[HN Gopher] Indie Microblogging ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-04 23:00 UTC)