@manton Tantek is one of the pioneers of the Indie web. What are all these apparent links to tweets he's posting on the Timeline, none of which seem to go to any tweets? Can't someone tell him what to do different? They don't work for me on Dialog or on the Chrome browser on Android. He has been posting dozens of them. Do they work for anyone? If not, can't someone help him out?? Or tell me what I'm doing wrong, if they work for everyone else.
@Ron This came up recently in the IndieWeb chat. The links work for me (but I haven't tested on Android yet). It might be best to exclude these from the feed since Micro.blog doesn't have special support for them.
@manton It didn’t occur to me to try that. I can see most of them on my iPod Touch, and some just tell me to log into Twitter, which I’m not gonna do. I don’t have any idea how to exclude them from the feed. Things get more complicated every day. Sorry, I’m very discouraged.
@Ron Sorry, I meant @t might consider excluding them from the feed of posts he's sending to Micro.blog. The other option is for us to improve Micro.blog's display of those kind of "like" posts, but there's not currently a plan for that because I'm not sure how it fits into the rest of Micro.blog. (Maybe when we have more formal quoting it would fit there.)
@manton I unfollowed home because of this glut of links. This is an issue IndieWeb needs to solve. And/or micro.blog...
@mexpat @manton I agree with Glenn completely. To me, I experienced it as spam, which is very rare here on micro.blog! I don't think it was intended as spam, especially considering the source, which made it seem very ironic to me. Even the idea of linking to many things on Twitter (even if I could have seen them, which I couldn't, with Dialog) seemed very out of step with the usual postings here. I have been saying for a looooong time that I believe the community standards here should more specifically specify the positive things that would be most welcome on micro.blog, not just the most agregious postings we would want to avoid or ban. For example, I would readily pledge to limit my postings and comments here to things that are civil in tone, respectful in nature, and constructive in intent. It's not something that would need to be policed, but I believe making a positive statement about what we all want to contribute here would be a wonderful thing to have. Many decades ago when I was in college, all students agreed to a Code of Honor, which helped to create a very positive tone at our college. The system is still working there today and I think a positive statement of our core intent could have a similar beneficial effect here. Of course I realize I am just one user here and what I want may not be anything at all like what others want. Thanks for reading this.
@Ron I'm chiming in here just to say your point about stating our positive intent has left me pondering…
@manton @Ron @mexpat I see right now Tantek’s entire Micro.blog profile post listing is this collection of “likes” of tweets from yesterday (and even visiting his website, I can’t find how to find a list or archive of any posts older than Monday!), which seems…excessive.
I follow some folks who use Like posts in a useful manner (e.g., Cheri, Eli)—I don’t know if they’re formal IndieWeb Likes, but they 1) aren’t spamming the Timeline with them (a few a day, and not even every day) and 2) are formatted in such a way that I have some idea of the content (the post title is the link text—obviously you can’t get that with a tweet, but you could still use n characters of the tweet text).
That said, it’s not clear to me what the issue here is? If Tantek isn’t making posts you want to read, just unfollow (or block, if you never want to see anything from him, ever) him, right? Or is this being seen as a sign of platform health, the first tumble on the slippery slope to spam and bots?
@smokey Since I started the thread, I'll respond to your choices at the end. I pointed Manton to them because something seemed broken. I've seen @t post many constructive postings and from what I know, he was one who helped create the concept of IndieWeb. It wasn't that I didn't want to read his postings, but that I couldn't read them. Tapping on what seemed to be intended as links did not go anywhere. Something was broken or formatted incorrectly. Couldn't someone help him use Micro.blog in a way that actually communicated what he seemed to be wanting to say? As for talk about spam, I said I experienced them as spam, but didn 't believe he intended them as spam, so they were NOT spam. But something was broken and I was hoping someone could help him with the problem. You confirmed my suspicion that something is wrong by looking at his profile, which has nothing in it but these recent postings. He has certainly posted many normal postings here in the past, about his long distance running, for example. Did he delete all that stuff on purpose?
