3) A large part of Medium’s success with the average Jan Doe is it’s stellar usability and aesthetic. If you don’t match that, forget it.
4) There are a lot of trolls on Medium for commenting reasons. Desiring a M model for commenting reasons may backfire. Not everyone wants to entertain comments.
5) A blog post is not ‘longform’ (unless upwards of ~3K words). Why not just custom extend Masto’s char limit to an equivalent of 500 words?
I agree. Masto if perfectly capable of being a ‘social’ blog tool right now. Just needs needs more characters, some rudimentary formatting syntax, and a slight layout change away from these silly colums. Done.
@wion @kensanata
you'd also need to auto-collapse posts longer than 500 chars, in order not to ruin the microblog experience.
@Wolf480pl @wion Maybe. But I’m doing fine with Amaroq which does not – and some people I am following do occasionally post longer text.
@kensanata @wion well, I use mastodon web frontend, and I like its columns as long as people post stuff below 500 chars. But when someone from an instance with different limit posts a 5000 char post, it just fills the whole column, and is a big nuissance.
@roka @kensanata @wion
That makes no sense...
IMO if you can abuse mastodon's API (APub, StatusNet, client api, or otherwise), it's a bug in mastodon, no matter whether it was triggered by another mastodon, or by an evil guy in a hoodie using curl from commandline.
d5ee0acf0893233bc0e6790274345bd…
What I meant is if masto or whatever other 'microcontent' tool can be used to make blog posts, there would need to be some layout changes for that kind of use. And not just on the reader side, but on the editing side too.
And if it's going to attract serious writer attention, it has to look and feel really, really polished. Because they want to be comfortable, and they want to be read.
@wion @kensanata
I think these two usecases (microblogging and full-size blogging) should use separate frontends, and both frontends will need adjustment so as to prevent posts made with the other one from ruining the experience.
It looks like that would need to happen, yes.
Stepping way back for a minute, because I can't imagine needing to use a federated blog tool anyway, and especially for longform writing, which is the kind I do... What is the advantage over just installing any open source app designing it however I want?
What does a federated offer bring to the table besides, supposedly, 'integrated comments'?
I have comments turned off at my sites, so that's not an attraction for me.
@kensanata
@wion @kensanata
Yeah, same here (except my never written anything over 2k words, so hardly longform).
Static blog generator + posting links here works good enough for me.
@wion @kensanata There already are Mastodon clients that don’t impose those “silly” columns.
@kensanata @wion As they say in Bavarian, “i a”.
Yeah, I mostly use phone, so a single column is fine for Masto.
But maybe we lost context here. I was talking about blog models, presumably in desktop mode.
@wion I sincerely think that the solution here is an extension to already existing blogging platforms systems (with focus on those blogging systems which allow for self-hosting) - a sort of recreation of the old "blog rings" (remember those? Around 1999? :) [pepperidge farm level memories going here])
The core part is how to ensure that there is a way to connect to other "federated" blogs and THAT is where the community part comes in and UI/UX needs high end specs.
Yeah, I can’t say what the solution is, but I can say a thorough look at reusing is a better approach than reinventing the same ol’ thing.
Another alternative is fork Masto, change layout, extend the character count to 1000 words, add basic formatting, add rss (if not already there). Done. A blog tool.
Or am I overlooking something? I’m not a dev.
@wion well the idea is to link blogs together in a federated format ("federated" runs the risk of being all "blockchained" - overused and made meaningless as an expression at this point :) ) but without demanding that the user move to another platform, format etc etc.
An extension or something...
Yeah, that part about not making people move is relevant, and akin to the ‘reuse’ concept, if safely possible.
@wion @ohyran @kensanata #pleroma (still in development but usable) with its char limit of 5000 by default might be something to build on. Its basic frontend could be made into the frontpage.
On a single user mastodon instance the home page is the user page of the user 1 and it also looks like a web log for unregistered users, so no tweetdeck UI there.
@wion I keep telling people that extending the limit and allowing for simple emphasis and strong emphasis would do wonders. Google+ has shown that some people will use it to write amazing posts. But I’ve met a resistance on Mastodon which seems to be deeply rooted and I don’t get it.