I spent some time trying to sort out self hosted/published social media posts form wordpress using the Jetpack plugin and wrote up my notes here:
After trying out Jetpack’s Social notes feature I think there’s some real potential here but I ran into a few issues and unexpected behaviours that I wanted to note down:
It’s funny how the internet works. I’ve already received two messages from strangers who were looking at trying the same functionality out. One of them included steps to fix one of the issues I list in the post!
Ghibli images aren’t really about copyright or ethics,
they’re about unexamined questions of power. Who gets to make
images? What gives them meaning? And what is their value when
machines can produce them at scale?
Began a big edit on the long thing i’ve been writing that I wanted done by end of January
Got some feedback from IRL people on the other long thing i’ve been writing throughout 2024/25
The jump in raw intelligence provided by Gemini 2.5 has resulted in significant progress being made on a slow burn project. As great deal of javascript has been written (generated)
It was large-scale, interactive live theater which viewers could follow from the perspective of whichever participating creator they chose by simply tuning into their Twitch or YouTube channel, whose individual communities, in turn, have their own objectives and in-jokes. This is the appeal of Dream SMP: As characters bond and betray, kingdoms rise and fall, and memes recount it all, viewers don’t just watch; they participate.
Mattson’s inventions were similar to existing packaged foods, like Betty Crocker cake mixes and Tyson Grilled & Ready chicken strips. Were products like this enough, I wondered, to break through Ozempic’s defenses and excite people whose relationship to food has been turned on its head?
The business lobby has, for all of these years, operated on a false assumption. They believed that they could slowly strip away the foundations of the House of Democracy for a quick buck, without the house ever falling down. Wrong.
For now, though, I think we all need to take whatever timelines we have and halve them. For better or for worse, cheap automated general intelligence is coming faster every single day.
Just because I have been, for the past two years, breathlessly hopeful for a cultural explosion that has not been seen since the ‘60s, does not mean I have to overcompensate by pretending there has been no greatness this year. But signs of hope are not reasons to rest.
In my ongoing effort to finish reading all the books i’ve got on the go, i closed the cover on the Warhammer 40k anthology Sabbat War by Dan Abnett et al. Just one Gaunt’s ghosts book to go 🙁
I made a great deal of headway on Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World by Kelly Clancy, and Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh finally ‘clicked’ and I’m now reading along at quite a fine clip.
I just discovered this 2024 album and I’ve fallen in love with it. This album is a jazz ambient oddesy. An exxploration on loops and simple melodic gestures. Very playful.
Its a lovely album perfect for this spring weather.
Remember Kids:
You could say that tidying orders the mind while cleaning purifies it.
Ghibli images aren’t really about copyright or ethics,
they’re about unexamined questions of power. Who gets to make
images? What gives them meaning? And what is their value when
machines can produce them at scale?
For our entire lives we have been living through a revolution, the opening era of the ‘Information Age’.
It can be hard to remember this, surrounded as we are by the flat texture of the future mundane: smartphones, AI-generated media, 3D printing, VR and ubiquitous connectivity.
When I was growing up in the 90s, it all felt new. The Information Age sat right at the surface. Dial-up tones, email, mobile phones, the World Wide Web. The future flickering into view over the millennium marker.
But it’s been since the 1970s, that we’ve shifted from an economy of tangible goods to one abstracted into information, and now we’re facing deeper consequences; cultural, social, and epistemic.
The Information Age doesn’t just change what we know. It changes how how we know, value, and construct shared meaning
At the heart of this shift is a migration of value—from the object to its context. Once, value resided in things: a crafted object, a physical book, a unique performance. But the digital revolution made information infinitely replicable and instantly distributable. Suddenly, the object matters less than its circulation.
Napster-era cracks reappear in AI debates. Revealing that Industrial-era symbolic systems, like copyright and IP, can’t cope with digital information’s physics. Perfect copies at zero marginal cost shattered older models of control. But instead of starting again, we patched things up and limped on.
Now generative AI arrives, not copying, but compressing. And from that compression emerges text, images, and video from vast, scraped datasets. What’s produced is not an imitation but a synthetic original.
What we’re experiencing isn’t just technological disruption.
It’s something older, deeper: Iconoclasm.
Literally meaning image struggle.
Ghibli images aren’t really about copyright or ethics, they’re about unexamined questions of power. Who gets to make images? What gives them meaning? And what is their value when machines can produce them at scale?
We are in the first Information Age Iconoclasm. A cultural reckoning over representation, authorship, and the role of images in society. A slow, ongoing struggle. Not unlike the Byzantine Iconoclasm of the 8th and 9th centuries, which lasted nearly a century.
That struggle wasn’t just about the presence or absence of the divine, but the metaphysics of image itself. A conflict over what images mean, who gets to create or destroy them, and what power they hold. Ours is similar, but it’s about indifference. The soullessness of the machine-made image.
