Reply to chenoehart’s tweet about community

Replied to a tweet by Chenoe HartChenoe Hart (Twitter)
Whenever I find myself actively seeking something to RT it always feels like there’s nothing but noise. Seem to find the most interesting things to share after I’ve already found too many things to RT at once.

Sometimes I find myself wanting to tweet just in general, and wish there was an easy way to just have casual conversations on here, tweet about the weather or something. It’s often really just a proxy for trying to meet people anyway.
I’ve had this feeling before and often long for the earlier days of Twitter when it functioned more like this. The popularization of Twitter in 2009 and the subsequent iteration on the platform and its community killed all the original spirit. It also reminds me of a piece I’d read recently by John Naughton1 about how toxic the retweet functionality (and other gamification like likes/favorites) can be.

I’ve seen the type of interaction you’re describing in smaller pockets of the internet on services like App.net (aka ADN, now defunct), pnut, and 10centuries, and a few corners of the Mastodon sphere.

The place I’ve seen it done well most recently is on Manton Reece‘s awesome micro.blog service, which I think has some strong community spirit and a greater chance of longevity. They’ve specifically left off “features” like follower counts, number of likes, and made conversation front and center. As a result it is a much more solid and welcoming community. I’m curious, as always, if they can maintain it as they scale, but the fact that they encourage people to have their own website and own their own data mean that you can take it all with you somewhere else if they ever cease meeting your needs in the future–something that certainly can’t be easily done on Twitter.

I hope you find the connections with the types of people you’d like to meet.

Originally bookmarked on April 01, 2018 at 09:22PM

References

1.
Naughton J. How to stay sane on Twitter: ignore retweets. Memex 1.1: John Naughton’s online diary. http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2018/03/11/25409. Published March 11, 2018. Accessed April 12, 2018.

❤️ Like and Repost of sarahmillerdc tweet

Liked a tweet by Sarah Miller (Twitter)

❤️ hmvanderhart tweet My 3yrold thinks all people looking at their phone are reading poems.

Liked a tweet by Hannah VanderHart Hannah VanderHart (Twitter)

🔖 The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer

Bookmarked The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer (Perennial Classics)

A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer -- the first and most famous of his books -- was made into a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest television press conferences.Completely relevant and essential for understanding the world today, The True Believer is a visionary, highly provocative look into the mind of the fanatic and a penetrating study of how an individual becomes one.

The famous bestseller with “concise insight into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement” (Wall St. Journal) by Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Eric Hoffer, The True Believer is a landmark in the field of social psychology, and even more relevant today than ever before in history. Called a “brilliant and original inquiry” and “a genuine contribution to our social thought” by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The True Believer is mandatory reading for anyone interested in the machinations by which an individual becomes a fanatic.

h/t

❤️ iOSDevDirectory

Liked iOSDevDirectory by daveverwer (GitHub)
It's just a site that lists all of the blogs that cover the wonderful iOS development community. It was built, and is maintained by Dave Verwer who is also the author of iOS Dev Weekly.
This GitHub repo has an interesting UI/display for creating a full page blogroll of sorts. It has means for following individual sources as well as subscribing to OPML files.

🔖 A Twitter bot to find the most interesting bioRxiv preprints | Gigabase or gigabyte

Bookmarked A Twitter bot to find the most interesting bioRxiv preprints (Gigabase or gigabyte)
TLDR: I wrote a Twitter bot to tweet the most interesting bioRxiv preprints. Follow it to stay up to date about the most recent preprints which received a lot of attention. The past few months have…
h/t to

❤️ Microsub bridge by Ryan Barrett

Liked Microsub bridge by Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)
If you’re familiar with much of my IndieWeb work, you probably know I’m drawn to building translators, proxies, and bridges to connect different protocols and services that do similar things. There’s been a lot of activity recently around Microsub, a standard API for feed reader clients to talk to feed reader servers. Many existing readers have APIs, so I’ve been thinking about a bridge that would translate those APIs to Microsub, so that reader clients like Together and Indigenous could use traditional reader services like Feedly and NewsBlur as their backend.
This article brings such warmth to my heart. It’s even beyond what I had originally envisioned in Feed Reader Revolution.

I’m salivating what this portends for the web and my ability to read it better in the future!