I thought micro.blog would get easier and easier to use. How else could it ever become a platform with wide adoption? Instead it has gotten more and more complicated, which is no problem for the technically expert. But not so for some others.
@Ron Ah, OK, thanks…so mostly a “bug report”, as it were.
First off, very strange that the links don’t work at all on Android, as they are just normal HTML links. Maybe there’s something on your Android device that is trying to open them in a Twitter app that you obviously don’t have installed? (If you want to experiment, does the same thing happen if you click on one of the “@so-and-so’s tweet” links in the big block on Tantek’s website?)
As for talk about spam, I said I experienced them as spam, but didn 't believe he intended them as spam, so they were NOT spam.
Right. Sometimes people (like me, in this case) will use the term “spamming” to mean “sending a lot of content that can individually be desired or useful but when present in a large quantity becomes annoying” (also sometimes “flooding”). So while they were not intended by Tantek to be annoying/spam, the end result, as you described, is that for people following him, the posts ended up feeling like spam. (FWIW, this could also be said of when I come through at the end of a day and reply to 10-15 posts and the Timeline seems to be all Smokey ;-) I’m spamming the Timeline with replies—which I do try not to do, but sometimes that’s my only shot at replying…)
You confirmed my suspicion that something is wrong by looking at his profile, which has nothing in it but these recent postings. He has certainly posted many normal postings here in the past, about his long distance running, for example. Did he delete all that stuff on purpose?
A person’s M.b profile page always contains only the last 50 posts or comments the person has made (and unlike the Timeline or Mentions, can’t load more to show earlier ones), so it doesn’t mean he deleted any prior posts, just that he posted so many “Like” posts yesterday to push all the prior posts off his M.b profile page.
It seems like Tantek recently either made some sort of change to his site to start showing those Likes (they make a nice, innocuous display block on his website), or whatever generates his RSS feed broke to start including them in his feed (which I don’t think any person or website using his feed wants to see!). In my professional software-QA-person opinion ;-) I think the solution to this problem is for someone to reach out to @t with the bug report about his recent flood of tweet-Likes and ask him not to include them in his RSS feed (or at least the RSS feed he submits to Micro.blog).
I thought micro.blog would get easier and easier to use. […] Instead it has gotten more and more complicated
I don’t think Tantek’s RSS feed going crazy—or any future instance of someone’s self-hosted, as opposed to Manton-hosted, RSS feed going crazy as they change something on their site, or make a mistake, like when I accidentally hit “Publish” instead of “Save Draft” on a blank post—is an indication that Micro.blog is getting more complicated to use. It just means somewhere along the line outside of Micro.blog, someone/thing messed up, and we just see the results of the mistake here on Micro.blog.
I hope that I’ve understood your concerns correctly, and I hope I’ve provided some useful replies 🤞
@smokey @ron some great discussions! Thanks guys! Just wanted to pop in and let you all know we did discuss it in the IndieWeb chat and Tantek mentioned he’s not opposed to removing likes from his feed he provides to Micro.blog. So in the near future I think his Micro.blog account might go back to standard posts as he posts them
@Ron I'm going to avoid the larger topic at hand and just focus on your issue with these types of posts. In this instance it looks like Dialog isn't able to handle those types of links as well as it ought to. I tested it on the Android alternatives, Indigenous and Gluon, and the links worked better.
Unfortunately Dialog is not currently fully supported when compared to the Apple side of things. At this point I would suggest trying Gluon, since Indigenous is much more on the technical side of the IndieWeb and not specifically made for Micro.blog.
Gluon is technically in its testing phase right now so there is less of a promise of stability as compared to a theoretical official app, however Vincent Ritter is making great progress with the app and is super helpful when it comes to feedback. He's available both via email and on Micro.blog, which helps.
And yes, unfortunately this is what those of us not in the Apple ecosystem need to do as we have agreed upon in the past. Hopefully Micro.blog is successful enough to take on official Android development and/or third-party development becomes sustainable, since right now it's 100% voluntary work from those who are trying to make it work outside of the Apple ecosystem.
(sorry for the long reply!)
