I’m seeing chatter about needing a federated blog system for ‘longform’ based on Medium, for the main reason blogging needs social to survive.
I don’t think that’s an entirely solid argument.
1) It sounds like mimicking centralized blogging for the sake of it, and a lot of people I know don’t like Medium because it is a ‘club’ model.
2) What’s a matter with installing a foss blog system (e.g. Textpattern) and sharing posts in a separate Masto account? Like you would do on Twieter.
Cont...
I know it wouldn’t be centralized (technically speaking) and I know it would be FOSS. So you missed at least part of my point there.
And everything you listed is the blogging ‘club’ mentality I referred to, characteristic of centralized blogging platforms: Medium, tumbler, Ghost, Wordpress.org, Blogger, etc.
My point: extend char length in Masto, add basic formatting, change the layout, and you’ll make most people happy about a federated blogging tool.
@wion Most people *don't* want "longer Masto with basic formatting". Sure, that can be helpful in some situations, by blurring the line between microblogging and blogging. But blogging allows you to embed media in between paragraphs, hyperlink certain text, apply categorization, and so on.
I'm also not sure why you classify Ghost and Wordpress.org as "centralized" when they are instead distributed (and Ghost doesn't even include native commenting).
@wion Anyway, something like this looks pretty cool to me. Masto e.g. displays the posts as a title and URL, but a longer-form application like Hubzilla might display the full article, or a custom client might implement a collapsible preview, or so on. You get to decide, because you get the full Activity Streams response!
Yeah, something like that, I guess.
I mean, I'm no dev, but if you can integrate apps so I could 'blog' (try it out) without having to create another account in a different system, then that's a step in the right direction.
And I use 'I' there meaning 'we the people'. ;)
@wion If you want an all-in-one experience, then I think Hubzilla is probably more in that category. Something like Mastodon is focused on providing only microblogging. Hubzilla is technically a permission system and not "just" a social networking service. You can do wikis, chess, calendars, and so on, in addition to articles.
Thanks. After reflecting more on it, I don’t think federated publishing is for me, thus I should not be discussing it.
I’ll stick with Textpattern and my own data management process. I’m quite invested there anyway; 14 years of building with it and and using it across many projects.
I don’t use comments on my writing anyway, and manually sharing articles in Masto is no headache. Just need to get my perso site out of maintenance mode. ;)
@wion That's fine too! Different people want different things :)
I meant wordpress.com (not .org), which seems pretty centralized. I thought Ghost offered a similar situation, but maybe I'm wrong there.
In any case, build it. Nobody is stopping you. I just don't think a federated Medium alternative is the answer.
I can install any open source blog tool now with full control over how I want it to look and behave. How is some federated substitute going to be better?
And if you say the 'social' aspect, then that might be where I diverge from caring.
@wion nobody needs an open-source medium clone. The web was just fine before this predator ate all our content.
That’s my feeling too. Social media for the sake of it. We need less of it, not alternatives for everything just because it’s technically possible. But I’m old-fashioned.
@wion @remotenemesis old fashioned just means logical 😊
@wion @remotenemesis well, I think there is a need for a place where people can post a long article without having a blog of their own. In as far as Medium was able to provide that, I liked it. But everything else on top of that was unnecessary. This BoingBoing post lists a few alternatives I like. https://boingboing.net/2017/03/14/minimalist-web-publishing-plat.html
Brutalist blogging platforms!!
@wion Such a federated blogging system wouldn't be centralized; in fact, it would still be a "foss blog system", but with the added benefit that you
a) don't have to share posts manually,
b) can read/subscribe to articles within mastodon/pleroma/etc.,
c) can comment on posts from mastodon/pleroma/etc.,
d) can potentially do linkbacks and follow blogs from other blogs,
e) can extend functionality within the spec, such as creating groups of blogs, multi-user blogs, and so on