One of the reasons I didn’t get onboard the Micro.blog hype train for Literal is that I can’t find any sign of how they make money, what their goals and intentions are, and what history their developers have with regard to previous work.
@simonwoods Totally understand that, I had the same questions even though I signed up for it anyway. It’s a good service but it matters not if they don’t have a stable revenue source going forward, as hosting and continued development costs money.
@jlrevilla 🤷♂️ I guess it looks nicer. To be honest, if I try out a social network for books I am going to be more interested in finding people as opposed to some sort of theoretically superior UX or anything like that. Of course we should be able to have both but I don't know how I'm supposed to trust Literal when they're seemingly unwilling to talk about themselves.
@pimoore It's also a trust issue for me. For example: Micro.blog, Letterboxd, and Glass; all three have paid products and either a compromised free version or nothing free at all. Nice, simple, easy to understand... and then you can also find out info about the companies and how they work and so on.
It's not that hard to improve the experience of GoodReads, let's face it. The difficult task is to be honest whilst attempting to build a better product.
@jlrevilla I’m going to play around with it as well. You can also check out @moondeer’s Bookshelf plugin.
Following on from @simonwood ’s post about literal’s business model, which I thought was a good question, I decided to ‘take it to the mountain’ and reconnected with Piet Terheyden - co-founder and CEO of literal to raise this exact question.
I was impressed with his initial response:
“I saw the discussion you’re having on simonwoods.online/2021/11/2... so I’m glad to be able to answer it here.”
Wait - Piet joined Micro Blog?
Well, no …
”I’m not a member there, but I occasionally check who’s talking about Literal to find some feedback from non-users. I actually like the concerns raised in the conversation on Micro.blog, because it shows we’re not the only ones who prefer to pay for a product instead of giving away data and supporting cooperations.”
So how do they make money?
The following is from Piet. He asked me to post on his behalf since he is not a member, but more importantly;
“Would appreciate if you can post a formal answer - I think it’s nicer than me signing up and replying as a stranger with a new account.
Two models - Piet's words.
“We currently have two plans for our business model: 1. Selling books, 2. Paid clubs & tips and to be clear - we don’t want to support Amazon, put up ads or sell your personal data.
Selling books ”The goal here is not just to make money, but support creators, authors and book stores. We will roll this out step by step on a national level. You will be able to buy the books directly through Literal while we’re splitting the revenue with the person/creator/store that the book was discovered through. This is a bit comparable to what bookshop.org is doing.
Paid clubs & tips To be honest, we’re still trying to figure out what the best way for this one is. We have received a lot of questions on if we will have this feature, as there are more and more authors and small influencers joining who are running Patreons or other forms of payments for the followers to support them. Again, with the goal to support the people curating and managing clubs. You can for example imagine an indie author launching a club for a small community of readers and asking them for feedback, doing Q&As and giving them insights in the writing process.
Piet also was quite open to answering more questions, asking us to reach out again if something is unclear.
I also know from prior conversations that they are very interested in using APIs to connect to other services - which is how my original 'conversation' with Piet started. This is a separate topic - but will write about again shortly. My belief is this is the right idea.
To remind - Literal's Micro Blog club stands at 56 members - and though not all are Micro Bloggers - around 30 of them are.
Calling all book readers ... I have 3 more literal invites if there is interest out there. LMK if you want one.
@JohnPhilpin @moondeer @jlrevilla @simonwoods Thanks for passing this along to Piet and sharing his replies, John! I’m glad to read Literal has some ideas in the works, and hopefully they’re able to keep momentum on it. Having an API that M.b. can link into would be the best, meaning one could control their book data here but take advantage of Literal’s sharing without having to duplicate their posts.
@pimoore that’s kind of where my head is - but really down to @manton who last I heard was thinking 'what it would look like'.
for my two cents - I would much rather the limited resources of micro blog were spent on integrating with specialist apps like literal rather than creating vanilla less functional equivalents such as Sunlit, Bookshelves. Wavelength et al.
@JohnPhilpin @pimoore I get that, but I think it's useful to have some of this built-in while dedicated book services are so new. Most don't have APIs yet. Syncing read state could be an option without depending on external services.
@JohnPhilpin I’m not going to try to say why @manton built all those apps, but they do showcase the possibilities of the Micro.Blog APIs, and maybe because he could? Integration with Micro.Blog may also become more popular as time goes by.
