[HN Gopher] Indie Microblogging
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Indie Microblogging
Author : JNRowe
Score : 164 points
Date : 2022-07-04 09:48 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (book.micro.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (book.micro.blog)
| lawgimenez wrote:
| I'm a happy customer of micro.blog and this seems very well
| written.
| mysterydip wrote:
| I need a service that converts tweet streams (like the ones
| shared here of Foone) into microblogs so I can actually read
| through them all.
| sacrosanct wrote:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/
| pqs wrote:
| Is there an epub version of this book?
| asim wrote:
| Very thoughtfully written. I can see the part at the bottom about
| breaking the stronghold of Facebook. Ah the lofty dreams.
| Twitter, Mastadon, etc. Not sure if the dreams will ever become
| reality but love the idea of a federated micro blogging site
| that's both open source and mainstream.
| kurupt213 wrote:
| Microblogs are largely irrelevant if you aren't already a known
| expert on a given topic.
|
| Longform posting allows you to establish your credibility and put
| your point forward.
|
| Maybe this is why Twitter is such a miserable experience. Way too
| many opinions from the vulgar mass
| nojito wrote:
| Completely disagree. Many individuals started their careers on
| Twitter.
|
| Long form posting is dead as a door nail.
| superkuh wrote:
| Careers? Is monetary gain the goal of blogging now? ~back in
| my day~ we posted to our web logs because we had something to
| share with the world.
| nojito wrote:
| It's not a goal, but the idea of monetizing yourself isn't
| new.
| superkuh wrote:
| Yes, it's what has destroyed the web. The real webpages
| are out there but they're all burried under a never
| ending influx of profit seeking crap.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Microblogs are largely irrelevant if you aren't already a
| known expert on a given topic._
|
| An enormous number of people have established themselves as
| known experts on a given topic via "microblogging" channels,
| which for nearly everyone means Twitter and Facebook.
| Hopefully, open/federated microblogging will break out of its
| niche.
|
| Just one example of this is the many thousands of virologists,
| epidemiologists, public health scholars, and statisticians who
| built huge followings (effectively from zero) during the
| COVID-19 pandemic.
|
| > _Longform posting allows you to establish your credibility
| and put your point forward._
|
| Microblogging is a great channel for this too. These are not
| either/or choices, and any good strategy for establishing
| yourself as an expert -- or whatever your goal is -- will
| include both of these communications channels and more.
| Saint_Genet wrote:
| Sure, if you think the point of twitter is to build a brand by
| dispensing your profound wisdom from up on high. The vast
| majority of people use twitter as entertainment, and the fact
| that people who like to pontificate about federated microblogs
| don't get this is why it won't take off in any meaningful way.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| For time wasting entertainment, TikTok is better than
| Twitter.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I don't think we can establish an objective classification
| for entertainment in terms of time wastefulness.
|
| I'd rather stare at the sky than use TikTok, by the way.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| Of course there is no objective way. TikTok is more
| optimized for silly, effortless entertainment, and
| Twitter is more optimized for opinion leaders to reach
| out the maximum number of recipients. They all have a
| purpose.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| https://book.micro.blog/rss-for-microblogs/: don't use RSS, use
| Atom, which is just as widely supported outside of podcasts
| (where Apple has ruined it for everyone for quite unfathomable
| reasons, with their peculiar mixture of innovation and
| ossification), and is technically sound in ways that not only
| make it easier to generate and work with, but _do_ actually
| matter here, about content types.
|
| To be perfectly clear: the _only_ reason anyone should use RSS in
| new development is podcasts.
| JNRowe wrote:
| There is some reasoning in the syndication section1. While we
| _may_ not agree with it, Manton has clearly put some thought in
| to Atom for this use case.
|
| I'm personally a little unconvinced by jsonfeed too which is
| mentioned in later chapters, but I have to say I'd go all in on
| it _iff_ it allowed us to free ourselves of RSS.
|
| 1 https://book.micro.blog/syndication/
| chrismorgan wrote:
| The nifty thing about JSON Feed for micro.blog's purposes is
| that it sounds like they wanted some kind of JSON _API_
| anyway, so extending JSON Feed works out rather nicely.
|
| For just about any other purpose, I'd say you want RSS or
| Atom anyway, and supporting multiple formats is actively
| undesirable because it complicates feed selection, so don't
| even touch JSON Feed.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Ah, I'd skipped ahead to the RSS page and missed that. I had
| been perplexed that it wasn't even mentioned, but I'm glad to
| see that it was addressed earlier.
