Excursions

There is a lot of chatter recently around the features on Twitter/Facebook that should be incorporated in the new¹ social media platforms. Or even the lack of the Twitter/Facebook like features that make the platforms better. Just look at the timelines at any of these platforms and you are bound to see some meta discussion on these lines. You will see it on Micro.blog. You will see it on Mastodon.

Let’s just take a couple of examples. Here’s how Mastodon’s boost is presented as better.

Boosts are essentially like retweets, with one key difference: there’s no option to add your own commentary. You simply can’t post something awful with a message saying how awful it is—all you can do is boost something awful without commentary.

Well, I can’t be the only one to remember the early Twitter days when retweets were just that, without commentary. It was all the third party clients that had an option to “quote” tweet. Remember those days of appending “RT:”, etc? We were using the feature and Twitter was forced to officially support it.

Same was the case with hashtags, another feature that made experience on Twitter a nightmare - but was brought in because users were “enjoying” it. We kept boasting we brought the hashtags to Twitter and now we want nothing to do with it.

Don’t get me wrong here. I do not want to sound like a Twitter apologist. The platform is in a dire state and their current and previous owners are rightly to be blamed here. As I recently wrote, I have no sympathy for these folks. Examples mentioned above are not the primary reasons why Twitter, and Facebook, are struggling.

But it is worth considering the fact that many of the features being touted as responsible for Twitter’s fall are ones introduced by its users.

So a plea to all the decision makers behind these “new” platforms - don’t let us, your users, drive the roadmap for you. We cannot foresee what’s right. You on the other hand can decide where you want to take your platform. That may mean some people won’t ride along and get left behind. But, at times, it is better to follow what’s right in the long run than chase the immediate growth.

I know people behind both Micro.blog and Mastodon are making these design decisions very carefully², and are not heeding to the pressure.

So just stick to your beliefs, Manton, Eugen and others. Take your time and decide what’s right for us.

I come to this place often. And ruminate. There’s something about the structure that calms me.

Time for churning some thoughts. Time for slurping some chai. ☕️

There was one (last?) missing piece in the quest of mine to simplify posting to my blog - and that was photos. Most of my posts originate on micropub clients, mainly Micro.blog. But photos couldn’t without a media endpoint. Not any more. Blotpub now has one in-built.

Another blogging platform I was fond of, and had self-hosted in between, Ghost is upgrading to 2.0. This is a fascinating story — I am still amused how the guys behind this continue to ask for the price they do for hosting one blog.

A walk amidst the nature, under an umbrella. With raindrops composing the best of the music to go with.

Nothing more calming.

Cathy O’Neil at Bloomberg mentioned she felt sympathy for “the big boys of tech”, like Zuckerberg. I, on the other hand, have no sympathy for these geniuses. I feel they ignored their responsibilities and sensibilities for way too long. Few thoughts.

I recently wanted to create a new view (a page) for all my social posts. Apparently, even if you create the page there are still few additional configurations to be done for the template to make it available at a particular link.

Configuration to be done is to define a route which will serve that particular page. This can be done on the web editor at Blot dashboard in the template section.

You can create a new ‘view’ on the web editor in the view section of the templates (available at https://blot.im/template/<theme-name>/view).

Once you create a new view, go to settings page for the newly created view and specify its route. For example, the route (or URL) for archives.html is set to /archives. This enables the Blot engine to render the given template view at the configured URL. You can explore the archives view for more options.

I had no idea there is a new Cormoron Strike novel coming. I like the name too, “Lethal White”. Mysterious.

I better complete all the currently-reading books before September arrives. It is always fun to read Rowling write characters. 📚

Cathy O’Neil, along with criticizing these “big boys of tech”, feels some sympathy for them.

I might be the only person on Earth feeling sorry for the big boys of technology(…) They all started out wanting to make the world a better place using cool technology, and here they are, dealing with all of this democracy and public responsibility stuff, which they never signed up for and honestly don’t have the chops to handle.

You might very well be; if not the only, you are at least in minority. I have no sympathy for these “big boys”. There is no justifying the sheer carelessness these “geniuses” evince in the way they go about their businesses.

You can’t dream of making the world a better place without first being a part of that world; living there; seeing it through the eyes of the normal people. Anticipate every possible way that the platform you build can be misused and empathizing with every single person that such a misstep will affect. This is the foremost quality needed in the person that leads the group building such a “world-changing” platform.

On the first indication of you realizing you do not possess that, you should sidestep. If you don’t do that after multiple slip-ups, it reveals your selfish behavior. And you lose the right to ask for any sympathy.