How to keep in touch

Following the atlas

There is no newsletter, and the reason is stated below. There is, however, a way to be told when a new entry appears or when I correct something — and it works without my knowing who you are.

Every time I add an entry, publish a text or record a correction, the update goes into a feed: a file the site exposes continuously and that anyone can read with a program. It is neither a new technology nor a complicated one — it has existed for twenty years, and it is how sites were followed before the social networks did it.

If you prefer an application

A feed reader gathers the sites you follow in one place and shows you only what has changed. There are free ones on the web and for the phone — Feedly, Inoreader, NetNewsWire — and many mail programs, such as Thunderbird, can do it without adding anything. I have no relationship with any of them: they are examples, and there are others.

If you prefer it by email

There are services that take a feed and send it to you by email — Blogtrottr, Kill the Newsletter and the like. The point that makes this route different from a newsletter is where your address ends up: you give it to the service, not to me. Atlas Noctis continues to have no list, no form and nobody's address. The other side of it, and it is fair to say so, is that you have to trust that service as you would trust any other: its privacy notice is its own, not mine.

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Why there is no newsletter

Because opening one would mean beginning to collect personal data, and whoever collects personal data has to declare who they are. The European Regulation requires the data controller to be identifiable, and a pseudonym with a mailbox does not fully satisfy that requirement. This site's privacy page has always said so, and it also says that if and when I open a list that page will be rewritten first, not afterwards.

While the question stays open, I would rather not have the list. The feed does the same job — it tells you — without my having to know anything about you and without my having to write something untrue in a privacy notice. If one day there is a newsletter, it will be announced here, with the name of a real controller.

And if you want to write to me

The address is fratercustos@proton.me, and it is the same as always: to report an error, to add a source, to say that a dialect variant in your village goes another way. The corrections that arrive go into the register with their date — it is the bargain described in the Method. What you write to me I use to reply to you and for nothing else.

The feed entries are written in Italian, because the register of corrections is the house record and I keep it in the language I work in.