Ben Werdmuller on a first-class fediverse platform:
I’m not bullish on squeezing long-form content into a microblogging platform, whether on Mastodon or X. Long-form content isn’t best consumed as part of a fast-moving stream of short updates.
It’s a good post. In some ways, Micro.blog best fits Ben’s vision. But not exactly. A theoretical fediverse-powered Medium might be a better match.
think it also requires some rethinking of how to consume/engage/discover long-form writing. Fedi doesnt really have any apps for this, even though there is writefreely for the creation/writing part. Funny enough that Nostr has multiple of these options that would be nice to have on the fediverse, stripped of their crypto integration
@laurenshof Good point about Nostr apps, I've noticed that too. We should draw inspiration from everywhere. Maybe a tool focused primarily on long-form content that is a mashup of feed reader + blog publishing + ActivityPub, without a timeline at all.
@manton This sounds like Tumblr, and increasingly I feel like a platform for tumblelogs is exactly what we're currently missing.
@manton Ideally I want one place to post and host my content. The consumer should then be able to decide what they want to see. Allowing folks to filter content types when they follow would be ideal. Following from a feed reader? Maybe you only want long posts. From Pixelfed? Just select photos etc
@manton Interesting read. Then again, both Friendica and Hubzilla seem to match that vision rather well too, most likely only lacking that commercial-grade UI and even more UX...
@manton I define long form posts as posts with titles and I tend to think of them as essays. I personally struggle with where to write/host essays. Some times I write them on micro.blog and other times I write them and host them in Drummer and link to them from a micro.blog post.
The reason why I haven't settled on writing and hosting essays in micro.blog is that I don't really like having the entire content of an essay appear in the main page of my blog site. I prefer that essays can be their own page with their own URL and I could automatically write a lede to the essay and have that appear in the main blog page.
I know I could use pages in micro.blog but they aren't integrated well, in my opinion, with micro.blog. I think they exist for reasons other than writing, such as the photos page on my site: frankmcpherson.blog/photos/.
I do like the Essays category that I have on my site that is "generated" from a filter of posts with titles. See frankmcpherson.blog/categorie... I just would prefer not not have the entire content of an essay, such as frankmcpherson.blog/2024/02/0... appear in the main blog page frankmcpherson.blog.
Honestly, this one thing of how micro.blog treats titled posts amounts to my one wish for change of a 99.999% perfect product.