Ernie Smith (Tedium)The independent blog has been in decline for years. It doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s why you should start a blog in 2019—and host it yourself.
A great argument here for the IndieWeb, and his second in probably as many weeks. Even better, it sounds like he doesn’t yet know some of the cool new things that blogs are capable of doing now that they couldn’t do in 2006.
@c you are digging up some good stuff!
@c It seems odd that he knows about Mastodon, but doesn’t seem to know about Micro.blog. He talks about the different features in software in the choices he discusses, when it seems to me that what matters more is the characteristics of the community developing around each choice. I immediately got way more (positive) engagement on Micro.blog than I had ever gotten on any other platform in many many years of writing. and that’s why I’m still here.
Mastodon is an order of magnitude (or two) larger than m.b. currently, so I’m not too surprised. One also needs to be on the lookout for such tools and then to be willing to try them. I suspect given the thrust of his post that he’s taking the preference for the broader independence of the web and may prefer the content he’s actively chosen to subscribe to in his feed reader. Given his technical ability, I suspect that micro.blog would only be yet another feed reader he’d need to check for updates.
@Ron Community is really something that you choose to make yourself by choosing who you read, respond to, and link to as well as how considerately you do those things. In its early days Twitter was a fine community primarily because it too was small. Once it reached massive scale it’s much harder to keep the bad element out and Twitter compounds the problem with some of their design choices and what their algorithms force into their users’ view in search of clicks and ad revenue. Eventually micro.blog will also face some of the same scale problems and have similar issues as well. Hopefully the subtle decisions they’re making now will help to mitigate those problems, but they too will eventually happen.
In the end, I think that having more powerful readers that give their users options for who and what to follow along with the ability to better filter, sort, and even rank the content they choose to see will help us all build the communities we want to be members of.