@JohnPhilpin There were ten more today (12:59 am here), all of various people posting links on Twitter to the New Yorker article. His links don't work in Dialog. So basically the same broken thing, over and over and over. You've probably already read the article anyway. Why do we need ten more reminders that it's there? {Hint: We don't.)
This all stems from someone automating the posting of something here, when they aren't actually here to see the outcome of the posting, or to actually communicate with anyone! In Gmail, a filter puts all such things for me in a special place, it's called the spam folder. Another is the Dave Winer account. Dave is on scripting.com, not here, but his links RSS feed puts things here automatically. Try replying to one of those postings. You'll never get a reply, because he's not here! "Dave" is one of the few people here who I've ever unfollowed. I'd rather read his stuff on his own website anyway. Actually I did notice one instance recently when Dave DID reply. Just to prove that general statements are never true, I suppose. He follows me on Twitter, but I bet he doesn't here! I've gotten back into reading his stuff some lately.
More than one person here has told me that unfollowing people is the solution to my problems here. So far, that's never been the right answer. For example not long ago a link to a Tantek talk came up, I watched it and enjoyed it. Had I unfollowed him, I never would have seen the talk. @manton
@simonwoods Yes, I figured out that those don't work on Dialog. It's my favorite way to read here, so I'll stick with it. As it turns out, I wasn't missing anything I needed to see! I've seen all the postings about the other two alternatives, but I'm lazy. It's a shame that there's nothing that "just works." Famous last words.
I think I'm the only one here who has spent $325 on an iPod Touch and $646 on a Mac Mini, both to simplify my life on micro.blog, but those have their own sets of eccentricities too!
The top of my wish list around here would be to have a special place to read and post actual blog postings, keeping all this technical chatter out of view behind a curtain. #2 would be to have a way to privately communicate with someone, rather than everything having to be public in distribution. There's plenty I wouldn't want to just say out loud here.
@EddieHinkle That's good news, Eddie! Maybe you could even encourage him to participate here. I was amazed you used the word "great." Shocked even! Yesterday, I was thinking about going away and never coming back here again. I realized the vast majority of people here don't have the least bit of interest in things that concern me. Which in the big picture is okay. This is a niche site for Apple nerds and I think that's what it will always be. 🍎
@Ron I believe Micro.blog is a specific social community with a specific feel and expectation for what kind of posts are followed and engaged with. So, yeah, I did actually encourage him (and other IndieWeb people in chat) that they should at least for a little while follow and engage with people here so they understand the community better and it might encourage the type of things they share rather than sharing what we call a “firehose” feed. Each of us do have different interests and concerns. Sometimes you and I agree on things that concern and sometimes we don’t 🙂 it’s natural, but one of the things I do love and look for in this community is the interesting ideas and thoughtful engagement. So for that I always appreciate reading your posts/concerns even when they might not be my own concerns. And also, why I felt like tantek’s likes being in the feed wasn’t a natural part of the Micro.blog community
@Ron can’t disagree with anything you write - except sounds like dialog is the problem when
that said - you did reminded me of this quote
“I know @dave doesn’t reply on here (or anywhere for that matter)”
..... @nitinkhanna
@JohnPhilpin Yeah, that's a good quote. When I was following him very closely for a while, he seemed prickly to me. But now I can appreciate better what he must have gone through on the leading edge of blogging for decades. He had very specific rules, which I'm sure were there for good reason. I wish we had specific rules too, but what I wish is irrelevant. Let me know if you wanna hear a good Dave story or two.
@smokey so mostly a “bug report”, as it were.
Not in my mind at the time. In my mind, it seemed like a pioneer of the web was trying to post things on micro.blog, but failing miserably. Had he not earned enough respect for someone to take him aside and help him sort out what was wrong? (Later I learned that it was Dialog that was failing, not his work.)
The rest of what you wrote is fine, except I still maintain that micro.blog is complicated and getting more complicated every month. Maybe not for you and the other brilliant internet mavens, but for regular people, like me. Just look at the Timeline for the evidence. A lot of people are trying to figure out how to get one feature or another, of many, to work for them. It doesn't "just work," it's complicated.