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Micro.blog

micro.blog

91–100 of 153 posts

Re: Micro.blog

#91
post #51
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…

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?

You would criticize a doctor who would order expensive unwarranted scans, or a taxi driver who would take longer routes than needed.

In other words you would criticize people who charge you for services that don't address your needs.

Re: Micro.blog

#92
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…

> Lots of negativity here, as is unfortunately typical at HN far too often these days.

Well, people are not bullish about this website, so they're expressing their views (which happen to be negative). Check out the 'Show HN' posts, there's a ton of positive feedback on many projects.

Maybe HN crew can somtimes be aggressive and opinionated, especially when it touches the economy and politics, but Show HNs and product reviews in general are the most honest you'll get on the net. This part works pretty damn well.

Re: Micro.blog

#93

> 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?!…

>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'.

This is exactly what I was hoping for and now I'm super disappointed.

Re: Micro.blog

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much does it cost?

It's free if you just want to reserve a username and add an RSS feed from your own website - which can be either full articles (which will appear in Micro.Blog as a title & link), or short 280 char posts. You can reply to posts with a free account too. ------- EDIT: Probably easier if for the other plans I just post the site's own info: New Microblog — $5/month We'll create and host a microblog for you at username.mi…

That seems very expensive for what is a very simple site with very low costs. Why not $5/year?

Re: Micro.blog

#96
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By making it a paid service, the author effectively kills two of those issues straight away - No ads and reduced fake news issues. The ads claim is obvious, they don't host ads because they don't need the revenue. However, that fake news is defeated is less obvious. Fake news largely spreads on free platforms by bot armies, which need to pay $5/mo per bot, making them highly expensive and reducing the likelihood they…

In addition, there are no global timelines or auto-generated trends or retweets at this point. There is Discover feed [1] which is manually curated. So, in case you do see the fake or spam posts, that would be primarily because you follow the accounts. There are also mechanisms to block users which should address the replies spams. Edit: Added the link to discover feed, accessible without an account too. [1]: https:/…

I forgot the Discover feed is publicly accessible, it's a good way of getting a sense of what the community is like.

There's also the 2 min video tour that they just released today, and should probably have been added to the front page of the website:

http://help.micro.blog/2018/video-intro/

Re: Micro.blog

#97
Maybe you should have a look at the Microblog extension over XMPP https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html.

It allows you to publish Blog articles on your XMPP accounts and let your contacts receive and comment them :) It has been successfully implemented in clients such as https://movim.eu/ or https://salut-a-toi.org/.

On Movim we also generate static pages and Atom feeds out of it (for example https://nl.movim.eu/?blog/edhelas@movim.eu).

Re: Micro.blog

#98
I was very pleased to see how easy and quickly I could set up an account and attach the feed from my actual site. (I note that this is all free, which is nice).

I find the $5 fee for someone to set up their own site to be perhaps reasonable on the face of it, but I fear that this won't work. I think those who care about decentralization and the decline of walled gardens are also technologically literate enough to know that they could host their own microblog for $5/month and have complete control. On the other hand, people who don't care probably wouldn't want to pay $5/month.

I would be very happy if it turns out that there are a large number of people willing to pay, and if RSS-based models flourished. Overall, I like the idea, it was easy to jump in, and good luck.

Re: Micro.blog

#99

I was very pleased to see how easy and quickly I could set up an account and attach the feed from my actual site. (I note that this is all free, which is nice). I find the $5 fee for someone to set up their own site to be perhaps reasonable on the face of it, but I fear that this won't work. I think those who care about decentralization and the decline of walled gardens are also technologically literate enough to kno…

If microblog people are reading this, I have a few other comments. I'd like to emphasize that it's a very clean UI and experience.

1. I wish it were more obvious that I could check out a variety of microblogs at micro.blog/discover --- giving essentially a twitter feed. I somehow missed this entirely on my first go-through, initial setup, and checking of the site.

2. I associated the RSS feed to my own site to microblog. And I expected these posts to show up on davidlowryduda.micro.blog. They don't, it turns out --- those posts are just the ones I made on microblog. They do appear on micro.blog/davidlowryduda. This behavior surprised me.

3. While looking at micro.blog/discover, I replied to a comment. After clicking, poof, the UI didn't give me any sort of feedback that I'd affected the world. I think it should both be more gratifying to reply (if this is a functionality that microblog is encouraging) and that it should be more visually obvious that there are replies to a micropost. Right now, I only see that there does or doesn't exist a "conversation" link --- I wish it were more obviously distinguished.

Re: Micro.blog

#100
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Different subdomains are different origins. So it's safe.

It's not quite that simple once cookies (and Internet Explorer/Edge) get involved. But it definitely could be secure.
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