Have you seen the last mobile app? You are forced to see 3-4 ads without seeing the post in question. Actually tumblr is dying because of this.
Let’s all go back to Tumblr
31–40 of 138 posts
Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr
#32A 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.
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. I've been toying around with writing my own social media software along those lines, using servers. Some noodling about on that topic: https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/tag/social-media/
I figure any cms could offer that via privileges
Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
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.)
Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. I've been toying around with writing my own social media software along those lines, using servers. Some noodling about on that topic: https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/tag/social-media/
I figure any cms could offer that via privileges
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.
Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr
#35Here'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 d…
It's good for short-form humor. Does that fall under (2)?
Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are all content issues, not format/platform issues. Don't like those? Don't make your social circle out of the people who do them.
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-m…
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?
Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr
#37Any 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.
Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr
#38A 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.
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.
Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr
#39A 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.
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...
Re: Let’s all go back to Tumblr
#40Politics 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.
[0]: http://i.imgur.com/PvO3Hcu.jpg
[1]: Pleroma is another decentralized, federated network that interfaces with Mastodon, GNU Social, and other Fediverse networks.