@odd @JohnPhilpin That's part of it. From the beginning I wanted there to be a rich set of third-party apps, not just a single app that everyone uses. I think we've achieved that: the official apps M.b, Sunlit, Wavelength, Epilogue, plus Gluon, Icro, Ulysses, iA Writer, MarsEdit, and others.
@odd absolutely - I think of it akin to inventing television and then creating 2 or 3 stations as examples of ‘what that means’…
And all good - I am just hoping that the core work can be put into simplifying things for the poets ( as @dave ) calls them around styling, plugins, web mentions etc - that is the core stuff that allows you to really expand the application.
Right now you have to really understand the tech to implement this stuff and when you go into the backend it sometimes raises more questions for me ( that I don’t need answers to ) …
Eg I want to switch on @pimoore ‘s Tufte design - all good - done - but only because I know that not all new designs are in design - some are in plugins. And now I have done it there’s a whole world to explore around Hugo and shortcodes - not for the light hearted!
Eg the Twitter card plugin by @moondeer - very cool - I think - too scared - I’ve got the instructions.
Eg webmentions still are not easy to introduce - again I’ve got the instructions - Thankyou @amit but need time to work it …
Not many people are going to spend time working out how to do all that - and ‘all that’ is a lot - if the umbrella message of Micro Blog is ‘simplicity for the ‘common man’’ to rif on Copland.
Until then, I suspect that the people that come and stay will be a fraction of the possible people that could join and utilize this very neat system. Then of course - I don’t know what your aspirations are … the potential market I can see might not be aligned with you vision.
// @odd
@JohnPhilpin I don't think this friction will be alleviated until the team is expanded to include more people who are different enough from the current team. Between technical expertise and major Apple bias*, Micro.blog lacks the kind of diversity that can grow the community by example in a bigger way.
/* the big problem with that bias is that it mostly includes: US men with money who read Daring Fireball. Whilst there is more than that in the community, it appears to still be the overwhelming majority.
Messaging and better guidance can help solve these issues but as I've learned, it's difficult to do that for free, and as quickly as it really could be done. There's been some bad luck but there are also some missing foundations... again, I agree with you in that this might also be due to a different of perspective. You and I might have entirely different ideas compared to the most important people -- Manton especially -- and the problem with that is there are clearly not enough people with the necessary resources to fully prove these points with substance. Either those people are getting or have jobs elsewhere, or have difficulty reconciling the obvious complications of Micro.blog with the proposed message of simplicity.
The only reason I even feel comfortable posting this is that Manton has spoken about his frustration with people misunderstanding his motives... to be honest, I think that works both ways and it's unfair to expect people to understand a thing that has not been explained all that well. There's a point at which either Micro.blog is going to grow and make the necessary, albeit difficult, changes at a deep level ... or it will in fact remain what it now looks like, the thing for which it was once criticised; Manton's own private party which you either fit in with or just... 🤷♂️
(I'm sorry for posting this in replies... finding it difficult to get in the flow of good, structured long-blogging at the moment)
@JohnPhilpin One of things I need to finish is expanding the design directory to be based off of plug-ins so it’s easier to discover and configure new themes.
@JohnPhilpin if you haven't seen it recently, I beefed up the cards plugin with structured data for search engines and automated preview card generation inside posts and post-lists. When I slow down a bit I plan to do some walkthrough type posts and y'all are always free to hit me with questions. Once I realized I could build CSS with Sass files, template any file (including Sass and Javascript files) I got sucked in to hyper focus mode thinking of what all I could do with it.
@JohnPhilpin also, if your looking to tinker. my repositories are a good source for seeing what is possible and how things are connected. I've picked Hugo 0.54 apart with 50/50 documentation and trial-and-error. Success is like 30% figuring out the code, 60% having things in the right directory and 10% having patience with waiting for site rebuilds and figuring out what goes wrong
@JohnPhilpin side note: one of the tricks to navigating themes and plugins is understanding they all got squashed into one during the build process. My custom theme uses partials that I moved into plugins. You just have to be careful about naming collisions which is why I started prefixing a lot of the file names
@JohnPhilpin also worth mentioning that I've been hacking my way back into web dev … anyone can do it. I wrote my programming poetry in Swift before giving the wheel back to the liberal arts side of my brain: recognizing musical chords on an iPhone
@Moondeer I hadn't. I now have. I am now even more scared !!
