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Colin Devroe has a new interview with me about all things Micro.blog. Interesting to compare what has changed and stayed the same since the last time I talked to Colin a few years ago.

Manton Reece

28 Mar 2024 at 15:21

interesting

 I’m always looking for people who use interesting ways to say things or who use interesting ways to live life. In some weird way that keeps me alive.

At my core I am interested in people and their stories, even though I know people’s stories can be completely made up.

Recently I got interested in Fujii Kaze. I would use the word ‘interesting’ to describe him. When I dig deeper I think I’m attracted to him because he is okay with dancing badly on stage and posting ugly photos of himself on social media even though he is a great dancer and a good-looking guy. And also because he sings while playing the piano on the floor and eats a lot of vegetables and writes his own songs and once he said (and I paraphrase badly) “I am not perfect of course but I want you to know that there is a perfect being inside of you”. His charisma comes from his lack of aversion to showing his true self. He is comfortable with being ugly and dorky and weird and talented and spiritual. His comfort with himself translates into a sense of comfort that wraps the people who watch him in a warm cosy hug. It’s very healing.

*

I keep wanting to go watch “Perfect Days” in the cinema but I keep putting it off. Procrastination is a bitch.

*

I like the feeling of having a new thought. It’s not something that happens very often. Sometimes the same loops just repeat themselves until I get bored. But a new thought! It’s like a mini-firework going off in my head. The trouble is connecting that new thought to new actions. Maybe I’m a pragmatic person after all. When my thoughts are looping I know I’m only running on the spot, procrastinating or being stuck in my patterns. But when a new thought comes, it means there’s some breakage in the loop. This ability to consciously break the loop is the result of more awareness, I think. I hope. And now, to allow that new thought to take root and to become behaviour. That’s a different challenge.

*

These days I’m trying to write whenever I have the time. Instead of writing only when I make myself sit down to write and doing it for an hour, and thinking that is the right way to do it, I’m trying to write whenever and wherever. It’s actually not too different from what I’ve always been doing. The difference is now I am also allowing myself to see that these little notes I’m writing are not just discardable notes but smaller parts of a bigger piece of work.

*

Someone else’s thought that became mine: “It’s not about what we do but how we do things.”

rebeccatoh.co

28 Mar 2024 at 14:56
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An algorithm for content moderation for reducing the human contact trolls have. If you notice an account that gets blocked by a lot of people who don't follow them after they reply to one of their posts, then slow them down or throw out their replies. Eventually if it keeps up, you pretty much know it's software, and you can delete the account. I guess. Just thinking out loud. ;-)
Scripting News

28 Mar 2024 at 14:51

Algorithm

An algorithm for content moderation for reducing the human contact trolls have.

If you notice an account that gets blocked by a lot of people who don't follow them after they reply to one of their posts, then slow them down or throw out their replies.

Eventually if it keeps up, you pretty much know it's software, and you can delete the account.

I guess. Just thinking out loud. ;-)

Scripting News

28 Mar 2024 at 14:51

An interview with Manton Reece for 2024

 

I interviewed Manton Reece about his journey with Micro.blog in 2018 and again in 2019. They’ve been fun to look back on as the service matures, grows, and changes. I’m a big fan of Micro.blog and the community there (follow me there, if you’d like) and Manton was very gracious to agree to be interviewed once again.

If you’re unfamiliar with Micro.blog their homepage and Welcome areas are a good place to start.

Two quick notes before we jump into the interview:

  • All links in Manton’s answers were chosen by me. It is my hope that the links provide some context and make it easy for people to learn more on their own.
  • Both Manton and I keep up with what each social networking platform offers, the decisions they make, the mistakes they’ve made, and their policies. Both of us work in the social networking / blogging market as our day jobs. So some of our discussion is fairly “inside baseball”. If you’d like context on anything discussed, feel free to reach out to me or him.

Thank you for doing this interview again. Hard to believe how much time has passed since our previous interviews.

How is Micro.blog going?

It’s going well! We’ve seen a lot of steady growth since you and I talked last. We’ve rolled out new features and apps. I’m really happy with where the platform is right now, but of course there’s always more to improve.

I’m glad to hear it is going well. In our 2019 interview I asked you about how you prioritize your time working on so many projects with such a small team. You have multiple apps, the website, support, servers to administer, etc. And it has only grown since then. Back then you said “I think good things can come from trying to do a little too much, but it’s not usually sustainable. Eventually it catches up with you and you have to simplify and wrap up or delegate some tasks.” How are you doing on that?

