Excursions

It’s been some time now that I have listened to a track that’s so fun and so meaningful at the same time as O’ Meri Laila. The whole album is an experience in its own way — very different, but appealing at the same time. A must listen 🎶

♺ Reposted a toot from D Dino

i proofread my writing by piping it through espeak

There‘re many feature requests for the new platforms that we users are making. To do some inspired by Twitter/FB. To not to do some inspired by them. I have one plea to the decision makers, like @manton - do not to listen to us if it doesn’t fit your vision. We may be wrong.

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.