A thoughtful blog post from Vlad Campos about a sort of “paradox” with Micro.blog’s integration with the fediverse. Most software design is a series of tradeoffs, and while imperfect I think the decisions we’ve made are right for Micro.blog. But we can evolve too… Trying to keep an open mind.
@manton My $.02: If people want/need to know who’s following them, micro.blog’s extensive cross-posting to platforms built for that kind of engagement meets the need. There’s no need for micro.blog itself to replicate what every social-media platform already does. And that micro.blog does not do follower counts etc. is a useful reminder that we don’t have to do things the way we learned to do them on Twitter back in the day.
@manton Thank you so much for reading and sharing. I really admire your effort to do your part to create a better online experience for all of us. As for the post, one detail I forgot to mention is that I believe the algorithm is the one to blame. Not the social signals. Social signals without the push from the algorithm, are just extra information added to the post/profile.
@vladcampos I think there are side effects from like/follower counts aside from the algorithms, but I agree the algorithms are a big problem. What’s interesting is that when platforms have the data, they are inevitably tempted to make new algorithms with that data. “We might as well show which users or posts are popular!”
@manton I doubt you'd fall into that algorithm trap. You have a vision.
As for being a blog platform first, I understand it, but it has grown beyond that. The connection to the Fediverse makes it so much bigger than that. There are many blogging platforms out there. IMHO, the combined features is what makes Micro.blog unique. It is so unique. Unfortunately, for me it feels incomplete.
Anyway, I'm the one who's constantly fighting the side-effects. So I should look for alternatives.
@manton I agree with @vladcampos on most of his points.
I like seeing reposts because it shows me additional content I might not have seen otherwise.
I like seeing likes on my posts because it tells me what people are interested in seeing, and also because occasionally I get a like from a friend I haven’t heard from in a while. (Every year or two, my college roommate occasionally pops in to like one of my Facebook posts — I haven’t talked with him since 1982 but I get a kick out of seeing his name.)
Manton, I love the work you’re doing here with Micro.blog but this place feels like a kiddie pool where the water is kept at 72 degrees and we’re all required to wear floaties. I wanna swim in the ocean.
Also, Epilogue, bookmarks, Bookshelves, Movies and Notes and the RSS reader seem to me to be distractions, when Micro.blog could offer so much more.
Consider this criticism to be praise. Micro.blog is the only individual blogging platform for non-technical users worth criticizing.
@manton to echo some of those who have replied, the lack of follower count and likes is one of the reason why I like micro.blog so much.
It is a social network that I curate and subscribe to in the way I want to without the weight of legacy social media.
Hard agree: feature not a bug.
@MitchWagner I also worry about distractions, but I think those apps all have a place… Definitely no more apps, though! 🙂
@manton I value the “calmness” of
MB and I’m ignorant of all the technical information on the back-end wiring up a Micro.Blog account to AT, Fedi or other gives you. But, I wonder if a compromise would be that one could opt into a social graph that aggregates individual post interaction statistics.
@manton Your willingness to hear suggestions and take them seriously is one of the things I like best about Micro.blog.
With that, here are two more: I’d love it if Micro.blog supported Reddit, Mastodon, BlueSky and Tumblr embeds. I do a lot of that on my blog.
Second: For those of us that cross-post on Masto instances supporting more than 500 characters, please allow us to cross-post the limit. I cross-post to Hachyderm.io, which supports up to 2,263 characters.
Yes, I have asked you for the second request at least several times before. My strategy with this feature request, as it is for me with many things in life, is that I will continue to ask very, very nicely until you say, “This guy Mitch is so annoying — I’ll just give him what he wants so he shuts up and gives me some peace.”
@MitchWagner Ha! I appreciate the repeated requests even though I know it’s frustrating that the change hasn’t happened yet. Will try to get it done soon.
@manton I recently started experimenting with 52Frames, a social photo site. They have an interesting approach to likes: you can get a daily email telling you about likes on your photos, but they don’t total it all up, and likes don’t show on the site. So if you wanted to track your like numbers you could do it with some work, but there is deliberate friction there.
@ffmike That’s an interesting system. Having it in an email also means there’s no urge to reload the site all the time. (Also why I think notifications for likes or posts is usually a bad idea.)
@manton Thanks! I also want to experiment with using content warnings on Mastodon to hide those long, 2000+ character posts. That’s a big lump to drop on people’s timelines.
And @ffmike raises a good point. I don’t care about like and boost counts. I don’t care whether that information is public so by all means hide it. I just want to see the likes on my own posts and see other people’s boosts.
I think if you supported likes, reposts and lists, I could migrate my Mastodon to Micro.blog for good. Same for Bluesky!
Even better: Support the Mastodon API and I could use a nifty Mastodon client (I’m currently liking Indigo.)
I’m not expecting this to be done this week. Next week is good! :)
@MitchWagner Do you know if your Mastodon server truncates those long posts behind a “show more” link? If not, converting the title to a content warning might make sense.
@manton I continue to think likes are good, reposts are just links and webmentions which already exist, follower counts are neutral, but not easily getting network effects from who follows me and who others follow is a real challenge to discovery. That said, I crosspost to get those things elsewhere, and MB is just another syndication point for people to engage in a way that’s native to MB so it’s fine. I suspect there’s just a lot of stunted growth from folks who want to have one native Bluesky/Mastodon experience here v. those who want a blog host.
@manton My Mastodon server doesn’t automatically truncate long posts.
It occurred to me this week that I like posting long posts to Mastodon but, paradoxically, I don’t like seeing them in my timeline, and that hiding most of the post behind a content warning would be a good solution. I have yet to try it.
And yes, converting the title to a content warning would be a good idea.
People don’t like clicking links when they’re scrolling a Twitter-like timeline. Rather than linking to long posts, a better solution is finding a way to show the body of a post while remaining in the timeline.
@MitchWagner I’m starting to enable initial support to check how long a post can be before truncating it. I think this is the kind of thing we’re just going to have to see how it works in practice with different servers, and what changes to make based on feedback, like content warnings.
@manton Oh, splendid, thank you for working on that.
And I have a correction to make on my comment earlier today: I just wrote a long (1500-ish characters) reply to someone else’s post on Mastodon. I wrote the reply using my hachyderm.io Mastodon account, not Micro.blog. And the reply is truncated behind a “read more” link. The truncation is about at 700 characters.
@manton I posted a 1,900-character post on Mastodon just now using the content warning as a headline, and it looked ok. The link attachment was marked as sensitive media (which it most definitely was not), so I will want to look into that.
Content warnings were initially intended as a means of warning users against emotionally triggering content (sex and violence but also faces that appear to make eye contact and images of food), as well as TV/movie spoilers (you already know this, of course), but I do now see them used on Mastodon just to mark content that many readers might not be interested in — for example, I just now saw one with a content warning something like “American politics, US Supreme Court.” So I think my idea is valid, to use the content warning to break the content of long posts.
