8 ms·

Blogs aren't "realtime", so they don't solve any problems that people went to social media for. If you're serious about people "just starting blogs" you need a

Blogs aren't "realtime", so they don't solve any problems that people went to social media for. If you're serious about people "just starting blogs" you need a proof of concept that centralizes various blogs into an updating feed of subscribed blogs. This isn't insurmountable. It's actually pretty simple, in a technical sense. The real trick is to get blogs to play along by providing an api endpoint that will enable a feeds to be generated in the ways that people use them (latest, hashtags, interest relevancy, searchability, etc), as well as endpoints that allow users to interact with them (comments, notifications, etc). Some of that is currently done with RSS, others will need a new (preferably less verbose) form of syndication. You could even use simple iframes as the delivery mechanism for the blog content, that way the blogs still get their ad-impressions. So long as the posts showed up in a curated feed, without needing to actually click through to anything, it would be fine. The only other thing you would need is a sign-up process that is as simple as facebook or twitter. To the point where you might not even be sure you're creating a "blog", if that wasn't your explicit intention. So yeah; when that platform/protocol becomes available, I'd say blogs are the silver bullet! Until then, the idea that we should all go back to scouring the net for bookmark-able content, or dealing with the static interaction of an RSS feed, is a non-starter. We didn't make/choose social media because it was useless. We did it because it was easy. That has to be a priority in any suggested alternative.

alt227 4y ago
Doesnt this go against the sentiment of the article? It makes a heavy point about nobody being able to control or censor what you have to say. As soon as you give power to an aggregator, thats a cetral point which can control/censor the content.
- catapart 4y ago
  Nah. The point, here, is those blog endpoints. That syndicates the blog to anyone with a browser. If one aggregator decides to cut you off, then your audience can always find another aggregator. Or, if you're particularly egregious, and no aggregators will host you, they can always go directly to your blog (aggregators have done the hard work of advertising your content already), or they can build their own aggregator and tell the faithful to join them, there. It's "freedom of speech without freedom of reach". Or whatever buzz phrase we're using to describe it, these days.
brokebroadbeat 4y ago
Despite the condescending tone, I think you’re probably right about what people want. Medium focused too much on style and making publishing easy, but it’s the discovery aspect people will appreciate. The TikTok algorithm but for RSS would be a winner.
robert_foss 4y ago
Blog posts centralized into a feed already exists. Planet is such a software, and you can have a look at an example for Debian related blogs here: https://planet.debian.org/ https://planet.debian.org/
- alexb_ 4y ago
  What advantage does this have over RSS?
  - marbu 4y ago
    This is not an alternative for RSS feeds, but rather something build on top of it. The planet site is basically a publicly available read only RSS client. It's useful to show what is going on in given group of people, both for insiders and outsiders.
- catapart 4y ago
  Don't show me an individual blog, show me that content syndicated into a feed which I can comment on, interact with, create ad-impressions for, and recieve notifications about, all without ever leaving the feed site. That's what I'm talking about because that's what it will take. No one has shown me anything like that, yet. Screenshots will be fine! But planet doesn't seem to do what I'm asking for, based on my (admittedly brief) look at it.
  - kevq 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - catapart 4y ago
      This is inappropriate. You're not even arguing against anything I'm saying. If there is an aggregation site that lets me subscribe to blogs based on a url (i.e. not something the aggregation site controls), then I AM controlling the feed. I'm just doing it with a much more robust syndication mechanism than RSS.
  - 4y ago
Brajeshwar 4y ago
There used to be a lots of these (Aggregators) and I believe quite a few still survived. I remember writing and getting swarms of traffic -- almost all of them via Aggregators. This Closure Planet is still active - https://planet.clojure.in https://planet.clojure.in I designed the theme about a decade ago as a fork from my website, and it still is holding strong today.
- catapart 4y ago
  People keep suggesting this, so I have to assume that I might be missing something. Please understand that I'm asking this in earnest: Does this type of aggregation allow for commenting and interaction? Does this type of aggregation notify a user when they have commented on a blog in their feed and someone has responded to them? Does this type of aggregation provide ad-impressions for the syndicated content? Is this type of aggregation as simple to start with as it is to write your first tweet? Again, I don't mean to be dismissive. I'm just trying to get across that what I'm talking about is a REPLACEMENT for social media. It's not some libertarian/technologist idea of what would be BETTER. It's harnessing the momentum that we know we have and focusing that into better technologies. But it has to work the same, or it's just another "hey guys, we should try this instead", which doesn't inspire a lot of my confidence (ymmv).
  - philistine 4y ago
    There is this idea, orthogonal to yours, that we do not need to replace social media. The cycle of Eternal September after Eternal September has to be broken at some point. We need to build systems for communities that keeps them small, engaged, and contained. We need to offer an alternative. Your desire to replicate all the ills of Facebook elsewhere is worse than staying on Facebook.
  - Brajeshwar 4y ago
    For the social commenting, isn't the likes of erstwhile Digg, Hackernews akin to that? They are indeed aggregation of contents from other websites and we discuss it here. The notification that my website is discussed in another corner of the Internet is, I believe, what the Fediverse[1] is trying to do. Ad-impression and revenue share has always been there. I can push ads via my RSS Feed, which used to be very popular and lucrative for good readership blogs. It is definitely not easy to just start off but now I'm beginning to think, you are making fun. Anyways, it takes a village to build and maintain Twitter. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
dev_tty01 4y ago
>Blogs aren't "realtime", so they don't solve any problems that people went to social media for. Curious, what is your basis for this assertion that "realtime" is the primary reason for social media? I think "realtime" has created this incessant need to watch and feed the machine. That has been an interesting diversion for a while, but I can't see it as healthy long term, IMO. I, and many others I know, check up on friends once or twice a day and then got on with our actual lives. With a less frenetic and more sane model of interaction, "realtime" is way down the list of important attributes.
- aabbcc1241 4y ago
  Also, if you're not very popular on twitter/fb/ig, it's rare to get realtime feedback anyway.
- catapart 4y ago
  I don't take issue with your assessment of what could be "healthy", but I'm talking about what people engage in. And realtime is, as you noted, behavior-altering. It engenders an "incessant need". That's real. That we don't want it to be so doesn't change it from being real. And the fact that the academically minded want to minimize it is of little importance to the 15 year old girls gossiping about each other. Or the 23 year old dudes trading sports clap backs. Or, or, or... So yeah. My opinion on the role of constant contact in a healthy society notwithstanding, there is a consumer hunger for it and while I can see it contracting, I can't see it ever going away to a point that it shouldn't be a design priority.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Because people want to know what's up, and there are numerous social and economic rewards for being the first to do or to know about something. That's why newspapers and the like exist in the first place. Should that be everybody's focus or anyone's only focus, no. But since the incentives/payoffs for timeliness are so obvious, expressing indifference to them seems like a counter-signaling strategy.
SamBorick 4y ago
> you need a proof of concept that centralizes various blogs into an updating feed of subscribed blogs. its called rss
- catapart 4y ago
  As asked with other comments: - interactive commenting with notifications? - video ad delivery for content gating? - simple (to the point of obscuring the blogness) sign up and posting? Show me a site doing this (with rss or without) and I'll be happy to evangelize it!
  - contentboot 4y ago
    A second button on your website beside the "RSS" button that says "RSS but with fancy features." when you click on it, it is the same content on your blog but via a substack newsletter. I believe that has all the features you listed as wants. I am kind of half joking but people do have very specific ways they want to consume content even if it is the same content.
  - SamBorick 4y ago
    commenting is valid, it would be cool to see that in a feed reader. But ActivityPub can do that, I believe Write.as has comments. but video ads? none for me thanks.
    - catapart 4y ago
      I certainly understand not wanting them! But I also deeply understand the money that can be made from them. And if that money is going to the owner of the content, rather than some larger corporate entity giving them a small cut, I'm very happy to support that paradigm (even if I, personally, would avoid as much video ads as possible). Edited to add: As far as write.as, I like what they've done! I just want more rich content, rather than just text. That's kind of RSS's deal, too. Only text, all the time (exceptions make the rule). There's value in sharing all kinds of content, rather than just text.
maxos 4y ago
[dead]
rektide 4y ago
> This isn't insurmountable. It's actually pretty simple, in a technical sense. The real trick is to get blogs to play along by providing an api endpoint that will enable a feeds to be generated in the ways that people use them (latest, hashtags, interest relevancy, searchability, etc), as well as endpoints that allow users to interact with them (comments, notifications, etc). Some of that is currently done with RSS, others will need a new (preferably less verbose) form of syndication. I feel like this is 99.9% tackled by existing ActivityPub implementations. There are already a wide variety of clients (and servers) out there with lots of different capabilities, ways of reading/browsing, that suit a variety of consuming styles. Interaction is well-goverened in the spec itself & quite capable. I would like to see a little more richer-media content. I am pretty partial to toot-threads myself but having more than just text+image post-threads seems like a pretty harsh technical limit. That said, my enemy in RSS feeds is when sites publish heavily stylized content; it's so gross having these blobs of content that don't fit well in my feed.
zemoose 4y ago
"Real time" has a place but it's severely misapplied as a value for a broad swath of news that just isn't that urgent. Minimizing reporting time and maximizing engagement just ends up optimizing for a discourse with minimal nuance that keeps us reacting by keeping us angry. It's not a new problem; the 24 hour cable news cycle has had the same effect. But social media has made it much worse. We sorely need a cultural shift towards chilling out and waiting for news to develop.

