unsure where to place this, this being more a conceptual than technical question I’d like to discuss: I’ve recently been wrapping my head a lot around wondering which way to go best with micro.blog and a lot of other services out there. Been reading through indieweb.org earlier, I always come back to POSSE - IndieWeb vs PESOS - IndieWeb and wonder which of these approaches is better.
So far I try to go POSSE here, keeping all “my” posts in one place and making sure it is federated or crossposted to all platforms and sites that matter to me, to all sites where I use to have people I’d like to stay in touch with. This works, but (minor?) drawback is that publishing and interacting with each of these systems (pixelfed, Friendica/Mastodon, …) always is more clumsy than, say, using their native apps or clients for posting content there. So, I wonder whether I should consider the other way 'round and rather use micro.blog for - the PESOS way - aggregating everything I left on any other platforms, as my personal archive regardless of where original data lives.
Does the micro.blog hivemind have any insights or considerations on that approach? Would it work (well)? Is it recommended? Or should I just go the route that works for now and stay with what I got?
Micro.blog is one of the only services that can take an RSS feed source and push it onto your blog. So in that sense, it’s one of the easiest places to do PESOS. The thing folks run into are not liking how something like an RSS feed is structured from another service and finding out that’s not editable. For example, many folks disliked that Letterboxd has the movie name and rating in the title field.
Essentially, the same limitations of POSSE-- not all of your content is precisely the best, ideal native version on each service you push to-- will be true of your blog when it pulls things in.
For me, my blog is the “canonical” source because I can make it do and look like whatever I want (even moving of Micro.blog to another service, for example). So I want control in the canonical place. I’m also not really interested in the “quantified self” style data aggregation on my site. That makes things easier for me, because it means the kind of content (images, short posts, long posts) I want to have on my blog and other services works well within the context of MB.
Others want an easier experience doing something like rating a movie in a native app for that and getting that content into their blog. That seems to work for them.
Most importantly, there’s nothing either/or about it. You can post to Micro.blog and push that content out some places while also sucking in content from elsewhere at the same time.
I post my “good” content here and crosspost it elsewhere. This is the curated feed of my online life. I don’t want my timeline filled with copies of the dumb jokes I make on Mastodon, say.
I’ve had this discussion with @jsonbecker in the past and it has convinced me to go more in the direction of POSSE.
More than that: I often treat other services as simple notifiers that there is something available here.
I write a lot of 500+ character untitled posts, and if they don’t look perfect in Mastodon, Bluesky or the micro.blog timeline, well, I’m ok with that.
I’m lately concentrating activity on places where people like to read it. For a few months, I was posting a lot of memes, vintage photos and ads, and other found media, on micro.blog, for automated syndication to Mastodon and Bluesky. Then I decided the heck with that—I have most of my community for that kind of thing on Facebook and Tumblr, so I’ll just post 'em there.
I post links, my own photos, and the occasional original thought here on micro.blog and cut-and-paste to Facebook.
I figure the technology landscape is changing here and next year’s solution is likely to be different from this year’s. Ultimately, I’d like to get to an end to silos—post once, and people can consume anywhere that is convenient to them.
Yes, reflecting my own views it’s “My website is where I put stuff, and I try to make it so that people can read that where they like, such as Mastodon, ActivityPub services, Bluesky, Threads, Micro.blog, RSS readers, etc.”
I could see going both ways, especially if you need to bow to reality because you’ve got a lot happening in a siloed place.
Even if you’re not involved in such places, starting everything on your own site could be a bit much for people who follow you one place or another. Still, I’ve been playing with the crossposting here because platform fatigue is real. It’s one thing I hope Micro.blog can help me with, even if, ironically, it comes with a social network of its own.
That’s the goal for me. Formatting incompatibilities, length limits and other cross-platform quirks makes the reality far short of the goal. I hope the silos eventually fall but I wouldn’t bet the mortgage on it.
MB does help in that it automates cross-posting and syndication but you still end up checking multiple platforms.
And Micro.blog’s crossposting features are kinda clunky at the moment. @MitchWagner You can choose where to crosspost, but only in the web interface. Hopefully that changes so that third-party tools are useful when such differentiated cross-posting is desired. Meanwhile, I’m experimenting with crossposting to see what works now.
As for visiting other platforms, @MitchWagner, that never bothered me so much (although the experience on some can be awful). For me, the old bird site (my first foray into microblogging, 2007-22) was good as a place for interaction, not simply because of its potential broadcast reach with hashtags and/or a community of so-called followers.
In a smaller part of the POSSE puzzle more broadly, I tried something new last night: I pasted a very short post from my domain into Facebook, and appended “It is amazing to watch … | Mark Stoneman 🌐” afterwards, while deleting the automatic thumbnail. I don’t possess the necessary wizardry to generate my own short urls, but I thought my need for them was so limited that I could do these manually with redirects. I chose this link format because it’s one of the few places I’d need it for. I also did a one-off to Instagram using my domain followed by insta001 because I think an unclickable “markstoneman.com/insta0001” won’t be that hard to remember and type.
