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 have Personals or Blogs.
  • 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?

  • maegul (he/they)OPEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Getting ActivityPub federation to work reliably between Lemmy instances alone is already proving challenging for developers.

    Lemmy has been federating with mastodon and other “different” platforms for a long time now. The only problem would be one of scaling, which applies to federating with anything of any substantial scale. That is, it’s a general problem and not one linked to, or especially linked to incorporating “microblogging”.

    The “micro” lie in micro-blogging, as you quickly conceded, is long gone.

    Yes, the fediverse is quickly moving on from micro-blogging. It’s just a name now for person-person feed generation or subscription. It’s all “posts” in the end and always has been, and on the fediverse, these posts can be more or less arbitrarily long.

    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.

    I’m not the biggest fan of “microblogging”, but I think you’re talking about Twitter/X not mastodon and the wider fediverse, though the essence of your critique isn’t lost on me and not entirely inapplicable. Most on mastodon only follow a few people and huge mega popular influencer accounts tend to not be so much of a thing.

    In the end, the thing that won me over to the idea is that establishing personal connections and relationships on social media is actually viable and a good thing. I’ve done this over on mastodon. I don’t always agree with them or anything, but I understand who some of these people are and what they’re on about and that makes communication with them interesting and fruitful. A community/group based platform does not facilitate this nearly as much.

    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.

    I hear you on this (and said more or less the same in the top post). But, again, I don’t think it’s a fatal issue.

    One, there’s the point above about forming personal connections, which is facilitated more by following a particular person and learning who/what they are.

    Two, a lemmy user’s posts need not live exclusively in their own “personal community” outside of any of the “topic focused” communities. The chief UX may very well be that all Lemmy posts are to be in a particular community, and anyone following a lemmy user just happens to get a feed of posts based not on communities but people (which may or may not be a separate feed). Of course a lemmy user following users on pure microblogging platforms will see mostly posts that aren’t posted to any community. But that at least creates the opportunity for those microblog posts to be cross-posted to communities of relevance for lemmy-based discussion.

    I’ve this seen happen already and is a decent source of dicussion as many people are on microblogging platforms so that they can represent their own personal work and so post interesting and insightful stuff about what they’ve done themselves.

    Three, not everything belongs in a topic focused community. Take the sort of thing you mentioned, a community like !casualconversation@lemmy.world. This is basically what “microblogging” is for, and there’s clearly some demand for that kind of interaction, not to mention repeated specific requests by users here on how to interact with mastodon users/content. So I’m not sure it makes sense to ignore this desire or meet it with a kind of patchwork/hack when we can give users options. For example, we could have loung/casual communities as well as microblogs.

    Afterthought

    I, in the end, would like to see the experiment be run. One lesson I think the fediverse is teaching social media users is that we have been shaped by the experience of being stuck on the big social platforms more than we realise and we don’t necessarily have good and accurate ideas about what we want and need and what we can get out of the internet and its platforms. The fediverse is probably first and foremost an experiment, and embracing that rather than settling on either old habits or old opinions will be a necessary approach for the fediverse’s future health.