Replied to Dumb Twitter by Adam Croom (Adam Croom)

Here’s my pitch for a Dumb Twitter app: The app forces you to tweet at the original 140 character tweet length. You can reply. You can’t like or retweet. You most certainly can’t quote tweet. There is no private DMing. Linear tweet stream only.

Adam, as you describe “dumb Twitter”, I can’t help but think about many of the design decisions that Manton Reece has made while more consciously designing and building micro.blog which specifically leaves out reposting, likes, and quote tweets as you’ve indicated. Admittedly micro.blog is still relatively small in scale compared to Twitter, and perhaps that size also helps guard against some of the toxic behaviors seen in Twitter. However, I might also suggest that since people are paying for a product and/or using one that has their personal identity built right into it with their own custom domain name, they are far less likely to proverbially “shout from their front porch” at passerby.

I notice you have a micro site which you were using with a micro.blog account, though I suspect you may have given up experimenting with them? Admittedly there is a bit of a technical hurdle in dovetailing either a WordPress or WithKnown site into the platform, but even tying RSS feeds from these platforms into the system isn’t too difficult.

I suspect that as a proponent of DoOO, you may find it fruitful to take another crack at micro.blog which, to a great extent, is really just a DoOO platform for the broader public. For a small monthly fee it allows users to bring their own domain name and get inexpensive hosting to own their own content including articles, status updates, photos, and podcasts. Otherwise, for free, you can use your own site (as you started to) and interact with the community by syndicating your content into it via RSS instead of crossposting via other means they way you’ve done with Twitter in the past.

I might suggest you try using your WithKnown site with micro.blog instead of WordPress, particularly as Known supports webmention out of the box. As a result, anything you syndicate into the system will automatically provide you notifications of any replies. You could then have just the “dumb Twitter” you wanted along with a solid DoOO solution at the same time. Ultimately you’d be using the micro.blog interface as a feed reader to scroll through content while posting your content from your own site.

If it helps to join the community there I’ve got a post that lists several micro.blog users who are in the education space, many of whom are tinkering around in areas like DoOO and IndieWeb, and a few of whom you may recognize.

I’m happy to help if you need any getting set up or experimenting. There’s a lot more power and value in the hybrid set up that micro.blog provides than it gets credit for.