Ahead of the Twitter API going paid-only, I’ve been looking into how much we’re actually using it. I’d like to keep offering Twitter cross-posting for the next X months to give Micro.blog customers an offramp. It’s hard to make business decisions with Elon’s erratic leadership.
@manton Three months ought to be enough but after a while, it’s a moral decision to keep supporting Twitter under the current leadership.
@pratik Agreed. In a kind of ironic twist, I feel like I can make this call for what is best for Micro.blog because I've been so anti-Twitter for a decade.
@manton This is easier for me to say as someone who doesn’t have to run the product, but if I were you I wouldn’t give Elon a cent.
@manton Yup. And respect for that. Unlike some developers who started hating Twitter only after Elon yanked the rug out from under the feet. They be like, I know Twitter is evil now but it’s still essential whereas the truth was that they loved the free ‘Sign in with Twitter’ API
@manton @pratik I too think cutting Twitter off from Micro.blog after the offramp period might be good idea. And I'm saying this despite the fact that I actually rely on crossposting my microposts as tweets because a good chunk of the space audience is still there and only there. But it was fine to use Micro.blog to crosspost only until the API offering was decent, whereas now it's just not fair from their side.
Tangentially, cutting off Twitter might also finally relieve post character limitations that I know Manton has been considering upping at least a bit for a while now.
@manton I use it from my Micro Blog account, depends on the price to me (maybe an add-on cost to users), but wouldn’t be mad if you just dropped it iether.
@manton I'm a bit surprised that you even consider doing it. Twitter represents the antithesis of what you've been promoting (the open web) for so many years. I'm really interested in understanding your thinking here.
@numericcitizen I don't like removing features that some users might depend on without warning. In the long run, absolutely the web is better off without Twitter. We've been building toward that for years.
@manton it’s frustrating that an important t early promise of Micro.blog and the web it wanted to be a part of was very much in the spirit of POSSE, but this has become increasingly impossible due to the actions of large corporate players. In the end, the web I want is easy to post to and easy to read what I want. Twitter is no longer that. Time to move on.
@manton As far as I'm concerned, and that's my opinion alone, cut it. I've stopped crossposting a while back anyway, when all this mess started. Maybe a poll?
@maique Thanks. I don't think we'll do a formal poll, but I'm getting some good feedback just in replies that will help inform the decision.
@manton That Elon Musk wants to make a profit on an investment he didn't really want is perfectly understandable.
But there is no need to make it easy for him. Even if I crosspost to his platform, it's the micro.blog philosophy that I'm interested in supporting. And I would have no problem removing my crosspost to Twitter. And too bad if too many of my acquaintances can't get rid of this poison that is as bad for humans as for the web!
Pardon my french but: qu’il aille se faire voir !
@manton I used to cross post nearly all the time to Twitter but I don't anymore. It's all Mastodon now. I can't lend any form of support to Twitter anymore.
@manton I don't think you'll be in the minority if you turn it off, I suspect most services will as users aren't going to want to pick up the cost. This reminds me of a few years ago when FaceBook stopped allowing cross-posting to individual timelines and restricted it to pages. I remember the up-set, ironically on Twitter, that tweets could no longer be cross-posted. I think in some ways it's unfortunate to not be able to cross-post, but it also forces people to actually be present on the networks they're using and that's not a bad thing. My WordPress blog cross-posts to LinkedIn and I just found a bunch of comments over there that I totally missed because I hardly ever use LinkedIn and frankly, I forgot I was cross-posting over there. So I think there's a slight chance people might be a little sad if Twitter cross-posting goes away, but especially in the Micro.blog community, I think people are understanding and will have no real issue with such a change.
@manton speaking of cross posting, is there a way to redirect a Mastodon profile to Micro.blog in the same way Mastodon profiles can be redirected towards each other?
@eggfreckles @manton I would still love to see this feature too, preferably with a setting in frontmatter.
@pimoore @eggfreckles We really do need to add that. I think the backend supports it pretty well now, just need a UI.
@manton @eggfreckles Is it also possible to remove the date fields from URLs if we choose, as well as dropping the html extension?
@manton personally I wouldn’t mind a random/sequential UID for the slug of short posts it is the longer form posts I have a problem with. Thanks for considering it!
@pimoore @eggfreckles Yeah, perhaps if there's a setting for slug format it should be for long-form posts. I like the date in the URL for microblog posts because there can be so many, there will be bound to be name conflicts.
@manton @eggfreckles Right that’s a good point, I forgot about that possibility. So is this something we could specify in frontmatter (or some other option) when posting from a third-party app such as Drafts, or Ulysses?
@pimoore I'm not sure if that would require client updates like for Ulysses. Will have to do some testing when we're ready.
@manton Dates in the URL are great. Having the ability to include the category is welcome. Having any control for the final slug would be much appreciated.