It hasn’t caught up with me quite yet, and I think over the last couple of years I’ve done a better job of focusing on the most important parts of Micro.blog — the core platform that affects everything from the web interface, to blog publishing, to federation with other services. It feels less stressful as we mature as a company. And now Vincent Ritter is helping with both server code and the native apps, including the bulk of our new app Strata for notes. That is a huge difference, not needing to do everything myself.

I’m glad that the number of projects you have going at once hasn’t overwhelmed you. I have noticed though, from time-to-time, Micro.blog may have some downtime. Or, syndication to other services isn’t so reliable. Of course, this type of issue plagues any growing platform. But I’m wondering, if you didn’t have so many codebases to manage, would the core product benefit from your entire focus? Or, have these issues been mostly one-off issues?

After some downtime last year, I took a fresh look at our servers and what upgrades we could do. Luckily the last few months have been really solid. There were some growing pains for us when Mastodon got popular too, because extra traffic from all the new users on the fediverse might reveal performance problems that were never a problem before. Of course, we should’ve caught that in testing, but some things are difficult to plan for until you see how it works in the real world. I expect this is partly why Meta is adding ActivityPub support in phases to Threads.

For distractions on the core Micro.blog features, the problem is everyone has a different view of what is core. Micro.blog has a lot of features. If we paired that down to the absolute minimum and only focused on that, those features could be as reliable and fast as possible. But then the product might not be as valuable or interesting, and we’d have fewer customers, and maybe not even enough customers to have a business that could sustain itself. There is always the balance of fixing bugs and taking care of the basics while also expanding what it can do.

Have there been any interesting or unexpected uses of Micro.blog that have surprised you?

Not exactly surprising, but it has been interesting to see how people use the various pieces that we’ve built, often beyond how I use the features myself. For example, using email newsletters to connect with their readers and wanting more control over how that works. Or using our external feeds support to plug in services like Letterboxd so their movie reviews show up on their own blog. Or taking the Hugo themes and customizing a bunch of the built-in assumptions in Micro.blog’s templates.

The citizenry of the social web are a passionate bunch. I consider myself among them! All social networks experience some turmoil based on the decisions of those leading them. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, WordPress, Mastodon have all had their share. Is this something you worry about with Micro.blog? Do you have a decision making process that can help you to avoid a mutiny or revolt?

We don’t have a formal process for handling a potential mutiny, but it is something I think about whenever there is a heated discussion about the direction of Micro.blog. Because we are small, a few loud voices that get traction could have a real impact on our business. Thankfully that is very rare. I remind myself not to take it personally because Micro.blog has always attracted people who have very high expectations. They want something different, more open, more civil, just better, otherwise they’d stay on Twitter or Reddit. If we fall short, I want to know about it, and most people are patient if we mess something up, as long as it’s fixed quickly.

I also often see the other side of this as we welcome new customers who have been frustrated elsewhere. Recent examples just in the last couple of months include Substack and even Automattic, because of controversy with selling user data to AI companies. When a company burns goodwill, it is really hard to get it back.

How do you see the future of AI and Micro.blog playing out over the next few years? Both in terms of how it might be implemented into features and whether or not the data on the platform should be included in these datasets.

I’m fascinated by AI. We’ve added two AI features to our Micro.blog Premium subscription plan: podcast transcription and summarizing web pages that you’ve bookmarked. I love the summarization feature, because I’m bookmarking pages often but maybe don’t read them right away. Now I can tell at a glance what the basic idea of the article was, then read it later. Micro.blog is about personal blogs and human-generated content, though. We’re never going to have AI features that write blog posts for you.

For how content is available to companies like OpenAI and others crawling the web, we will never sell user data. When we were working on our terms of service, I made sure that we spelled out that all content is owned by users, not us. We have no rights to that content beyond being able to display it in Micro.blog. I believe the web should be open by default and personally for my own blog, I’m fine if AI bots crawl it, but there should be easy ways to opt-out. There are a couple of Micro.blog plug-ins to exclude OpenAI, so it’s essentially just a couple clicks to set that up.

Micro.blog has intentionally omitted some social features that are commonplace on other platforms; such as likes and boosts. I know for me personally, I occasionally wish I could easily boost a post to help someone get a bit more exposure. Have you ever regretted omitting those features? Is there any consideration to adding them someday?