Liked Fears of the IndieWeb by Michael SingletaryMichael Singletary (Michael Singletary)
Prior to diving headfirst into the idea of taking back control over my content online, I held a number of reservations about the ongoing process of true ownership. I’m the kind of guy that likes to let other people worry about things when I can and, despite being a fully capable systems administrator, I generally avoid running my own personal servers, hosting accounts, or platforms. I have, traditionally, outsourced this job to hosted platforms like Blogger, Flickr, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and countless others. Only MySpace has failed me so far, erasing much of my early adulthood from the internet. Why should I turn this control over to smaller teams of developers that may not remain motivated to maintain the projects I’ve, now, come to rely on?
I long for the day in which the web has become IndieWebified to the point that I don’t need to worry about my non-tech friends and family anymore either.

I feel like the walls will eventually come down with technology like Webmentions and I won’t need to spend as much time on machinations like syndication and backfeed to and from silos which can be a drain. This is the dream that gives me even greater hope for future generations living on the web the way I do.

❤️ Just pushed some updates to IndieNews!

Liked Just pushed some updates to IndieNews! by Aaron PareckiAaron Parecki (aaronparecki.com)
Just pushed some updates to IndieNews! Notes like this one, (posts with no name) will now be displayed better, hopefully encouraging people to post more short stuff instead of just blog posts. There is also a calendar view for posts, similar to the calendar on indieweb.org/2017-12-indieweb-challenge Thanks to @sknebel for the idea! I didn't link to the calendar permalinks from the UI yet, but you can browse to them with URLs like this: news.indieweb.org/en/2017/12 I also fixed an issue where the content and name of posts was not being truncated, which caused a minor IRC flood this morning due to a Microformats implied name containing an entire blog post being sent to IRC.
Liked Here’s the latest version of my quick-reply bookmarklet. by gRegor MorrillgRegor Morrill (gregorlove.com)
Here’s the latest version of my quick-reply bookmarklet. It lets me reply to any URL now, not just tweet URLs. Copy and paste the below as a bookmark, changing http://example.com/endpoint/?url= to your desired endpoint. javascript:(function(){var endpoint='http://example.com/endpoint/?url=';if(document.location.hostname=='twitter.com'){var container;if(!(container=document.querySelector('.selected-stream-item'))){if(!(container=document.querySelector('.permalink-tweet-container'))){alert('Could not find tweet permalink. Are you sure a specific tweet is selected?');return false;}}var in_reply_to='https://twitter.com'+container.children[0].getAttribute('data-permalink-path');window.open(endpoint+encodeURIComponent(in_reply_to));}else{var in_reply_to=document.location.href;window.open(endpoint+encodeURIComponent(in_reply_to));}}())
Thanks gRegor! This seems to work like a charm with the Post Kinds Plugin endpoints.

❤️ Focus on Content by Khürt Williams

Liked Focus on Content by Khürt Williams (Island in the Net)
I’m going to use what works and is easy but focus on my content. When it doesn’t work; when it’s not easy. I’ll move on. Try another time.
Some worthwhile thoughts especially from a Gen2 perspective and on.

❤️ IndieWebCamp Austin wrap-up by Manton Reece

Liked IndieWebCamp Austin wrap-up by Manton Reece (manton.org)
Over the weekend we hosted the first IndieWebCamp in Austin. I’m really happy with the way the event came together. I learned a lot in helping plan it, made a few mistakes that we can improve next time, but overall came away as inspired as ever to keep improving Micro.blog so that it’s a standout platform of the IndieWeb movement. There’s nothing like meeting in person with other members of the community. I know this from attending Apple developer conferences, but the weekend in Austin only underscored that I should be more active in the larger web community as well.

❤️ It’s funny by Barnaby Walters

Liked It’s funny by Barnaby WaltersBarnaby Walters (waterpigs.co.uk)
It’s funny — people are saying so much about the #indieweb/federated social web not being a “Facebook Killer”, and yet it’s killed my usage of FB beyond occasional passive consumption. So, implementors: build stuff which kills your own FB usage before trying to kill facebook.
I’ve totally noticed this effect myself in the past several months.

And it’s wonderful!

❤️ Why Connecting Hardware with the Web is So Neat by Eli Fatsi

Liked Why Connecting Hardware with the Web is So Neat by Eli Fatsi (Viget)
We just wrapped up development on Lightwalk, an interactive art installation living at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. For a number of reasons, this has been one of the most interesting projects I've ever worked on. There is the obvious wow factor of the installation itself, but we also developed a whole suite of dev tools running behind the scenes that not only keep the installation running, but also enable engagement from ACU students in multiple ways. It's this tie between hardware and software that makes the project truly shine, it's taking art and making it sm-art, it's the internet of things but it's actually interesting, and it's what I'm going to be talking about today.
This is a cool art installation! I’d like to have one please… It’s like a miniature version of the installation at Los Angeles International Airport, but small enough to fit in my front yard. If only the LAX version was controllable like this one!