Blogs aren't "realtime", so they don't solve any problems that people went to social media for.
If you're serious about people "just starting blogs" you need a proof of concept that centralizes various blogs into an updating feed of subscribed blogs.
This isn't insurmountable. It's actually pretty simple, in a technical sense. The real trick is to get blogs to play along by providing an api endpoint that will enable a feeds to be generated in the ways that people use them (latest, hashtags, interest relevancy, searchability, etc), as well as endpoints that allow users to interact with them (comments, notifications, etc). Some of that is currently done with RSS, others will need a new (preferably less verbose) form of syndication.
You could even use simple iframes as the delivery mechanism for the blog content, that way the blogs still get their ad-impressions. So long as the posts showed up in a curated feed, without needing to actually click through to anything, it would be fine. The only other thing you would need is a sign-up process that is as simple as facebook or twitter. To the point where you might not even be sure you're creating a "blog", if that wasn't your explicit intention.
So yeah; when that platform/protocol becomes available, I'd say blogs are the silver bullet! Until then, the idea that we should all go back to scouring the net for bookmark-able content, or dealing with the static interaction of an RSS feed, is a non-starter. We didn't make/choose social media because it was useless. We did it because it was easy. That has to be a priority in any suggested alternative.
>Blogs aren't "realtime", so they don't solve any problems that people went to social media for.
Curious, what is your basis for this assertion that "realtime" is the primary reason for social media? I think "realtime" has created this incessant need to watch and feed the machine. That has been an interesting diversion for a while, but I can't see it as healthy long term, IMO. I, and many others I know, check up on friends once or twice a day and then got on with our actual lives. With a less frenetic and more sane model of interaction, "realtime" is way down the list of important attributes.
> This isn't insurmountable. It's actually pretty simple, in a technical sense. The real trick is to get blogs to play along by providing an api endpoint that will enable a feeds to be generated in the ways that people use them (latest, hashtags, interest relevancy, searchability, etc), as well as endpoints that allow users to interact with them (comments, notifications, etc). Some of that is currently done with RSS, others will need a new (preferably less verbose) form of syndication.
I feel like this is 99.9% tackled by existing ActivityPub implementations. There are already a wide variety of clients (and servers) out there with lots of different capabilities, ways of reading/browsing, that suit a variety of consuming styles. Interaction is well-goverened in the spec itself & quite capable.
I would like to see a little more richer-media content. I am pretty partial to toot-threads myself but having more than just text+image post-threads seems like a pretty harsh technical limit. That said, my enemy in RSS feeds is when sites publish heavily stylized content; it's so gross having these blobs of content that don't fit well in my feed.
There used to be a lots of these (Aggregators) and I believe quite a few still survived. I remember writing and getting swarms of traffic -- almost all of them via Aggregators.
This Closure Planet is still active - https://planet.clojure.in
I designed the theme about a decade ago as a fork from my website, and it still is holding strong today.
"Real time" has a place but it's severely misapplied as a value for a broad swath of news that just isn't that urgent. Minimizing reporting time and maximizing engagement just ends up optimizing for a discourse with minimal nuance that keeps us reacting by keeping us angry. It's not a new problem; the 24 hour cable news cycle has had the same effect. But social media has made it much worse. We sorely need a cultural shift towards chilling out and waiting for news to develop.
Despite the condescending tone, I think you’re probably right about what people want. Medium focused too much on style and making publishing easy, but it’s the discovery aspect people will appreciate.
The TikTok algorithm but for RSS would be a winner.
Doesnt this go against the sentiment of the article? It makes a heavy point about nobody being able to control or censor what you have to say. As soon as you give power to an aggregator, thats a cetral point which can control/censor the content.
Blogger doesn't get much attention and I'm somewhat surprised Google hasn't killed it. (Maybe enough people run Adsense to make it worthwhile.) But it's perfectly adequate for a basic blog and, if you do get a traffic spike, it handles it without breaking a sweat.
I've used both, and they make it really complex to move away. After finally biting the bullet and migrating[1] from Wordpress to Jekyll, there was a lot of work involved in getting the Wordpress exported files even barely presentable.
