Replied to a tweet by Sheila MacNeill (Twitter)

a really need for nuanced and civilised debates around what open platforms should and could be, the dangers of “free speech”, the need for ethics - you know all the things white, male billionaires regularly do. . . https://twitter.com/guardiantech/status/1518821183310860292

The microblogging book by @mantonsblog is full of both technical and ethical info:
https://book.micro.blog
http://micro.blog is IMO a great model of smallish communities & solving a lot of social problems. It syndicates hosted & external sites.

One of the best $10 I’ve ever spent was on the micro.blog kickstarter. For my money I was pledged:

PDF and ePub versions of the book, plus early access to Micro.blog. You can reserve your Micro.blog username even before the book is finished.

My username is johnjohnston on micro.blog and it has been a big part of my online life since April 2017

This week I got an email from kickstarter. The draft of the Indie Microblogging book is available online at book.micro.blog.

I’ve started dipping into the book rather than reading it through. Being beautifully organised online makes this easy.

The book is lot more comprehensive than I expected. Everything I’ve read so far has delighted me. It includes, history, different platforms, interviews with lots of interesting folk. There is also technical information about microformats and other indieweb technologies. This looks like being very readable and useful.

Manton’s personal way of telling the story makes it easy to read and digest.

A couple of quotes, that might not capture the range and depth of the text but resonated very strongly with me:

Toward decentralization · Indie Microblogging

We want smaller platforms again as was common in the height of Web 2.0. Back then it was more like a fabric of web tools, where one app might build on Flickr’s API, or another app might plug in missing features in early versions of Twitter like search or photo hosting. But with indie microblogging we want to go further, even more decentralized, where platforms fade away and all we have are our own blogs, woven together as a new foundation for the social web.

Part 2: Foundation · Indie Microblogging

There weren’t enough blogs back in 2002, and there aren’t enough now. I have no doubt that some of the blogs created today will be important in the years ahead, maybe contributing to a debate on politics, or showcasing new writing or art, or serving as an archive that reflects today’s culture.

Manton asks for feedback, I’ve not spotted anything I think could be improves so far, my only feedback would be lovely stuff!

In classic primary school book reviews a question is often, who else would like this book? If you are interested in any aspect of social media, blogging or online life you will find something of interest. If you are uneasy about Facebook algorithms, or you dislike the politicians and government announcing and pronouncing on twitter, this is for you.

I am finding micro.blog a really interesting community.

From an educational POV the most positive experience and the one that I would like to see replicated (in Glow and elsewhere) is #DS106.

DS106 influences the way I think about ScotEduBlogs and the way I built two Glow Blogging Bootcamps 1.

In particular these sites aggregate participants content but encourage any comments and feedback to go on the originators site.

Micro.blog is making me rethink this a little, there you can comment on micro.blog (the same as the blog hub in DS106) and that comment gets sent as a webmention to the originators site. This makes thinks a lot easier to carry through.

Micro.blog also provides the equivalent of the #ds106 twitter hashtag but keeps that in the same space as the hub/rss reader.

Manton recently wrote:

Micro.blog will never be that big. What we need instead of another huge social network is a bunch of smaller platforms that are built on blogs and the open web.

from: Manton Reece – Replacing 1 billion-user platforms

Which made me think.

Firstly it reinforces how Manton really thinks hard about making micro.blog a brilliant place, avoiding the pitfalls of huge silos.

Secondly it speaks to idea of multiple social networks. Imagine if DS106 and ScotEdublogs where both platforms in this sense, I could join in either or both along with others using my blog to publish. I could decide which posts of mine to send to which community, and so on.

It is the same idea I’ve had for Glow blogs since I started working with them 2.

Class blogs could join in and participate in different projects.

It would be easy to start a local or national project and pull together content and conversation from across the web into one learning space. Although I’ve spoken and blogged a lot about this idea I don’t think I’ve made it stick in the minds of many Scottish educators. I wish I could.

  1. Blogging Bootcamp spring 2015 & Blogging Bootcamp #2 Autumn 2015 . I believe the potential for these sorts of educational activity is much underused in primary and secondary education. I wish I was in the position to organise and design more of these…
  2. For example:

Firstly; I’ve removed most of the post formats leaving the 2 I actually use here. Standard goes to the front page, status to the status. I organise kinds with the post kinds plugin. My Format box now looks like this:

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'childtheme_formats', 11 );
function childtheme_formats(){
add_theme_support( 'post-formats', array( 'status') );
}

I added the above to my child themes function.php

Based on Post Formats Formats_in_a_Child_Theme in the WordPress Codex. Standard Format is formatless, so you just add the ones you want in addition.

Secondly; I’ve moved the quote and content generated from the Post Kinds plugin to below the post. This is in the Post Kinds setting so was simple. Having them above my remarks meant that the quote was going to micro.blog and twitter rather than my comment.

I hope to have a bit more time over the summer holidays to rethink and rewire the blog. Some of the decisions I’ve made were perhaps not the best.

Most of the functions that have do with micro.blog and microblogging that live in my child theme’s functions.php in a gist.

Replied to Replies from Micro.blog and oh hai, comments – Colin Devroe (cdevroe.com)
However, this is causing me a bit of frustration because it feels as though the conversation about a post is happening on Micro.blog rather than on people’s own blogs.

Here I get the text from comments on micro.blog replies and from replies to that reply. Colin’s blog only seems to get a link to micro.blog.

I am not really sure how it is all glued together. The final piece would be to be able to join the micro.blog thread from the comments here, that might be a technical step too far?

Replied to On Likes, Faves and Sharing (desparoz.com)
IMHO, the best way of registering thanks and supporting the efforts of the author is to take a few moments and to write a meaningful reply — perhaps in a comment, or better yet perhaps by making your own (micro) blog post — and linking back to the original.

I love the way: On Likes, Faves and Sharing thinks & practises the different micro connections on the web. I wonder if a nuanced, formalised set of interactions would be better than a carefully reply.

I’ve now removed the titles in the RSS feed from posts in the micro category using the_title_rss. So I’ve reenabled adding of titles through wp_insert_post_data. If this works this post will have a title in my dashboard, but all get through to micro.blog