quoting Manu again here–he might as well be describing me:

I am, broadly speaking, a shy and reserved person. I don’t like to be in the spotlight, I don’t like to draw attention to myself.

So we’re out here trying to do the best we know how for the web, but many of us have our own reservedness to contend with while also not knowing the line where things cross from self-promotion to rude. I’m here to offer an encouragement to you and to me: Let’s push ourselves a bit when it comes to self-promotion so that we can discover where that line is!

I recently wrote something related to this on the Good Enough blog: Grassroots. In order to help human-focused tools and products gain purchase, we are going to have to promote them. This means getting up the courage to talk about the things we do, whether we are doing them on our own, as a collective, or even as a small, independent company.

It is hard for many of us given our temperaments, but we have to remind ourselves that we’re trying to do good things and it’s also a good thing for others to discover our writing, product, art, etc. We are working on these projects because we enjoy them and we believe that others will enjoy them. It’s not wrong or bad for us to talk about our work, to remind people of our work, and, even in the act of them looking at our work, to remind people that we have other work they might be interested in as well. It’s not a bad thing to share what it takes to make that work sustainable, whether that means sharing a link to subscribe, support, or sign up.

There is certainly a line that can be crossed. We may talk too much about our Ko-fi or Patreon. We may make our self-promotion too loud or distracting. But I think most of us are very far from crossing that line and it’s time for us to push a bit out of our comfort zones. Let’s push ourselves to share what we like. Let’s push ourselves to share ourselves. Let’s do things and tell people.

He doesn’t write a lot of books, yet I’m pretty close to a Leif Enger fanboy. Peace Like a River was my first read of his, and it really knocked me over. None of his other books have quite reached that same height for me, though I’ve enjoyed them all in their way. Particularly Virgil Wander and its small town movie house hit a spot for me since I grew up in and around my parents’ small town movie theater.

So I was excited to somehow receive my digital library loan of Leif Enger’s new book, I Cheerfully Refuse, on release day. It was the most unique post-apocalyptic book that I’ve ever read. The post-apocalypticism was so subtle as to be difficult to notice. Anyway, here are some of my highlights.

Picture a voice like a river’s edge where the water turns back on itself, orbits quietly, proceeds downstream in laughter.

Did I understand it? Not by half, but when it thunders you know your chest is shaking.

I didn’t want to fall apart at such a time but felt something behind my eyes like the curling edge of paper catching fire.

“You’re a man who stops and listens. If that’s not the definition of friendship, it’s close enough for now.”

She was proud of that bookshop, we both were. It didn’t draw crowds but rather individuals, some of whom came a long way to see what Lark had found.

The food and drink had been enough. No one got too elevated or too honest.

Look out the window, will you? At the clouds, ripped at the edges and moving fast. The sea like a shroud. The eaves bare of ravens, every bird flown.

As enemies go, despair has every ounce of my respect.

Wrapped in wool and coffee steam, she watched me steer or watched the passing shorelines and barely spoke as miles murmured past.

“Words are one way we leave tracks in the world, Sol. Maybe one day you will write a book, like Olaus did, or Molly Thorn. And people will read it, like I’ve been reading to you. And they will know that you were here, and a little about what you were like.”

I am always last to see the beauty I inhabit.

This is an IndieWeb carnival themed post, as instructed by this month’s host, Aaron Leonard. The theme is near and dear to my heart.

When Shawn and I came together to do web work in 2022, we very much had in mind our deficiencies. While Shawn had been creative for all of his adult life, coding up a design was not something he’d done in forever. While I had been around coding for all of my adult life, coding up complicated back ends that are stable and efficient was also not something I had done in forever.

Yet we had many ideas. None of them seemed that technically ground breaking. We figured we could figure it out, at least to some level. We could get it done good enough.

I never met my wife’s grandfather. Before moving into retirement in Minnesota, he had worked for McDonnell Douglas in California, building the famous DC-3. Now that’s work that can’t tolerate “good enough.” Or in other words, “good enough” means something totally different when you’re building an airplane.

When he was working wood or repairing buildings in his retirement, though, with a little common sense good enough was plenty achievable. He had a very clear view of the different levels of quality required for different jobs. To this day, one of his favorite sayings continues to live on in my shop: “It’s not going to the moon.” He definitely knew the difference as McDonnell Douglas worked not only on aircrafts, but also spacecrafts.

A few months into working together, Shawn and I realized we weren’t exactly playing any longer and maybe we should make this business a real entity. Incorporating isn’t too onerous these days, and so we set forth. I’m not going to go check my notes, but my memory says that most of the names we came up with were similar to the ultimate winner. They poked a bit of fun at our own skills and set the bar where it ought be. In the end we just needed to pick a name and move on, and one name certainly appeared good enough (llc).

In the world of web software, teams can get a bit too caught up in the shiny lure of quality. It’s quite funny for me to say this because we had both participated in a prior venture where the word “quality” sat among our team’s stated pillars. Quality is important! Our new small company would not ever survive, though, if perfection was an end goal. We wanted to focus on the quality of experience, and honestly when it came to that quality we didn’t think that it’d be too hard to surpass the big players out there today.

So we set out not to ignore quality, but to continue reminding ourselves when the feature that we’d built had become good enough. We can continually improve software and we can make it better, but for now let’s get it out there and see how far good enough gets us. Today our collective is now six, and we’re all on board with seeing how far good enough can get us.

It’s a difficult balance. Art is never done. Without editors, authors might never finish a book. Software runs that same risk as it can always be improved. We don’t plan to set useful things down and call them done, but we can step away from that work for a while as it’s certainly good enough for now.

Good enough isn’t about sacrificing quality. It isn’t about giving up. It’s about recognizing when to step away and let things breath (Good! Enough!). It’s about not identifying as your art, software, or company. It’s about avoiding overconsumption of any one stream. It’s about tools that achieve a core goal without all the fluff. It’s about setting your priorities.

Enough is good. Good is enough.