Thankyou for all the detailed replies and posts and that link - back to finding time for me to even understand first steps of what I even need to do to get it all working.
And also now even more confused :
I don’t see your cards plugin in the directory - I do see @thatguygriff and @manton - so was I confused?
That said - I did read your post as far as my understanding of it allowed - which is not very much.
Seperate topic - I find the spectrum of technology 'novice to ninja' BIG.
In certain circles, people see me as a tech junk head who they call for help when they have a computer problem, whilst members of other circles don't understand how I am even allowed to have a computer - because I clearly don't understand it!
I am guessing that you would tend to fall on the later group!
Hopefully other thread readers will more readily grok your wisdom.
@issimonwoods good stuff - given the length of some of my replies recently I don’t think you should be apologising !!! We are definitely on the same page.
@JohnPhilpin That’s my fault. I haven’t added all of @moondeer’s plug-ins yet. I need to make it easier for anyone to submit a plug-in to the directory.
@frostedechoes That definitely helps. It's still a shame that those people might follow the adverts and then run into the same hurdle that I believe are not that difficult to remove.
@JohnPhilpin I'm knowledge blind as to knowing where to start, I just know it isn't scary and I can walk y'all through stuff. Step one is setting up the test blog @manton gives you so never have to worry about f$&king things up where people will see. @pimoore and some others have shown some interest in some practical walkthroughs. Y'all just need to think about what you'd like to see walked through. My \ADHD brain does better with a target. When the spousal-type needs my help with writing I make her write out what she wants to say and then I'll transform it for her.
@Moondeer you are very kind - and indeed - very right - to ask what exactly are we trying to fix here … so let me think and get back to you.
@JohnPhilpin I think I know where to start: a walkthrough navigating the Micro.blog theme and plugin portions of the web client user interface and discussing plugin management and what kinds of things I expect y'all to do in order to integrate my various plugins (some are drop-in, some want you to enter parameter values into a particular file, and some want you to drop a line of code somewhere in a custom theme).
@JohnPhilpin nope, I can walk y'all through installing the same way I do. When you go to create a new plugin there is a field for the URL of a GitHub repository. Entering the plugin's address there is effectively the same thing as selecting it from the plugin list
@JohnPhilpin Ask and you shall receive.
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@JohnPhilpin side note: how cool is this iPad + magic keyboard setup. I've been doing everything from the couch (with an out of commission laptop). The little dot on the recording is the magic keyboard cursor. The only thing I've needed the desktop for is a GD Javascript console when I'm trying to figure out what the f$&k is wrong. Everything else is accomplished via Working Copy (Github Repositories), Textastic (Code (or anything else) Editor), and Safari.
@issimonwoods Curious, have you tried Bookwyrm? It's an open source federated social book network, seems promising so far.
@pimoore Just got an iPad Air to go with my mechanical Keychron keyboard (Bluetooth). Pretty awesome. If it's a writing day, I pretty much don't need the laptop at all.
@JohnPhilpin @Moondeer I am looking forward to working on theme stuff for TIL but also not in a rush. The supported version of Hugo could change at any minute and I'm unsure if I have the appropriate resources to respond quickly to such a big update.
Kinda the curse of outsider work tbh, especially when it comes to working on documentation and message.
@issimonwoods It will be interesting to have the Hugo documentation as an accurate source for a change. Who knows how much time I spent with trial and error figuring out what was a code issue and what was simply a feature that wasn't around in 0.54 (merging maps comes to mind).
@issimonwoods Side note: my whole collection of plugin repositories are basically Micro.blog flavor Hugo gists for accomplishing various feats. I tore my theme into pieces to see how much generalizing I could do … and then kept going when I figured out how to build Javascript from templates and compile Sass into CSS (which then became building Sass from templates). A few of the plugins are really developer tools, like plugin-precision-injection which provides utilities for customizing where in a theme specific plugin HTML gets loaded as well as whitelisting by page path to only load plugin assets for pages that need them.
@Moondeer This is the kind of thing that makes me think the community ought to have a "developer track" of some sort. I'm working on an idea like that and have yet to see why it wouldn't produce at least the opportunity for people to make good progress on whatever ideas they might have.