bridge over gaps
Ege's Junited 2026 list helped me find Brennan's The Internet Needs More Cross-Pollinators. This was my favorite throughline from it:
Someone posts a thinkpiece on Substack, a YouTuber makes a video essay, someone on Tumblr webweaves quotes from it, and it lands in a Discord server, and three weeks later the idea has its NeoCities page and webring. That's cross-pollination. That's how the living parts of the Internet metabolize.
But it only works if someone actually moves. If someone is willing to be the weird person who is both here and there—in the fandom space and the IndieWeb space, in the literary blog world and the tech writing world, in the Tumblr reblog economy and messy craft of the independent personal site.
The Internet's structural holes—the gaps between communities that never talk to each other—don't close themselves. Someone has to be willing to be the bridge, willing to be nowhere solid.
You can be the person that moves, that bridges open gaps. The more presences you uphold across spaces, the more bridges you can establish. Moreover, be your best matchmaker for the ideas, projects, people, and spaces you value.
Sharing as widely as possible, picking your spaces, and netting an audience can all coincide with each other. Share via platforms, personal websites, niche protocols, and analog or non-Internet media too. Ultimately, you want to build the interpersonal network you want.
Give your found ideas, that were compelling enough to share publicly, the respect they deserve through more than just one home. For example, my blog and its posts could be part of a larger, more connective ecosystem. One that percolates more cool novelties across more mediums than it already does. That continuity from sharing what's contextual, meaningful, and advancing conversation prevents expressions from dying in their original space. Whether by your hand or someone else's, may your creative expression escape singular containers.
Then again, creative expression leaks by nature. Embrace the hands-on and hands-off sharing of your work and others to places and people that you would have never expected. It doesn't even have to be all that difficult either. Sparking connections, remixes, and more can be as easy as a single contextual comment. Imagine the exciting story you can tell after having done so.
You can encourage others to assume these roles and beliefs, if not follow suit too. Even if you can't, finding others that already practice these be just as helpful.
Do your best to find great connectors, springboards, and switchboard operators. Interface them not only to satiate your human need for connection, but to learn or improve at the roles they play too. That way, you can much better help out prospective connectors going forward. You also would be benefited finding friends:
- Working with familiar and unfamiliar media.
- Willing to propagate ideas you found then shared however possible.
- Willing to share your art in places you don't want to inhabit, but do want your presence within.
- That cover the nooks and crannies you miss.
- Knowing all the teams and individuals within any organizational structure (if not being it yourself).
That last point segues nicely into how important dipping your toe in everywhere is, particularly in leadership roles. Knowing how everyone and everything interacts and interlocks with each other is extremely valuable. How else are you going to manage communities well without an accurate representation of all the actors and their activity that lay before you?
Your work deserves the grace of a thousand spaces. How can you get one step closer to that abundance at this instant?