At WordPress.com, we believe short thoughts deserve a real home. Today we’re introducing a new theme built for quick posts, replies, and reblogs: the kind of writing that lives somewhere between a tweet and a blog post, on a site that’s entirely yours.

from: A New Theme for Short-Form Blogging on WordPress.com – WordPress.com News

A new setup on wordpress.com with front end posting, 500 char limit in their editor, but you can go past that if you use an alternative editor, WordLand for example.

It is not clear to me if the features go with the theme, or there is a plugin I can’t see at work. I’ve only got a free WordPress.com account. It looks like you could change the theme.

Of course it would be interesting to see this on self hosted WordPress sites. I did experiment with a telex block that gave simple short form posting. Not quite in a popup, but could be useful on mobile.

Update: Manton has some thoughts: Manton Reece – WordPress short-form interface.

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.

  1. Of course some of us like setting up or own sites;-) ↩︎
  2. If you are Scottish educator I’d recommend Glow Blogs £0 ↩︎

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.

 

Replied to #FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns by Chris AldrichChris 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.

 

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.

Liked Templated Space by Aaron DavisAaron 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