Readers, I have a couple of Letters Blogatory updates for you, one of which comes with a request.

Social media. Until about two years ago, I was quite active on Twitter (when it was Twitter) and engaged with readers there probably more often than here on the website. My Twitter/X account still exists, but I have not posted in a very long time. My main social media account (leaving aside LinkedIn) is on Mastodon, which is part of the Fediverse, a network of social media networks that are more like the old-fashioned internet than today’s leading social media sites. I am also starting to use Bluesky, which is closely related to the Fediverse, though it uses a different protocol. Bonus: at least on the Mastodon server I use, there is no algorithm sending me posts that I do not want to read, and no advertisements. It’s like old-fashioned Twitter: a reverse-chronological list of posts by people you follow. But the Fediverse doesn’t yet have the scale that Twitter has or had. It would be great to be able to recreate the good forum for social media back-and-forth I used to have on Twitter without having to have all the baggage that comes with Twitter or other centralized, algorithm-driven sites.

Here is the ask. If you use social media and are unhappy with your current social media network, or even if you are happy with it but open to having a second account, please connect with me. My accounts are @tedfolkman@federate.social (Mastodon) and @tfolkman@bsky.social, and you can follow it from your own Mastodon account or from any account on the Fediverse that uses the ActivityPub protocol (including Threads, I think) or on Bluesky. You can also follow @posts@lettersblogatory.com if you want to get Letters Blogatory posts in your social media feed. That account comes with a cool feature: if you comment on a Letters Blogatory post in your social media account, the comment will automatically show up on the blog!

Search. I have installed a new search engine on Letters Blogatory, so you may find that using the search bar yields better results. But that is small news. The bigger news is that I am in the process of categorizing thousands of Letters Blogatory posts so that using the new search engine, you will be able to zero in on all the cases decided by a particular court that deal with a certain issue. This is going to take a while, but it is coming.

Image credit: Elizabeth Fraser (Public Domain)