Shannon’s Information Theory, which underpins all digital communication, is concerned only with transmission of information, not meaning. Protocols don’t care what bits mean. This neutrality creates an environment where all Art, Poetry, Film, Images, Text, become flattened into “content”—indistinguishable in form, even if wildly different in consequence.
Upon this vacuum of meaning, platforms were built. They shape attention through feeds, trends, metrics, and algorithms. In doing so, they become the dominant environments of context. And in this world, the frame is more powerful than the content itself.
But this isn’t the first time we’ve struggled with images.
Photography, film, and recorded music all arrived together at the end of the Industrial Age. Cultural engines of the 20th century. They changed how we saw, how we remembered, how we imagined.
But within decades, they were digitised. Analogue became fluid, copyable, endlessly editable. A symbolic layer of culture abstracted into bits.
And now we’re living through the next phase of that shift. As Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst say: “All media is training data.” Generative outputs aren’t just more media,they represent one of the first truly computer-native mediums. And in doing so, they reframe the entire structure of originality and authorship.
When photography emerged, questions of craft, intention, and subjectivity arose. Sound familiar? But concern didn’t last. People flocked to have their portraits taken, and once artists could afford to experiment with cameras, they did what artists always do: they expressed themselves.
They staged scenes, added effects, and subverted the supposed objectivity of the camera. Painters used photography in their workflows. The argument wasn’t won—it was metabolised. ‘Is photography art?’ became irrelevant, art simply moved through it.
The same will happen with AI. But the difference this time is scale and speed. Image generation doesn’t just alter how we make images, it alters what an image is, ontologically. Thus, iconoclasm.
AI raises the stakes of our image struggle. It compresses the whole of media culture into latent space and reconstitutes it on demand.
If your art already exists, in some embedded vector form, before you make it, what does originality even mean? What does it mean to create?
The Ghibli crisis is just the beginning. Focusing on the outputs alone misses the point.
So how do we respond?
We must recognise that revolution is not over. We are in the Information Age.
We must cultivate context literacy and we must maintain a distinction between the infrastructure and the experience, between machine and meaning.
We are living through a moment that future historians may describe as a cultural rupture. A context war. How this plays out will shape new definitions of truth, authorship, creativity, and trust, perhaps for centuries to come.
For those who read this blog via RSS or follow me on any of the socials apart from Twitter, you will have noticed that the other night I tried out the new Social Notes feature in the Jetpack plugin from Automattic.
After trying out Jetpack’s Social notes feature I think there’s some real potential here but I ran into a few issues and unexpected behaviours that I wanted to note down:
Unexpected Featured Image Behaviour
When you add a featured image to a social note, you do it inside the post body in a featured image block. This was unexpected?
In most cases in WordPress, featured images are set in the sidebar but in this case, it gets inserted directly into the body of the note?
This to me seems counter intuitive. If you’ve turned off linksharing in the sharing (see later note) in the settings, then the featured image won’t appear on social media in an embeded so it’s redundent. BIT you will see it on your blog.
Post Image Should Go in the Note, Not the Sidebar
Further to that, if you want to post an image that shows up on the social sites, you have to add the image as “attached media” in the sidebar????
That works fine for syndication. But if someone clicks through to the social post on my blog, the image isn’t there – as it’s not embedded as block.
Think about this use case:
I want to post a photo to BlueSky using Social Notes, I attach the media and write a caption in the body of the social note. I publish it.
The image and the caption appear on social media but the image doesn’t appear in the post on my site??
Example:
The post on Bluesky with image added as an attachement:
I would have expected an image block to go in the body of the post – if you want to share an image on social media.
And then you set the featured image should be set in the sidebar—like how the rest of Gutenberg works.
Unexpected Title Behaviour
Social notes don’t have titles in the traditional WordPress schema–which makes sense. This used to be a problem but in 2025 most RSS readers can cope with this state of affairs.
Thing is however, the Social Notes post type admin screen does assign titles to them (the first however many characters) of the first sentence of the note:
But when Social Notes appear elsewhere in the Jetpack / WordPress UI (like Stats), all the social notes are assigned titles format like #NuMb3rs (untitled).
I think it would be better if they used the first 10–15 characters of the post content instead, maybe with “(Social Note) appended. Just having a bunch of numbers and “untitled” in the stats view isn’t very helpful.
Fallback Social Note Titles in RSS
I used some code I found on Reddit to put the social notes into my sites main RSS feed. But I didn’t like how they were styled of coming though in the RSS readers so I got Gemini 2.5 to write me this code snippet that injects “Microblog $date $time’ into the feed:
<?php
/**
* Filter the post title in RSS feeds to provide a fallback for 'jetpack-social-note' CPTs.
*
* This generates a title like "Microblog [Date] [Time]" if the original title is empty for this CPT.
