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Indie Microblogging

book.micro.blog

189 pointsJNRowe43 comments

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

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.

For time wasting entertainment, TikTok is better than Twitter.

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.

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.

Completely disagree. Many individuals started their careers on Twitter.

Long form posting is dead as a door nail.

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.

It's not a goal, but the idea of monetizing yourself isn't new.

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.

"dead" as in does not seem to carry the same wave of market. Actually dead? no.

> 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.

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.

Agree 100%.

But if you have your own domain pointing to other people's land, then it's easy to switch.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Am I a blogger yet?

https://telegra.ph/What-is-this-07-04-3

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.

rsshub speaks telegram/twitter/more

https://rsshub.app/telegram/channel/programmerjokes

I'm a happy customer of micro.blog and this seems very well written.

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.

My obligatory question for any (micro) blogging platform — is math (mathjax, Latex/Katex) supported?

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...

Is there an epub version of this book?

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.

https://threadreaderapp.com/

You might be interested in https://damus.io/.

You can take your identity elsewhere when using Nostr clients (like Damus) but, very disappointingly, not your content...

Why not? Extracting content from public relays is super simple, and you have the option of running your own relay with just your content at all times.

How about myblog.github.io? It’s a reliable free hosting with version control.

Can I use microblog to make a book format like this subdomain??

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.

truth - but the book they wrote is so clean and nicely organized.

That's fine - there are books of pithy aphorisms too.

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. :)

<3 M.b!

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