alt227 4y ago

Doesnt this go against the sentiment of the article? It makes a heavy point about nobody being able to control or censor what you have to say. As soon as you give power to an aggregator, thats a cetral point which can control/censor the content.

catapart 4y ago
Nah. The point, here, is those blog endpoints. That syndicates the blog to anyone with a browser. If one aggregator decides to cut you off, then your audience can always find another aggregator. Or, if you're particularly egregious, and no aggregators will host you, they can always go directly to your blog (aggregators have done the hard work of advertising your content already), or they can build their own aggregator and tell the faithful to join them, there. It's "freedom of speech without freedom of reach". Or whatever buzz phrase we're using to describe it, these days.

brokebroadbeat 4y ago

Despite the condescending tone, I think you’re probably right about what people want. Medium focused too much on style and making publishing easy, but it’s the discovery aspect people will appreciate. The TikTok algorithm but for RSS would be a winner.

robert_foss 4y ago

Blog posts centralized into a feed already exists. Planet is such a software, and you can have a look at an example for Debian related blogs here: https://planet.debian.org/ https://planet.debian.org/

alexb_ 4y ago
What advantage does this have over RSS?
- marbu 4y ago
  This is not an alternative for RSS feeds, but rather something build on top of it. The planet site is basically a publicly available read only RSS client. It's useful to show what is going on in given group of people, both for insiders and outsiders.
catapart 4y ago
Don't show me an individual blog, show me that content syndicated into a feed which I can comment on, interact with, create ad-impressions for, and recieve notifications about, all without ever leaving the feed site. That's what I'm talking about because that's what it will take. No one has shown me anything like that, yet. Screenshots will be fine! But planet doesn't seem to do what I'm asking for, based on my (admittedly brief) look at it.
- kevq 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - catapart 4y ago
    This is inappropriate. You're not even arguing against anything I'm saying. If there is an aggregation site that lets me subscribe to blogs based on a url (i.e. not something the aggregation site controls), then I AM controlling the feed. I'm just doing it with a much more robust syndication mechanism than RSS.
- 4y ago

Brajeshwar 4y ago

There used to be a lots of these (Aggregators) and I believe quite a few still survived. I remember writing and getting swarms of traffic -- almost all of them via Aggregators. This Closure Planet is still active - https://planet.clojure.in https://planet.clojure.in I designed the theme about a decade ago as a fork from my website, and it still is holding strong today.

catapart 4y ago
People keep suggesting this, so I have to assume that I might be missing something. Please understand that I'm asking this in earnest: Does this type of aggregation allow for commenting and interaction? Does this type of aggregation notify a user when they have commented on a blog in their feed and someone has responded to them? Does this type of aggregation provide ad-impressions for the syndicated content? Is this type of aggregation as simple to start with as it is to write your first tweet? Again, I don't mean to be dismissive. I'm just trying to get across that what I'm talking about is a REPLACEMENT for social media. It's not some libertarian/technologist idea of what would be BETTER. It's harnessing the momentum that we know we have and focusing that into better technologies. But it has to work the same, or it's just another "hey guys, we should try this instead", which doesn't inspire a lot of my confidence (ymmv).
- philistine 4y ago
  There is this idea, orthogonal to yours, that we do not need to replace social media. The cycle of Eternal September after Eternal September has to be broken at some point. We need to build systems for communities that keeps them small, engaged, and contained. We need to offer an alternative. Your desire to replicate all the ills of Facebook elsewhere is worse than staying on Facebook.
- Brajeshwar 4y ago
  For the social commenting, isn't the likes of erstwhile Digg, Hackernews akin to that? They are indeed aggregation of contents from other websites and we discuss it here. The notification that my website is discussed in another corner of the Internet is, I believe, what the Fediverse[1] is trying to do. Ad-impression and revenue share has always been there. I can push ads via my RSS Feed, which used to be very popular and lucrative for good readership blogs. It is definitely not easy to just start off but now I'm beginning to think, you are making fun. Anyways, it takes a village to build and maintain Twitter. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

