A radical idea, lets all go back to blogs, hosted and owned by ourselves, on our own sites, which will enrich only us, and where you can write as long and as short as you want, and link to whatever you want.
Is there a good way to get my blog onto the fediverse? It sort of seems like the protocol (ActivityPub) is built in a way that it can support blog-style content as well as toot-style content, and it would solve many of the problems people have with discoverability, RSS dying, shared private posts, etc. I'd be interested in getting my blog (which is self-hosted and using a static site generator) publishing in a way that fediverse users can follow.
I guess IndieWeb is also in this space, but ActivityPub probably has the critical mass thanks to Mastodon.
I'm aware that Micro.blog (mentioned elsewhere) is looking at ActivityPub support of some kind soon. I think the IndieWeb movement and the federated blogging/don't-call-it-tweeting movement are close enough that they should be working toward interoperability.
I don't know about the Fediverse but you could look into micro.blog, which is focused on microblogging but supports longer-form content (long-form content shows up in a micro.blog feed as the title plus a link to the full post). micro.blog is part of IndieWeb.
"The fediverse" seems to be the name people are using to refer to the maxclique of federated Mastodon and Mastodon-compatible (Pleroma, etc.) instances. Mastodon uses ActivityPub as its server-to-server protocol, although it adds some features or at least conventions that I think are not in core ActivityPub (content warnings, emoji, usernames of the form @geofft@xoxo.zone instead of https://xoxo.zone/@geofft, etc.). But I think that it's possible for any Mastodon user to subscribe to something that's just publishing blog posts via ActivityPub and not actually acting like a Mastodon server, and posts will show up in their timeline.
(Mostly I'm interested because in practice I tweet about my blog posts after I publish them and this seems to be how discovery works, so I might as well make my blog participate in the same protocol as this Twitter-replacement everyone seems excited about.)
If you're running a WordPress blog, then the [OStatus](https://wordpress.org/plugins/ostatus-for-wordpress/) plugin connects your site to the fediverse.
I don't know if there's such a thing for your static generator, though...
OStatus is currently implemented by Mastodon but essentially none of the rest of the post-Activitypub fediverse - we’ve more-or-less standardised on Activitypub as a protocol which solves many of OStatus’s problems.
I agree that individual blogs that emit an RSS feed to follow are a great thing. However, most bloggers don’t really have the skills to host their own blog on a dedicated server. So, even if they did avoid Tumblr, they would be relying on another such hosting service like Blogspot or Wordpress.com.
It isn't that hard to install a blog on a shared hosting plan or VPS somewhere. Just find something with CPanel and some sort of auto installer (I think it was called Fantastico or something) and Bob's your uncle.
Don't even need to know how FTP works or how to code anything to do that...
Plenty of people on social media/blogosphere who have no idea how to do even that. Just because "it isn't that hard" doesn't mean the barrier to entry isn't incredibly high.
CPanel can do nightly backups. If something goes wrong, roll back a day or 3 and try again.
I've been using this method since WP was first added to Fantastico, way back in the day. A form of lazy versioning I guess.
We're not talking about companies who need high availability. Your personal blog can handle a day down while you restore from backup (it's just a few clicks from the CPanel, the wait for the email saying it's ready).
You can use a static site generator and drag-and-drop the build directory into Netlify (or deploy with Git). Hosting is free, including using a custom domain and SSL.
Yeah. The only way things will really move forward (in terms of privacy, freedom of speech and general quality of discourse) is if people host their own stuff rather than relying on a bunch of large corporations aiming only to improve their own metrics and save their own sorry reputations.
Freedom of speech, sure. I don't know about privacy, though. Anything you post on your blog, or in the comments section of someone else's, will also end up getting scraped by robots and then aggregated and fed into the great Moloch idol of surveillance capitalism.
Savvy individuals could manage it themselves, by creating their own servers and encrypting the traffic and only granting access to trusted individuals. Most people, though, would have a hard time navigating that. A centralized (or perhaps semi-centralized, a la Mastodon) could help a lot on that front.