The problem with using Blogger or Ghost is that when the day comes upon which you realize a need for more flexibility in formatting, you’ll have a monster platform transition project on your hands. Just start with Wordpress, use DigitalOcean droplet to start for relatively cheap. Or Wordpress.org if you don’t want to mess with the backend at all.
I get what the author of this website is trying to say, but is there a need to swear that much? What is the purpose of that?
Ps: You actually lost me at the "Fuck Twitter" part. It actually has been better for me since Elon took over and Mastodon has never convinced me with its hallmarks of the old Twitter.
I enjoy it. I'm glad to see the unpolished, unveneered.
What you see as bad, I see as a strong positive signal that we aren't taking ourselves too seriously (it would be phrased delicately if it were), that we aren't here to be nice & tactful.
We're here because we're humans & we're wrestling with bullshit & we should at this point have some attitude & flippancy about where we are & how we got here & how badly we need to progress. It's time to spring ourselves from the trap, already, to start to re-emerge better genuinely human possibilities.
This is a Network (1976) Mad As Hell moment. And it fits; it's apparent to many, many are mad as hell at what online social media has become, what it's impact has been on society. "You've got to get mad." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WINDtlPXmmE
In general, one of my signs of empathic & in touch people is that they can get past their own response & start to tune in & sympathize with, understand other people's disposition & reason, even if they don't like it. Taking the best side of your opponent in debate, the most charitable interpretation you can muster, is the fastest route to progress. I think there's a ton of ways this form here can be a good influence, but more so, I think the content is right on, and it's worth trying to get past your yuck for.
For non-tech folks, I helped a few, and they all loved WordPress. They have simple pricing and a good mobile app with decent support https://wordpress.com/pricing/. Of course, there are other options, too like Ghost Pro https://ghost.org/pricing/
OK, so I broke my own blog many years ago, wordpress, hated it. I like this blog style. I was using bashblog, but I want to give this a shot.
I am apparently a moron.
I cloned the git repo. https://github.com/kevquirk/startablog It is all markdown. OK, I get a markdown converter for my linux server, but wait... the actual posts are in _posts/YYYY, so there must be some kind of script that goes through this thing and generates html... I am at a loss for what that is or where it is located?
Surely, there are better ways to convey a strong point other than to use extreme vulgarity?
I thought the first paragraph was kinda funny, but it was hard to read past that.
I do agree with the sentiment though. It's been my new years resolution for about 5 years now to actually write something on my blog. I find there is an interest mix of intimacy and privacy on a blog. If I post some off the cuff thought to Facebook or Twitter it's almost out of place. There's a sort of social adequate to what you can and can't post to social media. Facebook is a place for family and friend stuff, Twitter is kinda a place for short updates and thoughts for people who care enough about you to read it. But there are no rules on my blog. And no one close to me really cares about what I'm writing on my blog so it feels more private while also being more open and personal because I feel I can write pretty much anything.
So here's my question about static-site generators, such as the one that the linked site recommends.
They seem fine for lengthy prose. You probably aren't going to write that many long-form blogs anyway — in the vicinity of several hundreds, maybe. After many years. So that's fine.
But what I've discovered about my writing habits is that I mostly tend to write short notes, about the size of a Hacker News comment. And those can easily number in thousands after several years of writing.
So how well is a static site generator suited for this? Do I want to build thousands of pages every time I start the site locally? I probably don't. But I can't find a reasonable static-site generator that will only build the requested pages locally, and build everything when deployed.
It's probably also silly to pre-generate a static html page for every such short posted note.
What's the most appropriate solution for such a writing pattern? Bite the bullet and set up a Wordpress or a Mastodon instance? That's a bit depressing.
One the whole, the arguments I'm reading here against the author's points and for twitter and other social are no more than rehashed versions of why the profit-oriented social media CEOs say social media is good. Audience. Engagement. View counts. Feedback. Analytics.
Ask yourself, though. Who benefits most from maximizing those indicators, the content author, or the service which provides the author the free platform? Is it any coincidence that the metrics promoted and provided by the platforms are the same ones that they use to maximize their ad revenue?
