Good afternoon lovely email friends. I’ve been thinking about all of us enduring social distancing while also in the era of unregulated social media. Nobody saw the latter coming, because they occupy a space previously uncapitalised. As time passes, the overlapping of these two things will seem more significant.

🧹 Improve Your Life With These Tiny Chores: Completing these five home projects, like undergoing a good spring cleaning, will give you a fresh start. See also: Change Your Life in 5 Minutes a Day by Joanne Mallon. Frankly, over-indexing happiness at the moment is good and solid, so see also also: Your Happiness Calendar for February 2021.

🎁 What do you always recommend to people? The old web for which that people like me are occasionally nostalgic is still thrashing around, albeit in limited outlets. Here’s a great Metafilter thread with some interesting answers to an open question. [via Phil Gyford]

🏎 Bloodhound supersonic car project up for sale: Good news, speed freaks: the Bloodhound supersonic car that was built to break the land speed record is up for sale. There’s just no way that owning this can be a bad idea, particularly as 317 people hand-cleared 10-million square metres of desert race track for it to run on, so you don’t even need to worry about hitting a stone at 1,000mph. Cheque-books out, people.

📨 The battle inside Signal: Facebook is good at crippling competitors, but not normally by mass exodus. The fast-growing encrypted messaging app is making itself increasingly vulnerable to abuse. Current and former employees are sounding the alarm. See also: The Economist explains - What are Signal and Telegram?

🏘 Nextdoor Is Quietly Replacing the Small-Town Paper: While others get the scrutiny, Nextdoor is reshaping politics one neighbourhood at a time. The platform has gradually evolved into something bigger and more consequential than just a digital bulletin board: In many communities: it has stepped into roles once filled by local newspapers.

👯‍♀️ Jobless, Selling Nudes Online and Still Struggling: A social media platform that allows people to sell explicit photos of themselves, has boomed during the pandemic. But competition on the site means many won’t earn much. This power-law pattern repeats as each new platform gathers pace. See also: Only-Fans.

🌪 The Capitalist Case for Overhauling Twitter: I avoid linking to tweets because, well, Twitter needs no encouragement. But I’m becoming more interested in Twitter the business. Turns out it’s not just terrible for society, but it’s also a terribly-run company. See also: Twitter launches Birdwatch, a fact-checking program intended to fight misinformation.

💰 Seed Investments in Insurrection: Here’s an interesting thought. The internet we now know, and all the badness coming with it, has venture capital’s fingerprints all over it. As this piece examines, VC culture is complicit in undesirable outcomes, which wouldn’t be a problem for them except it’s hard to make money if the long-term consequences of your investments threaten the democracy that underpins society.