”It’s like walking into a place and there’s always a seat for you.”
… @mikehendley .. that is one going on to the quotes for posterity page.
Nice.
@JohnPhilpin So glad you keep curating this; it’s one of those things that adds a warm, human element to our community here 👍
@JohnPhilpin Yes, an excellent description of micro.blog. But I think I would have included his next sentence in the quote too!
And you don’t have to speak, if you don’t want to.
@JohnPhilpin @Ron Agree with Ron here, about the importance of that next sentence. One of my favourite things about Micro.blog is how well engineered the system is; the infrastructure, that thing about which we are all too often afraid to admit to its important, is key to the experience. Micro.blog has no incentive to constantly talk and fill the space in which you exist, has no reason to introduce cattle-like mechanisms, and would in fact fall apart if it ever did so.
@JohnPhilpin @Ron * admit to its importance
(NOTE: hopefully we'll have reply-editing as part of this well engineered system, heh.)
@simonwoods Yes, reply-editing would be good, but FULL archiving (including replies) is higher on my wish list. In fact it's at the top of my list. //cc: @manton
@Ron Oh that sounds interesting. Can you explain what you mean by "archiving"? Are you being specific to the .bar export or in another way?
@simonwoods I have a hosted site here. Manton set up an archive with links to all my postings for me. I've used it many times to find something I wrote before. But it does not include my replies. And sometimes I want to find those replies again too, but my posts archive doesn't help in that regard at all. So I've gotten into the habit of saving the URL containing some of those replies, in my daily log of activity in my Dropbox Paper file. I just linked to a posting I made in July 2018, found fairly quickly with the archive Manton made for me. If I had said the same thing in a reply, I never could have found it. I wasn't actually referring to any kind of an export, though it would be nice to do that for a backup too. Actually I now have all my original postings here backed up in MarsEdit. But again, that doesn't include replies.
@Ron Ah, I see. Yeah I agree and generally think replies need to be easier to manage. They should definitely be included in the export you can make and at the very least easier to find within the profile timeline, within your account settings (like original posts), or even both.
@simonwoods @Ron Replies can be exported (last paragraph) in JSON Feed format; I used to do this regularly but haven’t in a while—and it looks like it’s broken (or broken for me—504 Gateway Time-out) right now? @manton?
@simonwoods @smokey @Ron Many people now have so many replies that it often takes forever to export and times out. I need to re-work it so that it exports in the background like the blog archive.
@manton Export? What's that? Maybe we need a full-blown search capability, so people can find whatever it is they want, whether an original posting or a reply. I know search does work in the archives of my posts.
@Ron of course.
Also interesting how that phrase can be taken two ways ... based on the tone of how it is said ... filed in the bucket of ‘reasons that we shouldn’t rely solely on reading text to understand an issue.”
@simonwoods ... plays to your earlier reference re real conversations?
@JohnPhilpin Yep! Text is limited, even (sometimes especially when) in full-length format. There are some conversations that can never be fully and properly had via remote circumstances but of course we all have monkey brains telling us the opposite, a weird type of defiance to the reality that is our own deficiencies. It is no coincedence that so many people find healthier, more peaceful living when they finally embrace a life in which only the most full conversations are had with those with whom they share physical space.
@JohnPhilpin Micro-Con UK would need two special rooms for topical discussions; one for the discussion, the other as a big open space for taking deep breaths afterward. Quietly, of course.
@JohnPhilpin Hahaha of course it's a real thing. I had no idea! I was going for the notion of "Micro.blog Convention". But look at that, it's a whole political thing...
@Ron For export:
- Go to the web ->
- Click
Posts-> - Click
Export.
From there you can see options for exporting your posts and uploads. This is the feature Manton is talking about improving with regard to replies.
Full search is unlikely to happen since it can be used as a tool fairly easily by bad actors, which is what happens on sites like Twitter. Right now you can search for your own posts on your Hosted site but replies aren't included; I think if replies can be included or given their own search then we would all be set, and it would be comprehensively covered if the improvements to the export feature was also included.
@simonwoods Thanks so much for helping me, Simon!! I followed your clear instructions, clicked to export my replies to a json file, nothing happened (that I could tell), but eventually something opened in the browser window, which is apparently a json file, because the first line has "jsonfeed.org" in it, a promising sign, I thought. I tried to import it into Feedly as a new feed, but failed on that. Finally I managed to open it in Chrome and then it was more readable, with links that work and such.
It immediately made long-lost threads available again, including one about Dave Winer which was spot-on. PLUS I discovered that the URLs given actually worked, even ones from early 2018, unlike my Posts Archive, as you might have read recently. Maybe I can go back and export my posts, instead of replies, and get a json file for them too. That would be a work around to be able to find URL's that work for my older postings.