Having just slagged the IndyWeb movement for the sixth hundredth time, I took another look at Bridgy and said to myself hmmmmm that looks interesting. If it actually posts to Facebook, as opposed to just posting a link, that would be very interesting indeed.
I hear you. The walled gardens have had a frustrating effect on public discourse.
For a while I tried to use Zapier/IFTTT to make every new blog post a post on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn, but the results just looked tacky. It was pretty clear that I was trying to be lazy with my engagement in the different platforms. As a consequence, no one engaged with my contributions. (And then there’s the issue of context collapse.)
Maybe those automation options have advanced, though. If it was easy to generate well-fitting content for the different platforms, it would be a great solution to this problem.
I have put in some of the effort to make these tools work, and it still makes no sense to me. I respect the folks who are putting together the infrastructure, though, and I really hope it leads to a new golden age for the Internet… somehow.
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For the record, technically blot.im also suffers this issue, but it is a less dramatic scope than Microblog. The dev charges a subscription (a very affordable one) for a web hosting service. There isn’t a whole quasi-Twitter behind it.
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I spent some time hooking brid.gy to mitchwagner.blog and Twitter. The result is that I can publish posts from my blog to twitter, linking back to the blog, and I can also publish Twitter responses and other reactions on the blog.
Neither of these things are things I want to do.
Also, this:
- How do I reply to a tweet from my web site?
- Easy! Put the reply in a new post on your web site, and include a link to the tweet you’re replying to with class
[ u-in-reply-to](http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-in-reply-to), as if you were publishing a normal IndieWeb reply.
This is clearly a meaning of the word “easy!” that I am not familiar with.
Like I said, another language.
Paraphrasing Cory Doctorow (see original post) again: This is a legal problem, not a technical one. Scraping sites used to be legal — it’s how Facebook got started, by scraping MySpace — but then Facebook got powerful and the law changed.
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And because it’s just a bunch of Markdown files it should be relatively easy to move to another service if Blot were to go belly-up.
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While this might be the worst idea ever I wish Apple would step back into this arena. I’m not sure what it would look like.
The problems presented by Facebook are seemingly endless. But, it’s easy to use and well established so it’s got it’s own gravity. For many it would seem that Facebook is their primary internet experience. I quit it 5 years ago but I realize that I’m disconnected in some ways because of that.
I wish Apple would create a new, easy to use service that would be an expansion of Messages? Not quite a full blown blogging experience but something like “Messages Timelines” that would allow friends and family to share/subscribe to a more persistent timeline. The problem with that is that of course it would likely be pretty locked-in. But it would, perhaps, be a step towards providing an alternative to FB.
Alternatively, perhaps it would provide a more clearly separated service like “iCloud Diary” that would sit on it’s own as a simple “blogging” platform.
I’m not sure what either of these would look like but the goal would be to provide a safe space for non-techies to share. How would it be safer and not devolve into a pit? Could it still be somewhat open to the larger internet? I think the answer there is that it would be a paid service. Somewhat like micro.blog in organization but with Apple’s much broader reach. Anyone with a paid iCloud account would have an easy way to turn on their diary and begin connecting with friends and family with a persistent timeline and commenting. I’m thinking of it as sort of an extension of the kind of sharing already in Photo’s shared albums and Messages… just another piece of that, sort of pulling it all together.
Obviously this is not the more open, Indy-web sort of thing that so many of us are rooting for. But it would perhaps be a step towards more people easily sharing outside of FB. So, an Apple supported, easy-to-use platform that serves as a way out of FB for at least some people.
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Just to add to this: Blot’s source code is also in the public domain, so (unlike Micro.Blog) if the service were to shut down for any reason you could choose to spin up your own instance to replace it.
Admittedly, it’s not something a non-tech-savvy individual would be able to do (no one-click installer or DigitalOcean droplet or anything like that) but it’s just a matter of time before David does the work to make that easier.
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My hat’s off to you for quitting Facebook five years ago. It’s got its hooks deep into me.
One of my brothers never signed up. Years ago, I gave him grief about that. Join the 21st-century, I said. Now I congratulate him on his good sense.
A friend who is a journalist quit Facebook very publicly, a few years ago. Like me, he has been very active on Facebook previously. I asked him last year how it was, and he said it was terrible – like trying to live your life without a phone.
As for Apple creating a new social media platform: they have a terrible record with social media. There are some things that Apple is just not good at.
On the other hand, Messages is a de facto social media platform that’s already Facebook scale.
I mentioned my one brother who is not on Facebook – well he and I and my other brother have a running thread on Messages for years.
Yeah, they failed miserably with Ping but that was years ago and much has changed since then. I think the Apple of 2021 has the resources that should they choose to do so they could create something that would likely stick for a non-trivial portion of the Apple user community. And, as we’ve seen, once they get something to stick it tends to grow and become more sticky.
I just don’t think it’s in Apple’s DNA – the same way they haven’t created successful collaboration tools.
Apple is a company that makes products for introverts. If you stick your AirPods in your ears and isolate yourself from the world. Arguably, that’s probably why they’re going to succeed wildly at augmented reality, when the Apple Glasses finally hit the market.
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I think that Messages and FaceTime are examples where Apple has successfully built products for communication. That said, Apple’s communication tools seem to excel at 1 to 1, or 1 to n where n is small. They generally have not done well so far with mass communication tools.
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I am allergic to the major social media platforms. I only signed up for Facebook a few months ago, just to see the photos my siblings and their kids were posting. I once made a innocuous post, an architectural image from one of my exhibits, thought better of it, and deleted it. Otherwise I just give a like to my sib’s photo posts. I’ve never used Messenger and will never. I have a Twitter account just to communicate with the handful of developers who provide no other means to report issues. (An annoyance, BTW.) I used Instagram for photography, but stopped posting when the platform got increasingly weird. I have a page on LinkedIn but ignore it.
I definitely never want my contexts to collapse.
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