It’s come up in the github issues before, but I was wondering if anyone had any positive or negative thoughts about the general idea.
I say microblogging, but it would not need to be micro at all, as many/most fediverse platforms don’t bother with the (IMO silly) small character limit default in mastodon.
The feature is probably better described as a “personal feed”, where the primary agent is another user not a community.
I’ve thought about it and come to believe that I would rather like a platform that is lemmy + a microblogging interface/integration.
How it’s implement and how viably I don’t know. But in terms of design I have the following thoughts:
- It would feel natural to treat users much like communities (with one post author) and the “microblog feed” just like the current lemmy feed but of followed/subscribed users’ posts.
- In addition to
Subscribed, Local, All, you’d havePersonalsorBlogs. - Each user would then have their own “Personal Community”, which they could post to like any other. They’d also have moderation controls over it too, which might be a nice addition to the microblogging platform space.
- Unlike mastodon, replies/comments wouldn’t appear in the feed, as all replies would be available only once you view a post, which, I think, would be a wonderful way to organise microblogging content.
- A “boost/retweet” behaviour could be treated as a cross-post from one personal community to another, except you’d probably want to enable such a “cross-post” be applicable to a comment, which would be congruent with the more free-form nature of “microblogging”.
- You’d want to keep the sorting algorithms, which combined with being able to view only the top-level posts, would again I think be a nice way to handle a “microblogging” feed.
- Being able to create lists or multi-communities, as has been requested ordinary lemmy, would be very useful for microblogs.
- Following a microblogging account would obviously just create+subscribe to a “personal community” representing that account. Following a lemmy user account would involve subscribing to their personal community, which would exist by default.
- You’d probably want to make it as easy as possible in the UI to post links between the microblogging and community “interfaces”, so that they could cross-pollinate each other, which, in the case of lemmy users, would be quite nice as any link from one “side” to the other would drop right in a native interface where you can immediately comment/reply or vote etc.
Potential issues I can see:
- Implementation is likely more difficult than I realise
- DB sizes could potentially blow up with a whole bunch of microblog content from mastodon?
- Posting to and engaging with the microblog side might distract many users away from engaging in communities. I suspect that this is a real but minor concern, especially if some improvements come to the communites side of lemmy (eg, multi-communities, the “best” algorithm, making it easier to search through subscribed communities).
- Some thought would probably have to be given to how to deal with mastodon privacy measures like the no-index option and limits on following etc.
Beyond all of that, my impression of such a platform, should it ever come to be, is that it would be awesome, not just because of the fusion of two formats, but because presenting “microblogs” within the lemmy structure and with lemmy features would bring a number of improvements over something like mastodon: longer posts, markdown, post/comment organisation, feed sorting, search, and direct/native interaction between communities and microblogs. I can see it becoming natural to treat your lemmy(+mblog) account as a quick blogging platform (ie, writing longer posts because you can on lemmy), and cross-posting to the appropriate communities while enjoying that your direct followers will also get the post in their feed. Though this does raise an interesting question about whether following a lemmy user, which would entail getting all of their posts to everything, should also be enabled as a separate option from just following their “personal community”?
Thoughts?
From a technical point of view, I’d rather Lemmy didn’t federate except with itself, and maybe possibly also with similar networks, but only as long as that doesn’t hold Lemmy back from doing its own thing.
Getting ActivityPub federation to work reliably between Lemmy instances alone is already proving challenging for developers.
From a personal point of view, I have zero interest in what I consider a shit paradigm of social communication. The “micro” lie in micro-blogging, as you quickly conceded, is long gone. The interface is horrible for effective exchange of well-thought ideas. The social networks formed are hypernormalized echo chambers of unhinged ranting faux intellectuals and champagne activists, usually led by a cult of personality or two who are tasked with making sure the one-upping posturing game continues forever.
When you are about to "micro"blog, presumably you will be writing something coherent enough that it relates to a certain subject of interest to a section of the public. It is also presumably meant to be viewable by the public since you’re not sharing it in a private group chat.
If that’s the case, there should be a community in Lemmy where those interested in that subject congregate. That community would either be low-traffic, then you can make your "micro"blog a post there breathing more live into it. Or it would be a high-traffic one, in that case a lounge/chat/MegaThread post should exist where you can chat with people interested in that subject, in an interface that actually facilitates good discussion.