New: Last Week in #Fediverse - ep 66
This week's news:
- The EU Voice pilot that hosted Mastodon and Peertube instance for the EU over the last 2 years will come to an end. The @EU_Commission account will continue to be active and grow their Mastodon presence.
- Ghost announces a major push for fediverse support, adding #Activitypub to their posts and building an ActivityPub powered news reader app.
- Mastodon starts a US-based nonprofit.
Read at: https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-66/
I'd like to disagree with one thing you said:
"The fediverse does not have a great place to read native long-form writing yet, and Mastodon stands out in offering only fairly basic support for it, compared to other platforms."
How good does it need to be before it is a "great place"? The link you included shows that Akkoma is doing an excellent job of reproducing the full WordPress-like experience. The Friendica-Hubzilla-Streams family tree of Fediverse servers also displays WordPress blogs, even complicated things like tables.
What is still missing, in your opinion, that would make any of these options a "great place"?
@billstatler Thank you!
I think there is a difference between platforms rendering longform text in a good way (such as akkoma/hubzilla-lineage) and having a platform with the primary purpose of being used read long-form writing.
Sure, visually it looks good on Akkoma, but reading long-form often asks for a different mindset that I find quite incompatible with the scroll-focused nature of short-form/microblogging
In my mind there are no incompatibilities or cognitive hurdles, because long posts, like long conversations - are things you glance at the teaser part to gauge your interest in, and then manually open if you wish to look at in depth. Many we don't - and they scroll by as if they were a microblog post/conversation. If you find it interesting, it's a click to open the post/conversation inline and you scroll through the long post/conversation, and when you reach the end you just resume your doom-scrolling feed. It's different than the kamakaze attack of single completely unrelated posts, but it works. We also offer single post unthreaded viewing if you prefer the microblog style over the conversational/blog style. And you can open any of these in a separate dedicated page if you want to disassociate them from the feed and spend more quality focus time on them.
I suppose it really is a different mindset, but we've spent a lot of effort trying to find a workable middle ground.
It seems desirable to counter-support more scrolling though. Scrolling doesn't seem to be just a "get-this-out-of-my-way" type of online behaviour. It is very often a self-sufficient behaviour, even an addiction, only there to pass time while feeling like doing sthg. at all. All those characters, who never learned to read online.I've no other method myself, than taking such people off the online world to celebrate actual concentration on literally anything. Doesn't it make sense to shape online experiences more into a direction of dedication to more complex content, to foster depth and dimension so to say?
I don't think there is any model yet, that would further support this.
How would that work in your eyes? Playing guitar together?
Shrug. If you've got a better way, tell me, show me.
@fediversereport @EU_Commission This isn't to self-advertise here, but I’m not selling anything besides a thought on my podcast.
Ps I don't make any money on this.