Perhaps something comparable to Google+'s Circles concept. I always thought that was a great idea which was unfortunately rendered completely unworkable by the unfortunate accident that it was implemented by Google.
I operate on the principle that the Web was invented for publishing information to the world, so I don't publish anything (blog posts, comments, etc.) that I don't want available to the world. Hence I'm fine for bots to scrape it, copy it, aggregate it, whatever (as long as it's not plagiarised, but that's a different discussion ;) ).
Spyware monitoring my browsing habits, down to the real-time location of my mouse pointer, is not something I want to be exfiltrated from my computer and correlated into a political or commercial profile.
> Freedom of speech, sure. I don't know about privacy, though. Anything you post on your blog, or in the comments section of someone else's, will also end up getting scraped by robots and then aggregated and fed into the great Moloch idol of surveillance capitalism.
You’re forgetting that they also currently monitor everything everyone is reading, not just writing.
I'm on board with that, but we haven't solved the problem of notifying the world of our content. Places like reddit discourage posting your own material. HN is fine for niche but places like medium cross-promote between authors so things are more likely to be discovered.
I have such nostalgia for the blogosphere. The one thing it's missing is post privacy; I want to be able to journal privately (like on Dreamwidth) but also use my own hosting and not rely on someone else's platform.
This doesn't sound like a use-case for a Web site to me.
How about sending yourself emails, categorised into their own maildir or IMAP folder, or even a brand new account? That would inherit security from your email setup (which is monotonically more secure than systems which delegate password resetting to your email account).
You can read and write them online or offline using a variety of readers and editors, including some self-hosted browser-based clients (e.g. RoundCube, etc.).
You also get a bunch of tooling for free, e.g. for backups (offlineimap, isync, etc.), indexing/searching (e.g. mu), etc.
Sure! And that's what Dreamwidth offers... except I can't run my own DW. (Well, it's open source so I could, but it's kind of huge, and I would be the only user!) I'm basically thinking of federated DW.
- Allowing randos to emplace their screeds immediately below your post encourages fighting
That second point I think bears more exploration. Maybe we shouldn't allow trolls to inject themselves into every conversation, eh?
My favorite format for post/discussion is still the blog format, where comments are moderated by the author of the post. You want to post something the author wouldn't allow on their post? Do it on your own blog. (Dreamwidth, main successor to Livejournal, has this property as well.)
I think Reddit and sites alike cause a problem with activism, one which was not a problem with Forums.
I see topics for great initiatives on sites like Reddit however everything about its engagement is just wrong.
Comments are poor - people know how to game it, posts have a limited life span affecting comment quality, when a post disappears from the front page engagement drops to what seems 0%. Re-posts are looked at negatively, reddit community gets bored of seeing the same topic even if there is an interesting change or update.
There is something fundamentally wrong about it all and I can't answer why.
Forums allow for longer discussion and are a good way of promoting long term activism when needed, there are threads forums lasting years, are a joy to read and follow.
I run a few blogs for a couple of pretty big Authors (not GRRM big, but still top 5 in Amazon for their categories).
For years now, I've been suggesting to not have comments on the blog, and just have a link to their email saying something like "Want to discuss this? Send me an Email, I'd love to chat!". Every single one of them prefers this method, and has said it creates a much more valuable conversation 1-on-1 with the person, rather than the exposed public sharing of an open comment section. One of the authors actually came up with the idea, and I now love it too.
A few others ask for comments as normal, but want people to sign up, and be approved. WP has a nice feature for this where people can sign up + comment in a single go, then the admin can approve that comment, which also approves them to post in the future. Settings > Discussion > "Comment author must have a previously approved comment."
I find it really interesting (and even exciting) that Instagram stories (which have rapidly taken over Instagram) work like this: you respond by sending a private message to the poster, not by leaving a public comment.
