We want modern social media and public conversation online to work more like the early days of the web, where anyone could put up a blog or use RSS to subscribe to several blogs.
from: What is Bluesky? – Bluesky
I am reading around Bluesky this morning, some Glow Blogs research. This brought me up short. As far as I know anyone can ‘put up a blog or use RSS to subscribe to several blogs.’
If you want to leave some of the more toxic online spaces, I’d recommend a look at micro.one. You can gain ownership, and control over your content. All without the overhead of setting up your own site1.
Blogging is at the heart of Micro.one. Short microblog posts or long-form posts. Photo blogs or podcasts. Inspired by IndieWeb principles. Your own domain name where you can own your content, then feed your posts into the Micro.one social timeline or the larger fediverse.
All for $1 a month2.
Micro.one is part of the fediverse. When you post to your blog, your posts and photos are also sent to followers on Mastodon and elsewhere.
Micro.one is a ‘subset’ of micro.blog, which is also a relaxed and charming community.
So you love Facebook and you hate Facebook, you love Twitter and you hate Twitter. You love… You get the idea! If you’re anything like me you have at times questioned how much time you’ve spent trawling through social media. You may even be worried about how much data they’ve been gathering about you, or perhaps thinking about whether or not we’re even able to escape from it all. On the podcast today we’ve got Alex Kirk, and he certainly has been thinking about all of this. So much so in fact that he’s built a social network plugin for WordPress. Listen to the podcast to find out all about it…
Really interesting podcast discussing the Friends WordPress plugin with its author Alex Kirk. A lot of interesting features, including a built in RSS reader and a WordPress to WordPress social network.
I had a couple of thoughts, I wonder if this would work on a WordPress multi-site like Glow Blogs?
I also wondered if importing all these posts you were reading would bloat your own blog? This was answered in the podcast, you can set the number of posts kept or the length of time to keep them.
Alex did mention the IndieWeb, so I am wondering if there is much integration, with webmentions or bookmarking for example.
Obviously to use the social part you need friends using the plugin, but I think I’ll install it somewhere to see how it works as an RSS reader when i have a mo.
Chris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)Instead of spending time on Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram, or other major social platforms, start practicing #FeedReaderFriday by carving out some time to find and follow people’s websites directly with a feed reader or social reader. Then engage with them directly on their own websites.
This is a really nice idea Chris.
I am currently trying out FeedLand Dave Winer’s new project. This is a feed collector & reader. You can also see what other people are subscribing to.
My big thesis about technology is that “technology weirds the world” — instead of ruining or fixing it, it typically changes it in a bunch of unexpected ways, twisting the contours of human life into shapes never seen before.
several other AI-based enhancement processes to shield your images from reverse image searches without compromising the look of your photo
Good grief!
the quoted tweets in the linked article deleted, but we are in a mess.
Talking about Charles Arthur’s Social Warming: The dangerous and polarising effects of social media John Naughton says:
I run into non-tech-savvy people and realise they have no idea about how social-media feeds are algorithmically curated, say, or why many people in the global South are unaware that Facebook is not the Internet. But then I think: how could they have known? After all, mainstream media doesn’t do a good job of explaining it. And social-media definitely have no incentive to do it.
From Memex 1.1
Which made it sound like an interesting book. I’ve grabbed the audio version for January’s commute. I tend to prefer shorter podcasts, and have not listened to many audio books so am wondering if I’ll manage to keep on to the end.
Aaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)It is interesting to reflect upon different social media spaces and think about the features and the limitations. .... I think that is why I have taken to posting on my own site and working from there. Maybe that does not always have the same reach and interaction, but we have to compromise somewhere.
me to
“ Tried to get educators to adopt @Declara in 2015/16 and @Giveandtakeinc since last Christmas. ...In my experience It's a challenge moving edu folks to other platforms.”
I don’t want to move educators. I’d like to spread the understanding that platforms that you pay for with your attention, and then that attention is manipulated, may not be the best place to direct our pupils data and attention.
A start along that path might be to think of a blog that you either own and control or is owned by a benevolent entity (Scot Gov in this case) is the best place to store your data, memories etc. From there, they can be sent out to social networks.
Ideally, IMO, there would be a benevolent network or system that would eventually work well enough to replace commercial but free, services.
