but I had some more thoughts on it so I thought I’d start a new topic here. Perhaps I can generate support for my proposal among the micro.blog user base.
My feature request: Please do a complete 180-degree reversal of one of the fundamental principles of micro.blog, and make micro.blog a full citizen of the fedivere. That means:
Support giving likes
Support reblogging Mastodon posts.
Support seeing other people’s reblogs.
Supporting seeing when other people like your post.
Later: Support the trending posts column, and the rest of the stuff in the Explore tab of mastodon.
Right now I have two fediverse accounts. One is my micro.blog account, of course. The other is a mastodon account to support all the above features, which micro.blog does not support. Make things simpler for us folks who use both platforms and support all the feature of Mastodon in micro.blog. Then we can ditch our mastodon accounts.
Here are reasons why I like “likes” (so to speak):
Often my posts don’t generate comments. Which is fine. But if they don’t get likes either, I start wondering whether anybody’s even reading the darn thing!
Likes are a signal to Mastodon (and perhaps other fediverse platform?) to boost a post more broadly, in the trending feed.
Sometimes a friend who I’m not aware follows me, or a popular user or even a famous person will like one of my posts, and I get a kick out of that.
@manton , you said in the other topic that you don’t want to support likes because you see it as step down the slippery slope to supporting public like counts (which I guess is a big step down the road to spam?). The solution is simple: Just draw the line and don’t support public like counts.
To clarify, it’s not only about like counts. That came to mind in the previous thread you mentioned, but I think there are a lot of other side effects with changing the feedback model. Happy to go into that in more detail if people want.
I’ll try to take a step back before replying on the other points in case other people want to chime in. I don’t think Micro.blog needs to be exactly like Mastodon, though. We tried to do something different with Micro.blog. If some people prefer Mastodon’s features, that’s totally fine.
@MitchWagner I respectfully disagree. I don’t want Micro.blog to be like Mastodon at all. In fact, I wouldn’t even mind if the interoperability of Micro.blog-Mastodon goes away.
If I want Mastodon features, I will open a Mastodon account. In fact, to scratch my itch to post Micro.blog-like posts on Mastodon, I cross post to a separate Mastodon account. I’ve asked my Micro.blog followers to not bother following me there coz it’s the same content. In fact, my Mastodon follower community might even be different than on Micro.blog. In fact, I follow a few people there who are not on Micro.blog. They can click thru on longer posts and see my Micro.blog posts but only if they really care.
I might not even cross-post everything. So basically, Micro.blog is my personal blog and Mastodon is my “social media platform”, whatever that means these days.
If you are interested in tracking your engagement in terms of likes, you should definitely be on Mastodon and engage there primarily. You can still import your Mastodon posts to Micro.blog via RSS, but only expect engagement in terms of comments that you check maybe once a week (or not at all).
Taking a step back: The problem I’m looking to solve here is that I want to be able to use micro.blog as my primary Masto account, and still enjoy the benefits of Mastodon not currently supported by micro.blog.
I think I could do without “likes” if micro.blog simply supported boosting other people’s toots, and seeing other people’s boosts. I think that maybe if micro.blog supported that one feature, I could find workarounds for everything else.
For what it’s worth, while I’m on team “Likes are good, public or not!”, I am not on team “let Micro.blog be a full on Mastodon account.”
There’s a lot of reasons, but I want to reiterate something I said elsewhere in case it changes your mental model.
I view Micro.blog’s Mastodon support as supporting another method that people can subscribe to my blog to read my posts where they read blog posts. The methods that exist right now for those folks who want to read what I write are:
Visit json.blog directly.
Subscribe with an RSS reader using the RSS or JSON feed.
Follow me on Micro.blog.
Subscribe to my blog as a newsletter (I don’t have premium so this is not an option I offer today)
Follow my blog on Mastodon (that’s the Mastodon support part)
Follow me on a social platform that I cross post to (currently I have my own Mastodon account where I do this for reasons and a Bluesky account; I turned off Tumblr for other reasons).
The purpose of this support is not “become Mastodon” or even “be a great Mastodon account” it is “My blog can be read where people follow/subscribe users or sites to read blogs.”
In that way, I am quite happy with the ActivityPub work here.
Whether or not likes or reposts are supported within Micro.blog are, in my opinion, fully unrelated to Mastodon or ActivityPub. My assumption is that if these features are right for Micro.blog, they will be built first natively and then integrate as best as possible with Indieweb standards for webmentions and ActivityPub actions.
My vision is of blogging and social media being like email. Write or post photos once, in one place, and everybody who wants to follow can follow from whatever platform they want—even Facebook. And vice-versa; I want to follow micro.bloggers, Mastadonians, Blueskyers and even Facebook users from one platform. (Obviously, Facebook is refusing to play. But they may come around.)