But I’m still flying without stats at the moment, which might or might not be a good thing for me. There’s no way to know what’s going on in most of the cross-post targets, and I don’t want to force people to visit my blog, which means a certain amount of uncertainty is necessary, even if it comes with gaps in my knowledge. Still, the blog contains both blogging and microblogging. It might be nice to have stats on the longer blog posts. Dunno.
I’ve used Drafts and Ulysses to post to Micro.blog, and they both let me choose where to cross-post. And I very much like the options for manual and automated cross-posting.
I am a light user of traffic metrics. I get a kick out of knowing when something proves popular, but mostly there are so few people reading what I write outside Facebook that it doesn’t really matter. I get tinylitics email every week and often think, “OK, another week where my top post got a big 16 views.”
I have been down the road of trying to optimize my posts for every platform, and found it overwhelming and unsatisfactory. I wish you better luck than I had—and please share your results because if you are more successful than I was, I will gladly use your ideas!
Only if you let it bug you. I didn’t say everyone will get a native, best experience where they want to read. They’ll get a good one, sometimes dang near native, and sometimes, it’s a link back to where they can see the “real” thing.
There’s really no need for a “short url” unless you want a URL to look good for someone who sees it (which is rare). All services basically count URLs as a fixed length these days.
It’s not really that mysterious. What happens is fairly fixed:
Posts above X characters (I think 280 regardless of service): title + link to blog (or first 50 characters or so plus link). If you have open graph setup, that link will unfurl just like normal link pasting for open graph.
Posts below X characters(again I think 280), no images: full content will post on that site.
Posts below X characters(again I think 280), images: full content will post on that site + up to 4 images natively.
@jsonbecker My comment about not knowing what happened on sites to which I crossposted pertains to reader numbers.
Also, @jsonbecker, well-constructed short URLs can very well matter. Short makes them unobtrusive, readable makes them memorable. I got this idea via the POSSE page and following some of the links further. For Instagram (which I hate, but there are friends there), a readable link that one can type into a browser is a necessity. And on FB, I have tried this, because it makes known where I first posted something without getting in people’s way. This could matter in other contexts where links without “https://” don’t actually become clickable as well. So, as I wrote, Ima play around with this some more.
Okay, the forum software resolved my first link to the actual Microblog post. Here’s a Facebook screenshot to work around that. Maybe the screenshot makes clearer what I was trying to do with the short link anyway. @jsonbecker
The idea here was to crosspost something personal to my friends on Facebook while also showing that there’s a place I do this when they don’t hear from me on Facebook. (Plus there’s the potential power of example and all that, an appeal I’ve noticed a few times on the IndieWeb site.)
Well there is no Facebook-API for positing, but let’s say that was Bluesky, which you mostly don’t want to post to. That sounds like a great use case for the way the feature works today: you hook up crossposting but have it off by default for that target and either turn it on for that service when making that specific post or heading to the post page and crossposting it manual with one click.
I’m pretty sure in most cases cross-posting to Mastodon will post full content for posts below 500 char. The 280 char limit applies to Bluesky.
And Tumblr has no length limits, so it picks up the entire Micro.blog post perfectly.
@mrstoneman I think some of what you want here is suitable to a business blogging platform, like Wordpress. Micro.blog doesn’t support those things.
Like you, I have a background in journalism and marketing. I use blogging and social media for work, and I brought much of that mindset to personal social media and blogging. I’ve been enjoying it more since I let go of the professional mindset and asked myself why I’m doing this? What do I enjoy and most value? What do my readers enjoy and most value? Tracking traffic and optimizing URLs isn’t fun for me or them.
Yeah, I left Wordpress last month, where I was since maybe 2007, because it’s become too clunky and needy. I wasn’t really looking for anything in this thread, though, just weighing in on my recent IndieWeb experiences because of the initial question/topic. I’m here to do what I can with whatever tools I can find and put to good use, but not really to be told what I can or should be doing with them.
On that note, while I’ve been doing more the POSSE approach than PESOS, today I thought of a use case where the reverse could potentially be useful. I own my content, no matter where it starts its life. It’s just a matter of what I want on my site, and maybe what I’m afraid of losing elsewhere.
It is possible to crosspost to Facebook without an API.
As far as the Bluesky use case goes, I haven’t found a way to have anything turned off by default unless it is always off. At least, now that I think about it, that’s true in one case. Now I want to check for the way I believe you’re thinking of. That could get useful given developments mentioned on another thread.
You can connect it, then deselect it in the web interface. That will turn it off by default. You can then selectively go to your posts page and click “cross post…” to send it to Bluesky selectively.