I try to reevaluate these decisions occasionally, but no regrets. For everyone who wishes Micro.blog worked a little more like Twitter or Mastodon, I think there are other users who would be disappointed if we changed it. The goal was to minimize a lot of the noise, judgement, and outrage in other platforms that are partially given fuel by public likes and boosts, especially when combined with algorithmic timelines and trends. Micro.blog can also work as a companion to other networks, so if someone wants those features they can can use Mastodon or Threads for the social aspect, and use Micro.blog more for traditional blogging, or for handling cross-posting.

Speaking of cross posting, Micro.blog supports a nice range of services and protocols. Do you have a favorite? Or a protocol that you think may stand the test of time and be here 40 years from now?

40 years is a long time! The oldest formats that Micro.blog supports are probably RSS and the MetaWeblog API, and those are “only” a little over 20 years old. For cross-posting, a lot of it has to use proprietary APIs that I do not expect to be around forever. Posting to services like Tumblr, Medium, or LinkedIn is not based on standards. I like the IndieWeb’s Micropub and Webmention APIs. I also expect ActivityPub to be with us for a long time. Those are all W3C Recommendations.

HTTP will turn 40 in just 5 short years. We are old men Manton! 😂 Thank you for taking the time for this interview. I really enjoy catching up. I think Micro.blog is a bright spot of the open web. Is there anything you would like people that are new to Micro.blog to check out or anything new for existing members to look forward to?

Thanks! Great talking to you again. For anyone new to Micro.blog, the platform isn’t just one thing: it’s a social network with fediverse compatibility so people on Mastodon can follow and reply to your posts, but it’s also a full blogging platform, similar to what you might have with WordPress. We are always making it better… I’m currently working on improvements to our web post editor and support for Threads. It’s going to be an exciting year for the open web.


My thanks to Manton for taking the time to do this interview. I hope we do it again in a year or so.

Colin Devroe

28 Mar 2024 at 14:46

Floating Worlds

 

Find the Others

Last month I wrote about game designer Paul Cezge’s new newsletter and titled the post ‘Real Things For Real People‘.

My own efforts making a zine over the last two years – creating, printing, and mailing physical items – stem from a belief in the importance of tangible connections with people.

The act of sending and receiving real things – be it a zine, a newsletter, or even a one-dollar PDF to real people is an important antidote to the impersonal nature of the kinds of digital exchanges we currently find ourselves with. 

Maybe it’s a legacy of having grown up in a DIY punk scene or because I’ve been making zines since I was 10, but making and creating real things and putting them into real peoples hands is something that I’m increasingly feeling more and more passionate about as we head into the mid 2020’s.

A few people have asked me how I square his with my consulting job being almost entirely about techno-social systems, virtual worlds and narrative metaphors. But I honestly don’t see any disconnect at all … We live inside of techno-social systems.

The Internet (and the virtual worlds that precede it) is for meeting people. It’s always been about discovering a shared place online and subsequently sharing your ideas, time, and attention with people who have the same interests as you. The Internet is about meeting people and facilitating/coordinating action in real life. I’m not just talking about politics here, I’m talking about everything.

The memories of my 20’s are punctuated by secret warehouse noise raves, guerrilla gardening mobilisations, and beach parties. Remember how weird and wild flashmobs were in the mid 00’s I went to a few of them too? All of this stuff was organised online. The most important socialweb era ‘social technologies’ are in my opinion, things like meetup.com and Facebook events – before they got weird, shit and spammy.

Party’s aside, these technologies facilitated other things in my life too: The Murray Bookchin reading group I used to attend in a squat, RPG design meetings in cold and draughty social club spaces, and things like WordPress or camera nerd meet ups.

My point being, that because of the way that the Internet has impacted my life, I have an unshakable understanding that it’s a coordinating mechanism for finding others. Building community, and then meeting real people and doing real things in real life.

Check out this 1995 video of Bill Gates talking to Letterman about the Internet and ‘how you can use it to find people with the same interests as you‘:

I’ve queued it up the important bit 4m21s

Almost all of Letterman’s ‘funny man’ objections through out the interview are him pointing to existing cultural coordination technologies that dominated culture back in 1995 – the example in the clip I queued up – Magazines. Unfortunately for us 30 years later, magazines are all gone. And trying to find the others on social media in a way that isn’t algorithmically mediated by ad-tech is almost impossible.

Floating Croissant

In the 2020’s ‘The Others’ are mostly found the Dark Forest. I’m not sure how you, but I’m in lots of little Telegram and Signal groups chats, plus Discords both big + small. And one of these group chats is called ‘London AW Floating Croissant Chaos Agents’.

During DevConnect last year an existing Telegram group chat was used to pile London based people into as we met each other around the convention. It’s a group of people all interested in building Autonomous Worlds on the blockchain.

The group chat is a lively one. Full of artists, programmers, theorists and games developers engaged rolling discussion about books and articles on virtual worlds, metaverse legislation and recommendations for locations of finest baked goods from across London. The group chat’s name still retains an element of its original function – to coordinate a breakfast meeting on a narrowboat on the Regent’s Canal.

Unlike other groups I’m in however, this one has enough escape velocity to manifest things in real life. There’s been several whole chat group meet ups since November 2023 and some smaller impromptu pub meetings too.

There’s a lot of energy in the chat as it’s made up of a collective of people who have all had several ‘lives’. As a result we all have a lot of motivation and skills to make things happen. And earlier this month two things happened…

Open Croissant + Floating Worlds

First, a few people in the chat who are founders at two companies building in the scene decided to run a fringe event on Autonomous Worlds to coincide with ETHGlobal London 2024. They named the event ‘Open Croissant‘.

Upon hearing the news, I and a few others decided it would be cool if the group produced a semi-regular journal/zine on the subject of worlds. Just 10 days later, all 56 pages of Floating Worlds went to print. Then we waited 7 working days for delivery, and then further 2 for the conference.

The zine included essays from Tonk, J David Osborne, AWTNMY, Me, A manifesto from the AUTONOMOUS CULTURE RESEARCH BUREAU, OPNPC, and Kitty Mayo. And includes a games corner with a word search and a pastry related solo RPG.

I went though a weekend crash course in print design and layout, and Goblin Oats from tonk.gg did all the art.

As an aside, its the first time I’ve used print.work – the company single handedly keep the zine economy alive in the UK – and my experience was great. They held my hand though my PDF export as print PDFs are more complicated than literally rocket science! No issues (apart from the ones on my end!).

Playmint got some mech made up, a dice and a nice tote bag, and the conference where we handed them out went really well!

It was well attended, with lots of familiar faces and some Twitter handles materialised into meat space as actual people. Tonk.gg gave a talk and several of the Playmint team also spoke. The zine came out of Tonk’s marketing budget, but in future Floating Worlds is going to be funded by dues at our meet ups to ensure that we can print/make another issue later in the year.

It was quite amazing that we managed to go from *we should make a journal* to *here’s the journal* in side of 10 days. Folks in the chat are the sort of people who had essays ready to go.

I’m super proud of our little London based worlds chat group. I learnt a lot (and a hard lesson) about doing more ambitious print things for my own zine.

This zine isn’t for sale or anything, they are all gone. A limited run for a single event/conference.

REINER 6 Digit self incrementing mechanical number stamp

Speaking of zines. Because this was a blockchain related event, and we all know that crypto people sure LOVE a non-fungible collectable. We thought that Floating Worlds should probably be a numbered edition.

Let us all Un-fung the fungible with numbers.

So went and bought myself aREINER 6 Digit self incrementing mechanical number stamp.

There’s a whole bunch devices on Amazon and various stationary sites online, but in the end I shelled out for a German Made hand stamp as the significantly cheaper Chinese made devices have 1 star reviews on Amazon that include words like ‘Abomination’.

Let me tell you. This thing is the pure embodiment of a mechanical doohickey.

A mechanical contrivance even.

Check out the video! It makes such a satisfying noise when ca-chunking the stamp.

When I come to making my own 50-60 page edition of Start Select Reset (SOON) I’ll be using this stamp to number the copies too. As of right now my amortised cost of the mechanical hand stamp is 50p per use. But that will come down further as I use it for the rest of my life making my own zines lol.

Anyways. If you have a chat group with high escape velocity. Make a zine or do something IRL.

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The post Floating Worlds appeared first on thejaymo.

thejaymo

28 Mar 2024 at 12:41
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These 50 companies have donated over $23 million to election deniers since January 6, 2021.

Dave's famous linkblog

28 Mar 2024 at 12:16
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