We know the platforms use a variety of means to influence audiences to keep coming back, why don't we examine how much the platforms use those same means to influence the creators to come back? Doesn't that little dopamine hit from having your tweet retweeted or "liked" influence the author? And if those hits are parceled out stochastically like Skinner box rewards, who is dependent on who?
"Bloggers" till exist, but they are now called Influencers and have monetized their vlogging, and have expanded to the mainstream which can not read an article longer then 240 characters, and an attention span of 2 seconds, so they use images and video instead.
[+] [-] catapart|3 years ago|reply
If you're serious about people "just starting blogs" you need a proof of concept that centralizes various blogs into an updating feed of subscribed blogs.
This isn't insurmountable. It's actually pretty simple, in a technical sense. The real trick is to get blogs to play along by providing an api endpoint that will enable a feeds to be generated in the ways that people use them (latest, hashtags, interest relevancy, searchability, etc), as well as endpoints that allow users to interact with them (comments, notifications, etc). Some of that is currently done with RSS, others will need a new (preferably less verbose) form of syndication.
You could even use simple iframes as the delivery mechanism for the blog content, that way the blogs still get their ad-impressions. So long as the posts showed up in a curated feed, without needing to actually click through to anything, it would be fine. The only other thing you would need is a sign-up process that is as simple as facebook or twitter. To the point where you might not even be sure you're creating a "blog", if that wasn't your explicit intention.
So yeah; when that platform/protocol becomes available, I'd say blogs are the silver bullet! Until then, the idea that we should all go back to scouring the net for bookmark-able content, or dealing with the static interaction of an RSS feed, is a non-starter. We didn't make/choose social media because it was useless. We did it because it was easy. That has to be a priority in any suggested alternative.
[+] [-] dev_tty01|3 years ago|reply
Curious, what is your basis for this assertion that "realtime" is the primary reason for social media? I think "realtime" has created this incessant need to watch and feed the machine. That has been an interesting diversion for a while, but I can't see it as healthy long term, IMO. I, and many others I know, check up on friends once or twice a day and then got on with our actual lives. With a less frenetic and more sane model of interaction, "realtime" is way down the list of important attributes.
[+] [-] SamBorick|3 years ago|reply
its called rss
[+] [-] robert_foss|3 years ago|reply
https://planet.debian.org/
[+] [-] rektide|3 years ago|reply
I feel like this is 99.9% tackled by existing ActivityPub implementations. There are already a wide variety of clients (and servers) out there with lots of different capabilities, ways of reading/browsing, that suit a variety of consuming styles. Interaction is well-goverened in the spec itself & quite capable.
I would like to see a little more richer-media content. I am pretty partial to toot-threads myself but having more than just text+image post-threads seems like a pretty harsh technical limit. That said, my enemy in RSS feeds is when sites publish heavily stylized content; it's so gross having these blobs of content that don't fit well in my feed.
[+] [-] Brajeshwar|3 years ago|reply
This Closure Planet is still active - https://planet.clojure.in I designed the theme about a decade ago as a fork from my website, and it still is holding strong today.
[+] [-] zemoose|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brokebroadbeat|3 years ago|reply
The TikTok algorithm but for RSS would be a winner.
[+] [-] alt227|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxos|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] throw0101a|3 years ago|reply
* https://www.blogger.com/about/
* https://wordpress.com
[+] [-] ghaff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] f0e4c2f7|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WesSouza|3 years ago|reply
* https://dev.to/
[+] [-] footlose_3815|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s3micolon0|3 years ago|reply
* https://hashnode.com/
[+] [-] l0b0|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://gitlab.com/engmark/engmark.gitlab.io/
[+] [-] aksss|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rambambram|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philip1209|3 years ago|reply
https://postcard.page
[+] [-] widowlark|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linhns|3 years ago|reply
Ps: You actually lost me at the "Fuck Twitter" part. It actually has been better for me since Elon took over and Mastodon has never convinced me with its hallmarks of the old Twitter.