This article utterly misrepresents Tumblr as some kind of paradise. It's definitely not. It's as good and bad as Twitter or Facebook or whatever else. I used Tumblr for years, from probably 2008 until 2017.
The real problem as I see it is there's a large, vocal, vicious echo-chamber effect at play. A lot of its userbase are quite radical and aggressive in their beliefs, and the reblogging system makes it easy to use the platform for bully. It's not entirely optional to interact with radicalised elements on Tumblr. The tagging system lets them find you, and then they can brigade you if you fall foul of whatever pet cause they have.
This happened to me when I'd posted a photo of my dog. She's my pride and joy, and it was a harmless and cute photo of her jumping to catch a ball in the air. My mistake was using the caption "Good girl!" and tag #goodgirl. (I also tagged #dog, #fetch, #springerspaniel, #spaniel.)
I was flooded with follows from people, mostly men but also some young-ish girls, in the "daddy dom" community (their main tag seems to be #ddlg, but #goodgirl was enough for them to find me). That was a pretty disturbing subculture with definitely uncomfortable elements of abuse built right into the foundation of it.
I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that by "gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot. They mercilessly harrassed me. They flooded my inbox with abusive message: "dirty cis scum, kill yourself", things like that. They reblogged my photo saying some pretty vile things about me and my poor dog. In their reblogs they utterly misrepresented what I'd said, reposted it endlessly, called me transphobic, a bigot, threatened to dox me.
In the end I abandoned my entire blog there and deleted it. As far as I know, there's no way to get my dog's photo removed from Tumblr or get the hateful reblogs taken down. I reported them all for abuse and harassment, but Tumblr did nothing. Tumblr's staff don't care. They would never respond on Twitter or by email or to my reports through the form on the site. Just radio silence.
This is purely anecdotal of course. I know someone else who also accidentally drew the ire of Tumblr and ended up having to delete their blog and leave the platform to escape a sustained campaign of harassment and threats from a similar group of people. Again, Tumblr-the-company did nothing to stop it.
> I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that by "gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot.
Ah, you've run into an anti-trans false flag operation. Obviously they need to be banned for posting death threats, but they will be a hydra since their main organisation is not organic and is outside the platform.
I was on tumblr until around 2016 and i can confirm the observations - harassment for totally misrepresented things, just to demonstrate virtue. From the few persons i met IRL it doesn't seem like an false flag.
Indeed. I wondered whether the author was talking about a different Tumblr to the one I was familiar with. Even from the early days it seems to have been a community for militant transsexuals, furries, SJWs, and people with niche sexual fetishes.
This walled garden isn't working! Quick, let's get back to the last one!
Seriously though, blogs and RSS - communication on the internet has been solved. It just doesn't seem to be easily monetizable, so a big commercial entity isn't pushing it.
This is quite interesting though:
"Everyone I knew aged out of it, lost interest in chronicling their personal lives <b> or got jobs writing the kinds of blogs they used to write for free." </b>
So does this mean there is money out there for the kind of tumblr/blog weirdness people like to read?
> So does this mean there is money out there for the kind of tumblr/blog weirdness people like to read?
Sort of, if you've got the rare personality that can turn a blog into a form of entertainment. Along with the unrelenting dedication to do it in a rote fashion week after week for years. Once the audience latches on, you're not allowed to take a long hiatus or change what you do. Dooce (dooce.com) comes to mind, her blog had very primitive beginnings prior to growing into a serious monetized traffic destination for a time. I like to call them Howard Stern personalities, people that are gifted entertainers. You may not like their brand of content or personality (I don't care for people like Stern and Glenn Beck for example), but they've got the magic sauce for some audience base.
I spent a lot of time in the early blogosphere, circa 1998-2004 or so. Something that was amazing to observe, was how many very talented personalities were unable to break through to that ultimate next level of popularity. They seemingly had everything it required (whether wit, charm, skilled story telling, et al.) and still couldn't get there. The world has a lot of brilliant people that never break through for any number of countless reasons.