* This function should be used IN ADDITION TO the function that adds the CPT to the feed query.
*
* @param string $title The current post title passed by the filter.
* @return string The potentially modified post title for the feed.
*/
function thejaymo_filter_social_note_rss_title( $title ) {
// Ensure we are processing an item within the main loop of a feed request.
if ( ! is_feed() || ! in_the_loop() ) {
return $title; // Return original title if not in the feed loop
}
// Get the global $post object to access post data like type and date.
global $post;
// Check if the current post object exists, is the correct CPT, AND its title is currently empty.
if ( isset( $post ) && $post->post_type === 'jetpack-social-note' && trim( $title ) === '' ) {
// Get the formatted date (e.g., "29 Mar 2025"). Adjust 'd M Y' if you prefer a different format.
// See PHP date format documentation: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php
$post_date = get_the_date( 'd M Y', $post );
// Get the formatted time (e.g., "03:32"). H = 24-hour format, i = minutes with leading zero.
$post_time = get_the_time( 'H:i', $post );
// Construct the new title string.
$new_title = sprintf( 'Microblog %s %s', $post_date, $post_time );
// Return the newly constructed title.
return $new_title;
}
// If the conditions aren't met (not the right CPT, or title wasn't empty), return the original title.
return $title;
}
// Add the filter to modify the title specifically for RSS feeds.
add_filter( 'the_title_rss', 'thejaymo_filter_social_note_rss_title' );
I sort of think the ability to give it a default post title appearance should be in the settings.
As you can see in the screenshot further down, posts without titles when combined with yoasts plugin means social notes appear as -thejaymo -thejaymo in the embeds on the socials.
I Was Expecting Short Links to Use My Own Domain?
You can choose to include/attach links to your social note back to your blog when it gets posted on the socials. I tried using both the short URL and the indieweb Permashortcitation settings.
The short URL ended up being a wp.me link, which I wasn’t expecting? and it also appended the UTM source settings that jetpack also applies *after* the short link? which short of defeats the propose of using a URL shorter?
The Permashortcitation link was broken and didn’t link back to my blog at all.
Everything went through wp.me, and that wasn’t clearly indicated in the settings.
The behaviour I was expecting was for Jetpack to generate a shortlink using my own domain—something like thejaymo.net/shortlink—but it didn’t. I don’t know why I thought the Jetpack would do custom link shortening on my blog. But I did!
Author Details Are Weird in the RSS Feed
For various reasons of moving hosts several times over the last 15 years. I have two logins for my blog: a WordPress login and an admin login. I post everything from my admin account, but Jetpack uses my WordPress login for Social Notes, and there’s no way to change the author.
So in the RSS feed it shows my username – rather than my nickname. I’d prefer it to show my name/nick name on the blog, not the login username.
Need Option to Set a Default Template for Social Notes
Social Notes don’t really work with my blogs theme. They have no titles, and also may or may not have featured images.
It would be useful to set a default layout template just for Social Notes, so they appear differently on my blog from normal single blog posts. Right now, I’m changing the template manually each time before/after publishing.
That’s one extra step to remember, and if this is meant to replace posting on social media, that extra friction isn’t helpful.
UPDATE: 31st Mar 25 Received an email to the blog contact form, from a kind internet stranger who is also experimenting with jetpack social notes with this great tip!
“If you create a template in your theme with the file name single-jetpack-social-note.html (for block themes), then the theme will use that for all your social notes.”
I Should Be Able to Rename the SN URL?
By default, the URL for Social Notes is thejaymo.net/sn/postID. I really don’t like the /sn/ part—SN doesn’t mean anything to anyone!!
The WordPress logic is usually to use full category names in the URL. I’d like to be able to change this to actually something like /Microblog.
For example, Molly White uses /micro/.
At the very least, the URL should use /social-notes/, not /sn/ !!!
This is quite the laundry list of things I think are weird about Jetpack’s Social Notes feature as they are in March 2025. I’m sort of inclined to wait and see if any of these things change.
The main deal breaker for me right now is the weird image behaviour and the post template styling. BUT I think its a great start! Avital step toward getting me to the point where I never have to log into social media ever again.
I think I might keep using them though? Or I might just start using this notes category more often?
Ok that worked on some sites and not others lets try with a full permalink URL and see how that looks? This whole rigamarole might be better if I just set up a new blog category called ‘notes’. and posted short form blog posts there and used the custom message field in normal jetpack social. They are a great idea, but right now I don’t think jetpacks social notes are for me.
this post has both a featured image and an attached image
This is my second attempt at posting a social note on my blog and I hope that these notes will post out to all my social media accounts. the first one worked fine but it did not update my RSS feed or put a link back to this post in the post on the social sites so i’m trying again. It also did not include my featured image. So trying that again too
the image i’m trying to send is a gif promoting the next issue of my zine.
