TL;DR: We should bring blogs (self-publishing) back instead of putting all our knowledge into other people’s websites.
For years, people have posted their anecdotal or technical useful information on reddit because it was the most popular centralised but community-based website. So much that, this created the “<search query> + reddit” phenomenon.
We shouldn’t have put all of our eggs in one basket: with the slow and painful downfall of the centralised network, we suddenly realised that most of our cumulative knowledge has been hosted on someone else’s website of which owners don’t give a damn about its users.
reddit is a link aggregator, it was meant to be used to discover other websites but it time, it turned into the website. This was a massive problem. Now that we’ve got the threadiverse, it makes me worry that we’ll repeat the same mistake all over again.
Normally, I would’ve posted this on my blog and link it here but for years we’ve gotten accustomed to not “self-promote”. This behaviour caused all traffic and engagement to stay in one place. There was nothing wrong with self-publishing; we left, spammers stayed.
Yes, there will always be that person with a bloated Wordpress blog with articles that sound like it was written by AI but, honestly, it’s easy to block a domain, we’ve got the tools. We can fight off the spam and find gems on the internet.
The threadiverse is a beautiful thing, but accessing information shouldn’t depend on it. Thanks for reading my blog post.
great take. I wanna go back to the days of stumbleupon, and getting redirected to all sorts of separate and interesting sites. reddit made the internet feel smaller imo
I definitely agree with this. I’ve often thought recently about how different the internet feels compared to even just a few years ago. “reddit made the internet feel smaller” is spot on for describing that feeling.
I really miss Stumbleupon. I found a bunch of really interesting niche websites that way.
Wouldn’t this just encourage SEO clickbaits more though? Also, a lot of these blogs can die over time, so it’s also not the most reliable (like the owner can die or the domain providing service has expired or some shit). Also, how can this solve the problem of confabulated misconceptions (let’s say that there are blogs that are feeding misinformation)? Without a moderating system, a comment section that can exist to engage and debunks those statements, and the upvote/downvote system… I think that it’s hard to tell reliability of the information. Feel free to debunk my doubts though.
I agree with you. I think it wasn’t clear in my original post, so let me clarify. The threadiverse is awesome, comment sections are important for us to parse, debunk, or amplify information. What I’d like to see more of is that links to informative blogs that people control, instead of posts that are hosted only on link aggregators. SEO and longevity of blogs is a whole another 'net culture issue; people must keep linkrot in mind while producing content and take precautions for their longevity (there are lots of tools for that but I won’t get into detail).
I don’t think the upvote/downvote system has merit in accuracy of information. It’s just what is popular with the hive-mind. My time with Reddit has shown me people barely click through links, let alone able to discern what is factually correct. I’ve seen Redditors upvote things that are in my domain of expertise that were just flat out wrong. Also, Reddit is federated by moderators of individual subs, so it’s not that different than what we have here.
But site reliability is certainly something Reddit has over the Fediverse. It may not be as resilient, but just like all major platforms, having a single master of information like Reddit invites enshitification.
If everyone links to their blog instead of writing a text post I think there will be issues with self-promotion and clickbait like you said. Also people might be running ads/etc. on their own blogs which adds a monetization side to it all (i.e. I want to attract people in the magazine to click my link and see my blog so I make more money).
On Reddit for instance if someone discusses an interesting concept or reviews a product in a self post the sub appreciates it a lot. In contrast if someone posts a link to their blog with the same content it’s generally less well received.
You’ve just encouraged me to post some of my old(ish) blog posts here. Thanks man. That “no self promotion” thinking really was toxic for a site meant to aggregate links. But having information in a single source is still super helpful, especially on a system that ranks content so that the creme can rise to the top. But nothing says we can’t cross post with the full text here as well.
I would generally agree with you. Bring blogging back, baby! But the question of discovery is still open. I’m optimistic about the threadiverse over the long haul in this regard, but there’s a lot of work we’ll need to do to get there. Also blogging feels daunting to the less technically-inclined still. I’m not sure the traditional blog platforms out there (Wordpress.com, etc.) are quite up to the task…they typically end up catering to more of the power-user business site use cases.
We could also bring back the old Webring concept for discoverability. Might even be able to decentralize and federate that bit.
Yeah, if something like a combination of a webring/blogroll with actually good UX (I don’t like the “which random website will I get plopped down on next?” aspect) could emerge, that would be cool.
Wordpress is investing in activitypub and just released the latest plugins to publish to fediverse and the parent company owns tumblr which has said they’re joining the fediverse (who knows when)
Yes. This is why I blog still. Any niche setup instructions I need to recall later, I make sure to write it down. As I said in another comment on another post, it’s great if that helps someone else out, but it’s mainly for me.
I also tied my Wordpress blog in with ActivityPub recently (last 6 months) so people can subscribe to it automatically from Mastodon, or other fedi clients, if they wish.
Hey could you give some more details on how you intergrated ActivityPub? I make a lot of Wordpress sites but know very little about intergrating the fediverse.
There is an ActivityPub plugin in the plug-in store that does all the work for you. I had some trouble getting it setup and federating at first but I may have been tinkering too much; I think if you just install that and the recommended Webfinger plugin you will be golden - let me know when you do and I can help you test
Thanks!
I’ve been thinking about making my own neocities website to blog and share my creative works.
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i’ve heard that WordPress might be good for publishing your blog to fediverse with using ActivityPub plugin
You could do that or just write a blog post and then share it on KBin, Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.
There’s also Write Freely, which is a minimalist federated blogging platform.
Oh this is interesting. I may look into this.
Its most valuable feature is the discoverability of information. Federated information, so far, is too difficult to parse.
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It feels like part of the beauty of the Fediverse is you can have a blog focused instance, an instance that prioritizes safe spaces and tolerance, another one that prioritizes fact checking, a humor instance, a debates instance, a casuals instance, a highly technical instance, a maximum free speech possible instance, and so on. I’m still learning but very excited to see what the future holds for this type of infrastructure.
Can even have a blog that posts to the fediverse
Blogs and rss. Or make it easier to “federate” on the user level where each individual is an instance. But then, I like the idea of mesh nets, too.
This is so wonderfully written and I totally agree. What do you think we (the community and the devs) should do to prevent this from happening all over again?
Thank you! Here is what I think we should do.
- Developers: Should give us even more tools to filter out and promote domains.
- Admins: Should market their platform as “where we talk about original content” instead of “where original content origines from”.
- Moderators: Should encourage original content in form of blog posts.
- Users: Should get in the habit of writing their knowledge in posts that they own. Don’t have a blog? There is a federated website called Write.as, this can be utilised greatly.
