:INFO Where The Kettle Essay Went On 3 March 2024 I published a piece called The Kettle Is Not The Problem. It is about repair, about the four hours I spent fixing a kettle worth eleven euros, and about the specific pleasure of understanding an object you had been using blindly for years. It is 2,200 words and it is the most widely read thing I have written. This page is the ledger for it. Every copy I made, where it went, when, and what happened there. I started keeping it because I had a vague sense that some of the copies did something and most did nothing, and a vague sense is not worth much. :QUOTE [quotetype:plain] A copy is only worth making if it can be traced back. The ledger is not bookkeeping for its own sake. It is the part that makes the copies mean something. :TIMELINE The ledger 2024-03-03 | Published. 2,200 words. No copies made for four days while I decided whether it was any good. 2024-03-07 | Copy to Mastodon as a short thread of four posts with the opening paragraph and a pointer back. 31 boosts. Two long replies about induction bases that were better than my paragraph on the same subject. 2024-03-07 | Copy to Bluesky, single post, same pointer. 12 reposts. No replies. Consistently the quietest destination in this table and I keep doing it anyway. 2024-03-11 | Submitted to Lobsters under the practices tag. 44 points. The comment thread argued about right to repair for two days and about the essay for roughly one comment. 2024-03-12 | Reached Hacker News, submitted by someone else rather than me. 380 points and around 240 comments. Four hours of traffic then nothing. Almost no one who arrived that day came back for anything since. 2024-04-02 | Copy in my own monthly email, sent to 214 people. 61 percent opened. Eleven replies, all of them from people I know, several of them still going as conversations two years later. 2024-05-19 | Republished in translation in a Dutch repair collective's newsletter after they asked. I never saw the numbers and I do not need them. This is the copy I am gladdest about. 2024-09-30 | A woodworking forum quoted three paragraphs in a thread about tool maintenance and linked back. I found this by accident in 2025 and it is still the single best referrer in the list. 2025-02-14 | Cited in a university reading list for a design course. Found via a referrer. Nobody asked and nobody had to. 2025-11-08 | Quoted at length in a print zine about repair cafes. They emailed for permission. I have a paper copy on the shelf and it is the only version of this essay I can hold. 2026-06-21 | Still arriving at about 40 readers a month with no new copies made since 2024. Almost all of it from the woodworking forum thread and the reading list. :INFO What the ledger actually taught me The two destinations with the largest numbers, Hacker News and Lobsters, produced a single day of traffic each and almost no continuing readership. The two with the smallest numbers, the Dutch newsletter and one forum thread, are still sending people in 2026. I would not have believed that without the table, and I would have kept optimising for the wrong day. The email is its own category. Sixty-one percent of 214 is a smaller number than any of the others on this page and it is the only one that produced conversations that are still running. :INFO How each copy points back Every copy above carries a pointer to the original, and the ones that matter carry it as a link rather than as a name. The forum quote is the proof of why: somebody quoted three paragraphs in 2024 in a thread I have never posted in, and because the quote carried a link, that thread has been the best source of readers for two years. If it had said only my name, that would have been the end of it. :LINK https://indieweb.org/POSSE POSSE on the IndieWeb wiki: publish here, syndicate elsewhere :LINK https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ Webmention: the W3C recommendation for a copy telling the original it exists :LINK https://lobste.rs/ Lobsters, where the March 2024 copy went :LINK https://news.ycombinator.com/ Hacker News, where somebody else took it :INFO Keeping the ledger honest Two things in the table are guesses and I have marked neither, so here they are: the Dutch newsletter figure does not exist because I never asked, and the 40 readers a month is a rounded average across the first half of 2026 rather than a figure from any single month. Everything else is a number I actually have.