|
| I disagree with the reasoning, because Atom is every bit as
| widely supported outside podcasting, and RSS is more painful
| to generate, requiring special-purpose date formatting rather
| than using the standard format that your library already
| supports, and requiring foolish duplication (things like
| description versus content:encoded) to obtain _almost_
| reliable results due to some of its underspecified or
| unspecified areas causing genuine pain for authors and
| clients alike, and simply not representing the right
| semantics. Atom is much more dependable and harder to mess
| up, and the sensible choice to implement as a feed producer,
| except (as mentioned) in podcasting where Apple froze it out.
| fiatjaf wrote:
| You might be interested in https://damus.io/.
| janandonly wrote:
| You can take your identity elsewhere when using Nostr clients
| (like Damus) but, very disappointingly, _not_ your content...
| sotu wrote:
| Can I use microblog to make a book format like this subdomain??
| velcrovan wrote:
| Think for a minute about the words "microblog" -- a twitter-
| like presentation format limiting individual content chunks to
| a few sentences in length -- and "book", a longform collection
| of prose typically running tens of thousands of words in
| length.
| sotu wrote:
| truth - but the book they wrote is so clean and nicely
| organized.
| azangru wrote:
| That's fine - there are books of pithy aphorisms too.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| The underlying platform of Micro.blog, the specific service
| sotu was asking about, is built on Hugo. If you make a
| Twitter-sized post, it will show up just like it would on
| Twitter or Mastodon or another microblogging platform; if you
| make a long post, you'll get a field to add a title, too, and
| when you read it on the timeline (and when it gets
| crossposted to Twitter, if you have that enabled), you'll
| just see the title and a link to the longer post.
|
| I don't know how Manton made that site, specifically, but
| focusing too much on the terminology here may lead you astray
| a little in this context. :)
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| My obligatory question for any (micro) blogging platform -- is
| math (mathjax, Latex/Katex) supported?
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Can't speak for other platforms but Hugo can[1] and, IIRC, a
| fair few of the themes do this for you and give an easy "turn
| mathjax on" option in the settings.
|
| [1]
| https://bwaycer.github.io/hugo_tutorial.hugo/tutorials/mathj...
| pqs wrote:
| For many years, I have been microblogging from Telegram. Telegram
| is great for that, thanks to the channels feature. Yes, I know,
| it is closed, and centralized, and it has many other problems,
| but it is super convenient. Now I'm trying to post my post as
| WordPress entries which are linked in the channel, but it is more
| cumbersome. This way, people can follow me through the RSS and I
| own my posts. I haven't read this book yet, but I will check it,
| as I'm very interested in the microblog format. But still,
| Telegram is so convenient ... Any decentralized indie
| microblogging approach must beat Telegram in convenience, and
| this is very hard.
| asim wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. Did not know Telegram had a blogging
| platform. Assuming it's this https://telegra.ph. Is there an
| integration inside telegram for publishing?
| blooalien wrote:
| Actually, while that _is_ indeed a service of Telegram last I
| checked, I don 't believe that's what asim was talking about.
| Pretty sure they're using a Telegram channel in lieu of a
| blogging platform.
| Jaruzel wrote:
| To be honest, it would be trivial to wire up a Telegram Bot
| to read posts that you send it, and to re-post them on a
| web based blog platform.
| pqs wrote:
| I sometimes have used telegra.ph for longish posts, but this
| is a microblog, so short notes with no title and just one,
| two or three small paragraphs of text. I sometimes share
| Evernote notes, exactly in the same way one would use
| telegra.ph.
| thekoma wrote:
| Am I a blogger yet?
|
| https://telegra.ph/What-is-this-07-04-3
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Basically it's just a Telegram channel where only you can
| post content on.
|
| I followed a friend's semester abroad in Japan through one
| and it was pretty good. A bunch of OnlyFans creators have set
| up a Telegram channel to notify about new content etc.
| chaosite wrote:
| I don't think that's it?
|
| I think they're just using a channel, as described. You got
| to squint a bit until you recognize it as a blogging
| platform, but all the functionality is technically there.
| sacrosanct wrote:
| I guess the gist of this is don't build your castles on other
| people's land. Anyone remember Posterous, a blogging platform
| that got shut down and is now Posthaven? Posthaven is a paid-only
| service so unlike Posterous it can keep the lights on for a
| longer time. But then there is the likelihood of even a paid
| service shutting down, so buyer beware.
|
| My approach is to self host and keep all my blogposts backed up
| in markdown format. Any images I have are backed up too. Also if
| you are running a blog, make sure you have the funds needed to
| keep it up for as long as possible. You may even need a paid CDN
| if you are serving a lot of images. Cloudflare helps with their
| free CDN but it's nice to get away from centralised monopolies
| such as Cloudflare. Their recent outage has me looking for
| alternatives.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Agree 100%.
|
| But if you have your own domain pointing to other people's
| land, then it's easy to switch.
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(page generated 2022-07-04 23:00 UTC)