Micro.blog is designed to encourage thoughtful writing and interacting. If you are wondering whether anyone here is reading your stuff, try letting other people know that you are reading their stuff. It is OK to write a super short reply. Sometimes I even reply with an emoji. 😇
@macgenie I’ve noticed the large volume of emoji-only replies. It makes perfect sense but I must confess my frustration with emoji. I simply can’t see well enough to figure out what half the emoji I see are supposed to be.
@dynamitemoth Worse, some of the faces are frustratingly-similar each other even when they are large enough to see, so you still have no idea of the difference (or the meaning!) unless you make a trip to Emojipedia!
@dynamitemoth @macgenie maybe there is a way that @Manton could detect if there’s only emoji in the posts and display them larger in a similar manner to iMessage and WhatsApp?
@macgenie I understand the reasons why @manton has chosen not to do this, but allowing a person to see who is following him would also help fix the “black hole” feeling that Micro.Blog sometimes has. I mean, at least you would at least know who is seeing your posts.
@macgenie Allowing people to see a person’s followers would also help people “find their people” on Micro.Blog. It’s easier to discover people to follow if you can traverse the “social graph” in both directions. // @manton
@philbowell Interestingly enough, someone linked an article here recently where the author posted a (very long) pure-CSS way of doing just that! (Sadly, I read the article in M.b on my phone, so there’s no way I’ll find it again :-( )
@philbowell @macgenie @Manton alternatively, maybe I could tap on an emoji character and have a text bubble pop up with the name of that emoji character
@DazeEnd @macgenie Good points. I still think there are a few downsides, though, including the stress of not thinking you have enough followers. This isn't necessarily permanent but it's the right thing for a growing platform. And because these are blogs, you will have readers on the web who aren't tracked anyway.
@digitalpardoe It works the other way around here. Look on anyone's profile and you'll see a list of the people they are following, that you are not following. Those are all candidates of people you could follow. If you want a really big list of choices of new people, look at the profiles for @kitt and/or @JohnPhilpin. You'll find there are tons of choices. If you're not sure about someone, look at their profile and scan down their posts. Or just follow them and see what shows up in your timeline. If you don't like what you see, unfollow them. Easy. No one will know, so no need to be concerned about offending anyone.
@macgenie Agreed. Since I joined Micro.blog I’ve stopped wondering if people are reading what I write. Because irrespective of the original post, I am always part of some fascinating discussion.
So, will second your thought - keep posting, keep interacting. So much to learn here 😊
@macgenie I favorited your first post in this thread but the replies and subsequent conversation made it even worthwhile. I’m loving the conversations on here.
@smokey I think it's important to remember that emoji are a less "x = y" way of communicating; I'd guess that I've used them to mean something to that emojipedia wouldn't have a definition before. ☺️
@kulturnation ironically, this is why I limit my time on micro.blog: I know it will be a network of rabbit holes !
@jw The fact that emoji can have alternate meanings (especially that can’t easily be discened from context) is one of the problems that makes them ill-suited for clear communication (words can have this problem, too, but you have more context there, at least to be able to tell “this doesn’t mean what it normally means here” even if you don’t know what it does mean in that situation). Most emoji are pretty clear and distinguishable and I don’t really have any problem with using them, but the emoticon-successors are really problematic for me; we went from 10-20 ASCII or crisp pixel-art emoticons to 75+ smoothed face emoji, many of which vary slightly in ways I can’t discern how they change the meaning. So in an exchange between someone who is familiar with the emoji and their standard meanings and someone who is not, I could pick the wrong face and convey a different meaning to you than I intended, or I could infer the wrong meaning from the face you used because I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean—and that’s without any community-specific meanings.
(For the record, 1) I’m not anti-emoji, I just find the emoticon-successors problematic for all those reasons, and 2) I really like your 💙 empathy heart; in that case, I think it’s ascribing a useful meaning to something that has no inherent meaning, unlike the emoticon-successors.)
@Ron @digitalpardoe ... I have yet to find anybody that I need to unfollow. I do come across opinions that I don’t agree with and I might then comment back ... or let it silently pass as a fallen leaf in a stream ... and that to me is the point ... I don’t want an echo chamber. I do want respect and civility.
@JohnPhilpin @digitalpardoe I am much the same. When I started here, I followed every single person who came along until I finally noticed the timeline getting too busy. I was probably following at least 600 people at that point. I don't view a follower list as something to be carefully curated, like a list of Dylan's best songs. I follow people so there will be something to read in my timeline! 100% agree that respect & civility matter a LOT and I did unfollow one person for that reason once. A year ago, I wrote up my procedures for following people.
@JohnPhilpin I haven't done anything with mine for a long time, but when I was posting articles in it, I found it very easy to use. Everything I did that was done according to the instructions always worked right away. And I loved that it was just files in Dropbox. In 24 years of blogging, I could jusr never bring myself to try the complexity of WordPress.
@smokey I’m glad you like the empathy heart — it’s a thing I’ve been happy to spread as much as possible!
As for the interpretive nature of emoji...I consider it a feature, not a bug. ☺️ I love how certain people always send/receive certain emoji from me: i love that it makes the receiver think a bit and decipher. Esp since they can always ask me to clarify!