[+] [-] kibwen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rektide|3 years ago|reply
What you see as bad, I see as a strong positive signal that we aren't taking ourselves too seriously (it would be phrased delicately if it were), that we aren't here to be nice & tactful.
We're here because we're humans & we're wrestling with bullshit & we should at this point have some attitude & flippancy about where we are & how we got here & how badly we need to progress. It's time to spring ourselves from the trap, already, to start to re-emerge better genuinely human possibilities.
This is a Network (1976) Mad As Hell moment. And it fits; it's apparent to many, many are mad as hell at what online social media has become, what it's impact has been on society. "You've got to get mad." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WINDtlPXmmE
In general, one of my signs of empathic & in touch people is that they can get past their own response & start to tune in & sympathize with, understand other people's disposition & reason, even if they don't like it. Taking the best side of your opponent in debate, the most charitable interpretation you can muster, is the fastest route to progress. I think there's a ton of ways this form here can be a good influence, but more so, I think the content is right on, and it's worth trying to get past your yuck for.
[+] [-] waihtis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mmcnl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derrida|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nixcraft|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blamazon|3 years ago|reply
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
[+] [-] readingnews|3 years ago|reply
I am apparently a moron.
I cloned the git repo. https://github.com/kevquirk/startablog It is all markdown. OK, I get a markdown converter for my linux server, but wait... the actual posts are in _posts/YYYY, so there must be some kind of script that goes through this thing and generates html... I am at a loss for what that is or where it is located?
[+] [-] kypro|3 years ago|reply
I thought the first paragraph was kinda funny, but it was hard to read past that.
I do agree with the sentiment though. It's been my new years resolution for about 5 years now to actually write something on my blog. I find there is an interest mix of intimacy and privacy on a blog. If I post some off the cuff thought to Facebook or Twitter it's almost out of place. There's a sort of social adequate to what you can and can't post to social media. Facebook is a place for family and friend stuff, Twitter is kinda a place for short updates and thoughts for people who care enough about you to read it. But there are no rules on my blog. And no one close to me really cares about what I'm writing on my blog so it feels more private while also being more open and personal because I feel I can write pretty much anything.
[+] [-] sam345|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bentobean|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WesSouza|3 years ago|reply
The author clearly doesn't understand the concept of audience. I have thousands of followers on Twitter, just hundreds on Mastodon.
We can't move, we can only transition and hope others follow.
Also, don't expect a lot of people to read your blog, unless you have a very hot take, like this post lol
[+] [-] gk1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3nu|3 years ago|reply
https://www.pikapods.com/apps#blog
[+] [-] azangru|3 years ago|reply
They seem fine for lengthy prose. You probably aren't going to write that many long-form blogs anyway — in the vicinity of several hundreds, maybe. After many years. So that's fine.
But what I've discovered about my writing habits is that I mostly tend to write short notes, about the size of a Hacker News comment. And those can easily number in thousands after several years of writing.
So how well is a static site generator suited for this? Do I want to build thousands of pages every time I start the site locally? I probably don't. But I can't find a reasonable static-site generator that will only build the requested pages locally, and build everything when deployed.
It's probably also silly to pre-generate a static html page for every such short posted note.
What's the most appropriate solution for such a writing pattern? Bite the bullet and set up a Wordpress or a Mastodon instance? That's a bit depressing.
[+] [-] cratermoon|3 years ago|reply
Ask yourself, though. Who benefits most from maximizing those indicators, the content author, or the service which provides the author the free platform? Is it any coincidence that the metrics promoted and provided by the platforms are the same ones that they use to maximize their ad revenue?
We know the platforms use a variety of means to influence audiences to keep coming back, why don't we examine how much the platforms use those same means to influence the creators to come back? Doesn't that little dopamine hit from having your tweet retweeted or "liked" influence the author? And if those hits are parceled out stochastically like Skinner box rewards, who is dependent on who?
[+] [-] c-fe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] z3t4|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xmorse|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://notaku.so/product/blog
[+] [-] Tepix|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brajeshwar|3 years ago|reply
1. https://simplecss.org
[+] [-] forgotpwd16|3 years ago|reply