- