3 ms·

This is a Medium-branded Mastodon instance, not an integration between the Medium blogging platform and the Fediverse. I would love to see an integration where

by jefftk 4y ago

This is a Medium-branded Mastodon instance, not an integration between the Medium blogging platform and the Fediverse. I would love to see an integration where the discussion on a Medium post is viewable both as comments at the bottom of the page and as Fediverse posts. (This is what I was pushing in https://www.jefftk.com/p/mastodon-replies-as-comments https://www.jefftk.com/p/mastodon-replies-as-comments)

tonystubblebine 4y ago
(Medium CEO here) Definitely a possibility. Where we ended up landing is that Mastodon is culturally short form. From prior experience just syndicating into a short form ecosystem is kind of lame even if the ActivityPub protocol supports it. So if we have Medium authors on this part of the fediverse then we want to encourage them to be fully there. The medium-length fediverse, i.e. blogs and articles, is still emerging and for us is also a much more complicated product question. But definitely open to it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- skybrian 4y ago
  It seems like this could be handled by having a short post with a link to the article for each article that authors want to publish that way. This is essentially how blogs are promoted on Twitter and Mastodon already (though people often create longer threads) so it's a "paving the cowpaths" strategy. Since you can do it already, the only difference would be having an official short post representing the article, which would be a focal point for discussion about the article. For better or worse. Maybe having a focal point for article discussion is bad?
- thejohnconway 4y ago
  I get that. It would be good if you could associate Medium articles to a federated post so that comments on Medium could come from federated servers.
- riffic 4y ago
  Tony, you should have a talk with the writefreely/write.as folks (Matt Baer; I think it might just be one guy but it might be a small team as well now) because they're in this space and may have experiences to share with you.
  - tonystubblebine 4y ago
    Definitely!
kragen 4y ago
Yeah, I assumed they meant they were going to federate Medium articles, so you could follow a Medium author on a Mastodon instance and see their articles in your feed. (You could also display replies from the rest of the Fediverse as comments on the Medium article; that way the reply authors wouldn't lose their writing when Medium goes out of business or sells to Google.) That would have been a huge announcement; possibly good, possibly bad, but either way of huge impact. This is still somewhat significant because if you see comments from @someone@me.dm you'll know it's the person who goes by the same name as a Medium author, who you might know from elsewhere. This would be more effective if the Mastodon instance were at something like fed.medium.com though.
- toastal 4y ago
  You could and should do this with Write Freely or similar today. I don't think a company’s desire to close off its ‘product’, host ads, and require sign-ins align with that the Fediverse wants to do. This isn’t like a co-op where funds are spent just to cover maintenance and server fees.
  - kragen 4y ago
    That's why I was so surprised to see the headline! I'm not used to seeing Medium respect other people. But it is what Tumblr plans to do, apparently.
  - saurik 4y ago
    ActivityPub is a protocol. It can try to define itself as a community all it wants, but at the end of the day it is as much of a community as SMTP is a community. If a for-profit company wants to send e-mail notifications to its users about blog posts--and even if it also wants to embed really horrible advertisements--it should not only get to send e-mail, it should be encouraged to send e-mail instead of only using proprietary centralized replacements for e-mail (such as mobile push notifications).
- tonystubblebine 4y ago
  To me, ActivityPub support is for a different goal and that's because I see short form and medium-form (i.e. blogs) as separate use cases in practice. Mastodon represents a short form corner of the fediverse. To participate in this corner via a medium-length tool would mean participation from people who are blindly syndicating at worst, and having a disconnected experience at best. It'd be disrespectful to the community there. Instead, Medium authors should be fully present as short form participants, even if all they want to do is share a link. To speak in the town square you need to be present in the town square. In the case of Mastodon, that means reading and writing from a short-form app. The point of adding ActivityPub (both ways) would be to be part of a much, much smaller blog-length corner of the fediverse. It's interesting, but is fundamentally a different goal.

by jefftk 4y ago

tonystubblebine 4y ago

(Medium CEO here) Definitely a possibility. Where we ended up landing is that Mastodon is culturally short form. From prior experience just syndicating into a short form ecosystem is kind of lame even if the ActivityPub protocol supports it. So if we have Medium authors on this part of the fediverse then we want to encourage them to be fully there. The medium-length fediverse, i.e. blogs and articles, is still emerging and for us is also a much more complicated product question. But definitely open to it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
skybrian 4y ago
It seems like this could be handled by having a short post with a link to the article for each article that authors want to publish that way. This is essentially how blogs are promoted on Twitter and Mastodon already (though people often create longer threads) so it's a "paving the cowpaths" strategy. Since you can do it already, the only difference would be having an official short post representing the article, which would be a focal point for discussion about the article. For better or worse. Maybe having a focal point for article discussion is bad?
thejohnconway 4y ago
I get that. It would be good if you could associate Medium articles to a federated post so that comments on Medium could come from federated servers.
riffic 4y ago
Tony, you should have a talk with the writefreely/write.as folks (Matt Baer; I think it might just be one guy but it might be a small team as well now) because they're in this space and may have experiences to share with you.
- tonystubblebine 4y ago
  Definitely!

kragen 4y ago

Yeah, I assumed they meant they were going to federate Medium articles, so you could follow a Medium author on a Mastodon instance and see their articles in your feed. (You could also display replies from the rest of the Fediverse as comments on the Medium article; that way the reply authors wouldn't lose their writing when Medium goes out of business or sells to Google.) That would have been a huge announcement; possibly good, possibly bad, but either way of huge impact. This is still somewhat significant because if you see comments from @someone@me.dm you'll know it's the person who goes by the same name as a Medium author, who you might know from elsewhere. This would be more effective if the Mastodon instance were at something like fed.medium.com though.

toastal 4y ago
You could and should do this with Write Freely or similar today. I don't think a company’s desire to close off its ‘product’, host ads, and require sign-ins align with that the Fediverse wants to do. This isn’t like a co-op where funds are spent just to cover maintenance and server fees.
- kragen 4y ago
  That's why I was so surprised to see the headline! I'm not used to seeing Medium respect other people. But it is what Tumblr plans to do, apparently.
- saurik 4y ago
  ActivityPub is a protocol. It can try to define itself as a community all it wants, but at the end of the day it is as much of a community as SMTP is a community. If a for-profit company wants to send e-mail notifications to its users about blog posts--and even if it also wants to embed really horrible advertisements--it should not only get to send e-mail, it should be encouraged to send e-mail instead of only using proprietary centralized replacements for e-mail (such as mobile push notifications).
tonystubblebine 4y ago
To me, ActivityPub support is for a different goal and that's because I see short form and medium-form (i.e. blogs) as separate use cases in practice. Mastodon represents a short form corner of the fediverse. To participate in this corner via a medium-length tool would mean participation from people who are blindly syndicating at worst, and having a disconnected experience at best. It'd be disrespectful to the community there. Instead, Medium authors should be fully present as short form participants, even if all they want to do is share a link. To speak in the town square you need to be present in the town square. In the case of Mastodon, that means reading and writing from a short-form app. The point of adding ActivityPub (both ways) would be to be part of a much, much smaller blog-length corner of the fediverse. It's interesting, but is fundamentally a different goal.