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Micro.blog

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Re: Micro.blog

#51

Post by arnvald »

prepend wrote: post #36
deyan wrote: post #22

Lots of negativity here, as is unfortunately typical at HN far too often these days. Especially given that this project is what HN is supposed to be about - done by a lone hacker with help from volunteers, trying to create a different and hopefully better social media. Sure, it may or may not work, it has all sorts of pros and cons, but I’d vote for being open-minded and constructive rather than cynical from the get…

I think it’s a neat idea and seems to be what blogger was way back in the day. $5/month is completely unreasonable as a github pages account is free and Dropbox/OneDrive is $8/month. This would be a really neat oss project. And I’m sure some people will find this useful, but seems like not the solution to social media problems. The only way I would think this is good is if it donates $4.95/month to some sort of simpl…

Please stop criticising people for charging money for their work. You don't do that to a doctor you visit, you don't do that to a taxi driver, why do you do that to a fellow programmer?

Re: Micro.blog

#52

Post by almostarockstar »

brainless wrote: post #3

This is something that bothers a lot of us for many years. But the solution is not another young idea, which will grow into another walled garden. We need an easy to deploy open protocol based service. Like XMPP, with easy service discovery. And an open source, fantastic app to go along with it.

As far as I know, there are a few of these already in existence.

IMO, the two main challenges are subscribing to content and discovering new content, the icing on the cake is interaction.

Atom/RSS already "fixed" the issue of subscribing to a blog.

Board like HN and reddit have now "fixed" the issue of discovery (to an extent).

Disqus, reddit, HN all provide interaction methods - the key would be reducing them to one feed so you could comment to all formats and reply seamlessly.

Re: Micro.blog

#53

Post by SyneRyder »

arendtio wrote: post #47

> There's a better way: a network of independent microblogs. Short posts like tweets but on your own web site that you control. Either I don't get it, or their service is not what they advertise. After reading that line, I would expect a somewhat federated blogging platform where you can set up your own server, and it joins the 'network of independent microblogs'. But I can't find any instructions on how to do that?!…

> where you can set up your own server, and it joins the 'network of independent microblogs'

It's a bit like that. You can configure the official Mac or iOS Micro.Blog app to post microposts to your own Wordpress-API compatible website if you want. You can submit the RSS feed from your website to your Micro.Blog account and have that feed into the Micro.Blog timeline - and if you do that, it's actually free to be a member.

It's difficult to explain all that and intimidating to non-programmers (there's a lot of non-technical users on Micro.Blog), so I think they focus on the Micro.Blog hosting & official apps as the easiest way to get started. There's a lot of Micro.Blog users for whom self-hosted-Wordpress/Jekyll is more hassle than they want, and they'd rather pay $5/mth to have that hassle go away.

You might be interested in reading about IndieWeb [1]. Behind the scenes Micro.Blog uses the W3 Micropub [2] specification and other IndieWeb standards for posting microposts and federating Webmentions across websites, if that's something you're interested in.

[1] https://indieweb.org/ [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/

Re: Micro.blog

#54

Post by Aissen »

SyneRyder wrote: post #26
quickthrower2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do that on any blog! E.g. blogger.com

I was about to say the same thing. Think of the username.micro.blog pages as your personal home page, like a Wordpress or Squarespace blog site. They're a hosting option for people who aren't tech-savvy enough to setup an RSS feed / 280-char micro-post RSS feed on their own site, or just don't want the hassle of maintaining that setup. I believe others have tried posting similar XSS into a Micro.Blog post, and it get…

I think it's only true as long as every *.micro.blog subdomain is properly isolated, and you can't access cookies/sessions from micro.blog (e.g post/comment as someone else, if there's no CSRF token). I haven't checked, but hopefully it's the case here. See: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/95369/persisten...

Re: Micro.blog

#55

Post by yRetsyM »

arendtio wrote: post #48
kickscondor wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to be a member to take advantage of this. I syndicate my RSS feed to my micro.blog account (no membership) and have had quite a few useful conversations through there. I didn't see any point at first, but I'm sold now - it's a small community where you get to know people, which is rather rare at the moment.

Can I read somewhere how that works?

I tried to find myself, but there is a bit more detail on the help site which isn't very well linked to: http://help.micro.blog

Re: Micro.blog

#56

Post by rplnt »

stedaniels wrote: post #38
prepend wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s a neat idea and seems to be what blogger was way back in the day. $5/month is completely unreasonable as a github pages account is free and Dropbox/OneDrive is $8/month. This would be a really neat oss project. And I’m sure some people will find this useful, but seems like not the solution to social media problems. The only way I would think this is good is if it donates $4.95/month to some sort of simpl…

You reckon you could build and run this as a service for $0.05 a user per month? Whilst perhaps scraping profit? Care to share some of your own products, I'm keen to see how sustainable your business models are.

Why are you forcing the look from the provider's perspective? OP mentioned an alternative that is cheaper (free), so it's expensive from user's perspective.

Re: Micro.blog

#57

Post by teddyh »

gl0w wrote: post #43

> Registration error. Email address must not include a "+" character. Why not? "+" is valid in email addresses.

They want to spam you later (or sell your address to spammers) and have you not know where they got the address.

Re: Micro.blog

#58

Post by SyneRyder »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #42
jeena wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I know they do is that they have a full time community manager and after more than a year participating I can say that the community is very civilized, see also https://monday.micro.blog/

Just the one? Do they sleep? They will need automated systems for continuous spam and abuse monitoring and removal.

There's no global timeline, no likes, no hashtags & no global search (the global Discover feed is human curated about 4x a day), so the only way to see spam posts is if you deliberately follow a spam account.

Spam replies might become an issue, but it hasn't happened yet, and there are already ways to mute or report an account if it does happen.

Re: Micro.blog

#59

Post by pmontra »

I read that this is federated, but how do I download the software to run my own server? I looked at the FAQ and help and found nothing about it.

Re: Micro.blog

#60

Post by eeZah7Ux »

deyan wrote: post #22

Lots of negativity here, as is unfortunately typical at HN far too often these days. Especially given that this project is what HN is supposed to be about - done by a lone hacker with help from volunteers, trying to create a different and hopefully better social media. Sure, it may or may not work, it has all sorts of pros and cons, but I’d vote for being open-minded and constructive rather than cynical from the get…

Labeling ideas we don't like as "negativity" does not encourage a rational discussion. It's imprecise and often judgemental.
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