dev_tty01 4y ago

>Blogs aren't "realtime", so they don't solve any problems that people went to social media for. Curious, what is your basis for this assertion that "realtime" is the primary reason for social media? I think "realtime" has created this incessant need to watch and feed the machine. That has been an interesting diversion for a while, but I can't see it as healthy long term, IMO. I, and many others I know, check up on friends once or twice a day and then got on with our actual lives. With a less frenetic and more sane model of interaction, "realtime" is way down the list of important attributes.

aabbcc1241 4y ago
Also, if you're not very popular on twitter/fb/ig, it's rare to get realtime feedback anyway.
catapart 4y ago
I don't take issue with your assessment of what could be "healthy", but I'm talking about what people engage in. And realtime is, as you noted, behavior-altering. It engenders an "incessant need". That's real. That we don't want it to be so doesn't change it from being real. And the fact that the academically minded want to minimize it is of little importance to the 15 year old girls gossiping about each other. Or the 23 year old dudes trading sports clap backs. Or, or, or... So yeah. My opinion on the role of constant contact in a healthy society notwithstanding, there is a consumer hunger for it and while I can see it contracting, I can't see it ever going away to a point that it shouldn't be a design priority.
anigbrowl 4y ago
Because people want to know what's up, and there are numerous social and economic rewards for being the first to do or to know about something. That's why newspapers and the like exist in the first place. Should that be everybody's focus or anyone's only focus, no. But since the incentives/payoffs for timeliness are so obvious, expressing indifference to them seems like a counter-signaling strategy.

SamBorick 4y ago

> you need a proof of concept that centralizes various blogs into an updating feed of subscribed blogs. its called rss

catapart 4y ago
As asked with other comments: - interactive commenting with notifications? - video ad delivery for content gating? - simple (to the point of obscuring the blogness) sign up and posting? Show me a site doing this (with rss or without) and I'll be happy to evangelize it!
- contentboot 4y ago
  A second button on your website beside the "RSS" button that says "RSS but with fancy features." when you click on it, it is the same content on your blog but via a substack newsletter. I believe that has all the features you listed as wants. I am kind of half joking but people do have very specific ways they want to consume content even if it is the same content.
- SamBorick 4y ago
  commenting is valid, it would be cool to see that in a feed reader. But ActivityPub can do that, I believe Write.as has comments. but video ads? none for me thanks.
  - catapart 4y ago
    I certainly understand not wanting them! But I also deeply understand the money that can be made from them. And if that money is going to the owner of the content, rather than some larger corporate entity giving them a small cut, I'm very happy to support that paradigm (even if I, personally, would avoid as much video ads as possible). Edited to add: As far as write.as, I like what they've done! I just want more rich content, rather than just text. That's kind of RSS's deal, too. Only text, all the time (exceptions make the rule). There's value in sharing all kinds of content, rather than just text.

maxos 4y ago

[dead]

rektide 4y ago

> This isn't insurmountable. It's actually pretty simple, in a technical sense. The real trick is to get blogs to play along by providing an api endpoint that will enable a feeds to be generated in the ways that people use them (latest, hashtags, interest relevancy, searchability, etc), as well as endpoints that allow users to interact with them (comments, notifications, etc). Some of that is currently done with RSS, others will need a new (preferably less verbose) form of syndication. I feel like this is 99.9% tackled by existing ActivityPub implementations. There are already a wide variety of clients (and servers) out there with lots of different capabilities, ways of reading/browsing, that suit a variety of consuming styles. Interaction is well-goverened in the spec itself & quite capable. I would like to see a little more richer-media content. I am pretty partial to toot-threads myself but having more than just text+image post-threads seems like a pretty harsh technical limit. That said, my enemy in RSS feeds is when sites publish heavily stylized content; it's so gross having these blobs of content that don't fit well in my feed.

zemoose 4y ago

"Real time" has a place but it's severely misapplied as a value for a broad swath of news that just isn't that urgent. Minimizing reporting time and maximizing engagement just ends up optimizing for a discourse with minimal nuance that keeps us reacting by keeping us angry. It's not a new problem; the 24 hour cable news cycle has had the same effect. But social media has made it much worse. We sorely need a cultural shift towards chilling out and waiting for news to develop.