But maybe that’s not the best way to go? Maybe each platform should be its own thing.
If you don’t mind my asking: Why do you choose to not syndicate your blog to tumblr?
I also want to write once and let people follow wherever. I just don’t expect where I write to also be where I read everything and can have native-like on going interactions. I expect to have something much closer to cross posting, where follow up interactions with native elements of specific platforms people use require me to engage on the platform they use. I don’t view having accounts where people are interacting with my stuff as an anti pattern. I just want to write once somewhere I control and share everywhere automatically.
As for Tumblr— it’s such a great blogging platform from a content creation stand point. I hate the theming system. And the social system is quirky and hard as hell for me to crack. Because I don’t have any meaningful network there, I felt it was not valuable to syndicate to another blogging platform I was not engaging in and didn’t feel posting without things like hashtags that are so important for discovery there made it likely I’d bootstrap followers. I don’t think tumblr works as a social site without more direct engagement, and I don’t need a copy of my blog elsewhere. If I had people who followed me there already I might keep cross posting. For now, I feel if I want to make tumblr a thing I need to first participate there.
The disconnect is, I believe, between the two distinct parts of Micro.blog - the hosting/blogging platform and the social community. The former wants to be open and supportive of every open protocol, which is an admirable goal. On the other hand, the latter is more insular and even a bit anti-social (or introvert-oriented), which makes it distinct from all other social networks, open or not.
If these were two different teams within the same company, I would love to be a fly on the wall during product meetings where each advocates their values and their value to the company. The fact that it’s all run and dictated by one person makes it more interesting but also confusing to communicate to the people using the product.
I don’t really agree with this characterization. I think Micro.blog is open for broadcasting your content to people who read it and sensitive to what mechanisms people have to respond. In many ways, it’s saying access to read what I write is not an invitation to have access to my attention.
I like how you put this. However, don’t you think people want the “engagement” features to show their appreciation or share it with others? For, e.g., Glass started out with no engagement features either. Then he added Appreciations that only the author can see, which are not public. But did that affect comments?
This is extremely well said. I sometimes feel weighed down a feeling of social obligation to respond back to people who respond to my posts. That feeling of obligation may be completely imaginary.
I like this idea a lot. Call them “likes,” not “appreciations” (I like the plainer word) and make them visible only to the person posting.
As I said earlier: On other platforms, I get a kick out of it when I get a “like” from a RL friend, someone I’m a fan of, and even the occasional celebrity. I’d like to see that here too. And I like it even more when a RL friend I haven’t been in touch with for a while does it.
And @jsonbecker 's comments about the value of separating Mastodon, BlueSky, etc., and micro.blog activity make me rethink my feature request to support Masto boosts on MB. Let MB be MB and let Masto be Masto (with MB cross-posts).
I will admit that I do too. Hence likes are so addictive. Suddenly you start writing/posting for what you think will get more likes and you get kicked down when you don’t. So if the platform just removes that option, it can be freeing.
I am in favor of likes. I have no strong feelings about whether they are public or private. But I am not really in favor of “be just like another Mastodon host” or “try and Swiss army knife every native feature of every social protocol you integrate with.”
If Manton ever changes his mind on likes, and I do hope he does, I think that decision should be largely orthogonal to interacting with other social services.
Chiming in here (as I came up with that issue elsewhere too): I briefly read through the page and wanted to add a small sidenote, how this generally feels to me: At some point, I was interacting from Mastodon with a person on write.as, someone who wrote witty yet controversial posts and I commented these. Never really got a response to any of the comments though, until eventually I discovered that write.as uses ActivityPub / “the Fediverse” as a write-only drain (back then?), so you could interact with these posts until hell freezes over and never get a response for mere technical reasons. Now that I know, I mostly avoid commenting those posts, much as I try (on the Fediverse) to avoid leaving “likes” on posts coming from someone on micro.blog (if my platform receives these at all). I personally don’t mind micro.blog not being a fully-fledged Mastodon / Fediverse participant, but, with all the history I have in here, I feel … somehow bad about services “ignoring” communication - including “likes”, follows, follow-requests, that, to me, count as “communication” too. Maybe it would be better to have ActivityPub support details like this (so, in example, on Mastodon I could know whether it makes sense to leave a “like” or a “comment” on a particular post), but as long as this isn’t the case, it might end up a one-way street without the other end even noticing there’s something going missed. It feels like sending out e-mails with your reply-to redirected to your local /dev/null in a way. Just my $0.02 of course. Another valid option would be to (similar to Hubzilla) completely disable ActivityPub and just post all content to some other Mastodon API instance to keep the social stuff there. Would be perfectly fine with that too.
Yes, could do with this very well - but that only makes sense if I really can disable ActivityPub “visibility”(?) of my micro.blog altogether (think we mentioned it should work but haven’t figured out how to do this yet). You know how to achieve this…?