Some of the longer posts about social justice that I would read on Tumblr when I was regularly using the app offered some insight into the minds and feelings of marginalized groups that were able to voice their opinions vehemently due to the anonymity that Tumblr provided. It was a safe space and an echo chamber, in that widely unaccepted opinions were harshly criticized as bigotry and removed from the discourse. I think it gave a lot of people the opportunity to vent to a group of generally caring, considerate, sometimes single-minded, and occasionally misguided teenagers and young adults when these people felt that they had no other outlet. It might not have produced the most inspired arguments or conversations, but at the very least Tumblr provided a cohesive community.
Politics aside, tumblr is impossible to have long-form conversation on. Sure, it has longer posts than say, twitter, but replying to a chain makes makes things almost impossible to read. [0] Furthermore, instead of following content per se, you follow blogs that are likely going to be insular. Tumblr is just as much of an echo-chamber as Twitter is, if not even moreso.
This is quite different from reddit or hn where you see a plethora of topics and submissions from different people related to a topic, and which are upvoted/downvoted. Both reddit and hn's UX allow for long replies and discussion, at least until the thread becomes too nested.
You can see the difference in any reddit sub that is geared towards text content instead of link submissions, but especially in /r/AskHistorians and similar. Not that reddit and its ilk don't have any issues, but at least its possible to have longer discussion there.
Mastodon is a semi-decent alternative to twitter, but 500 characters is still a tad too short. I suspect they'll make this configurable in future updates. Pleroma [1] has a 5,000 character limit by default, which is configurable. However both of these still suffer from subscribing to people, not content aggregates where anyone can post.
So for social networks, Mastodon looks promising if you don't care about the popular culture of pathologically blocking other instances. If you aren't on an instance that doesn't block other ones, you can end up being in an echo chamber easily too.
For actual discussion though, I don't know what's better than reddit or hn, even with the problems that they do have. Centralization isn't always bad, although reddit is slowly making itself unappealing, especially once they finally kill off the old design.
> But a great many serious things cannot be articulated in 140 or 280 characters, and so [on Twitter] you get the most easily reducible — and therefore least accurate — version of the feeling or idea. Either that, or you get lengthy Twitter threads, which are ponderous and boring.
This is quite similar to Noam Chomsky’s idea of the media requiring “concision”¹, and therefore the media can only express mainstream ideas, since non-mainstream ideas require a little bit of explanation and so cannot be expressed concisely.
> neurons work together in networks to produce truth
Category error, surely? Whether or not something is true, it's truthiness or falsiness must exist outside of the brain percieving it, yes? In which case it's a process of recognition or labelling, not creation.
Well, no. I thought about editing this after the fact, but couldn't come up with a succinct summary of what neurons do on a high level. So I let this first impulse stand.
Collectively neurons moderate their individual binary responses and together respond with more nuance to outside stimuli. Maybe that's the parallel she/he is trying to present?
Here's the deal with replacing Twitter: first realise it is (under a sane interpretation) a really badly designed product, because it doesn't know what it is. Let's say that roughly it comprises:
1. A way to hear about news from people or organisations you like (Elon, Yankees, WTO, Lady Gaga, whatever)
2. A way to microblog and share with your friends or (more usefully) with colleagues or interest communities.
3. A discussion medium where there is no hierarchy of competence, and everyone's opinion is given the same weight.
(1) and (2) are generally positive and useful things. In (2) you might get a flamewar in a gardening community or whatever, so you need moderators to prevent outbursts over how best to deal with greenfly, but generally these kinda things are pretty peaceful. See HN.
It is not at all clear that (3) is a good idea at all. Most people know nothing about most topics, so giving equal weight to their voice is a bad idea.
The reasons that (3) has come about, persisted, become central to Twitter, is that it's a very good way to engage people. Enragement is engagement. It sells advertising, but it doesn't do much for humanity or its user base.
I'd say using Twitter for (1), leaving (2) to better platforms, and realising we don't need (3) is a sensible solution. The only reason we don't have that is Jack knows full well that (3) makes money, and to hell with the terrible problems that causes.
tl;dr - before looking for alternatives, ask yourself if you need anything at all.
The medium is the message. Twitter is designed like a platform for harassment, so a lot of the content on Twitter is harassing. Tumblr is designed like a platform for radicalization, so a lot of the content on Tumblr is radicalized.
It turns out that your very advice ("don't make your social circle out of the people who [create weird and distateful fringe content]") is the exact same echo-chamber-and-radicalization-mechanism that filled Tumblr with this kind of crap in the first place.
But Twitter makes it so that's all up in your face. I haven't used Tumblr hardly at all, but it seems like it's optional to participate in that, since things are a little more partitioned.
Anyway, I'm interested in hearing more about the radicalization thing, which I haven't actually observed first-hand, but several people in the comments here have mentioned. What interaction elements do you think lead to it?
I used Tumblr for years. From probably 2008 until 2017.
It's not entirely optional to interact with radicalised elements on Tumblr. The tagging system lets them find you, and then they can brigade you if you fall foul of whatever pet cause they have.
This happened to me when I'd posted a photo of my dog. She's my pride and joy, and it was a harmless and cute photo of her jumping to catch a ball in the air. My mistake was using the caption "Good girl!" and tag #goodgirl. (I also tagged #dog, #fetch, #springerspaniel, #spaniel.)
I was flooded with follows from people, mostly men but also some young-ish girls, in the "daddy dom" community (their main tag seems to be #ddlg, but #goodgirl was enough for them to find me). That was a pretty disturbing subculture with definitely uncomfortable elements of abuse built right into the foundation of it.
I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that by "gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot. They mercilessly harrassed me. They flooded my inbox with abusive message: "dirty cis scum, kill yourself", things like that.
They reblogged my photo saying some pretty vile things about me and my poor dog. In their reblogs they utterly misrepresented what I'd said, reposted it endlessly, called me transphobic, a bigot, threatened to dox me.
In the end I abandoned my entire blog there and deleted it. As far as I know, there's no way to get my dog's photo removed from Tumblr or get the hateful reblogs taken down. I reported them all for abuse and harassment, but Tumblr did nothing. Tumblr's staff don't care. They would never respond on Twitter or by email or to my reports through the form on the site. Just radio silence.
This is purely anecdotal, I know. I know someone else who also accidentally drew the ire of Tumblr and ended up having to delete their blog and leave the platform to escape a sustained campaign of harassment and threats from a similar group of people. Again, Tumblr-the-company did nothing to stop it.
> As far as I know, there's no way to get my dog's photo removed from Tumblr or get the hateful reblogs taken down.
I've been waiting for the GDPR to destroy them for this, it's easily the biggest abuses I can think of. Your dogs case might not be that big of a deal but many people have put up some very explicit material of themselves and I doubt they are aware that anything reblogged is still on the site.
When browsing the more explicit info it looks like 90% of the content comes from now deleted accounts, so they're in a position where compliance would destroy a major chunk of their traffic.
Not a huge loss for the world though, the UI is the worst I've come across. It takes some spectacularly bad design to make a blogging platform that doesn't work well with tabs.
I think the "notes" and the "reblog" function contribute to the problem. It drives engagement ^w^w makes trolling way too easy and creates a need for attention that leads to attention whoring/virtue signalling/radicalisation. I think they are pretty much platform problems.
There was a great article I've never been able to find again about how the UI of Twitter naturally guides users into de facto bullying, and most of the advice given by experienced Twitter users (e.g. check existing replies to a tweet before adding your own) is working around UI choices made by the system itself.
I wonder how many of those bully-inducing UI features are also present in software like Mastodon or Diaspora, and are therefore disasters-in-waiting, to be triggered once critical mass of users is reached.
You can add one more thing: inane bullshit. In my field of academia, I know several people who maintain a Wordpress or similar blog for serious matters, but a parallel Tumblr blog for silly memes etc. So, there seems to be a feeling among some that Tumblr is not a credible venue.
I don't trust Yahoo to moderate things well either. They seem to be a little too reactionary. For example they first cracked down on NSFW blogs for no particular reason and then mostly rolled back changes after protests. https://www.zdnet.com/article/after-backlash-yahoos-tumblr-q... How do you think they're going to handle organized campaigns to remove users, or not to remove users? My guess is it will be a mess.
I can't actually recall any form of organized moderation that has been successful for WIDE audiences.
It seems to work 'OK' if there's a smaller community with a group of core dedicated users (which the moderation staff has a large overlap with); however even then it works only if there is a clear and unambiguous mission statement and laser focused guidelines of 'on topic' contributions.
I'm not familiar with Craigslist, and have only very limited observations of Reddit; but I think these sites are generally the closest to a sustainable model.
In my experience they let 'local' moderation do it's thing, sub-communities individually have their own flavor and groups; with active and positive ones seeing the most success. Moderate ones tend to languish until they trail off. The really bad ones get globally flagged and killed.
I think a logical next step might be 'supersets' where different user areas subscribe to a kind of moderation guild.
Any public social platform that wants to be the new thing needs to add a discoverability component for new users. I signed up for mastodon.social a while back, and had no idea who to follow. So I stopped using it.
I notice all the commercial ones have a discoverability component when you join to solve this problem.
Only if tumblr promises to close down account/blogs promoting pedophilia/zoofilia/similar degenerate stuff.
The moderation after the Yahoo buyout got quite stale, they don't even block nazi, or anti-zionist stuff which is a red flag in liberal media.
Yes, let's go to tumblr because text-wrapping is awesome.
Seriously, tumblr has a problem with basic text layout. Responses get indented, heavily on an already narrow column. And next thing you know, any text is basically wrapped to single characters on the right side of the page.
Edit: It's so bad, trying to intentionally reproduce it is more trouble than it is worth.
Possibly it's been changed since then. I've some friends on tumblr but after a while I've just given up on going to any tumblr link because reading it became annoying.
I'm still shocked nobody has figured out how to turnkey self hosting. I mean I understand how complicated it is, given the range of options, but it seems like it's tractable.
Maybe if AWS/Azure etc... had some kind of sign up API that would make it possible.
My DreamHost shared hosting WordPress is pretty turnkey. It's not the most user-friendly UI, but it really is as simple as "register domain" on one page, "install WordPress" on another, and then setup my admin account. After that, they keep the software up to date and email me to let me know when I need to click the link to upgrade the database (very infrequent).
I'd imagine there are hosts that are more turnkey than that (wordpress.com, likely).
I wonder if it's really the case that people just don't want to pay.
It's true, there aren't any that I've seen that are more turnkey, but that's not self hosting.
I'm thinking something like Medium, where you enter your name/contact info etc... on one page and a CC and that's it.
A back end process registers the URL/whois, sets up a cloud host account, pushes a default package to the host (maybe even WP), then sends your email the key/login for the front end and the cloud host login.
So it's a one page setup for something that you can either use as a default Medium like site or SSH into and do whatever you want. You pay the monthly EC2 account, a yearly maintenance with a DNS Registry etc... like you would had you set everything up individually.
The only thing you can't currently automate is setting up people's accounts on cloud providers. I don't see that changing but would be interesting if you could.
Dreamhost is pretty close to self-hosting. I can SSH in. I can download all of the files in my Wordpress installation, copy them elsewhere, dump my MySQL db, copy that elsewhere and have it running on another machine. The only way it differs from a VM is that I don't have root.
Dreamhost actually does, iirc, allow me to get the same experience with a VM.
Really, I'd argue that anyone offering Wordpress in such a way that you can easily download all of your data and put it somewhere else is fine on the self hosting axis.
And lots of people do pay for hosting, but there are millions more who won't pay even $1/month.
reply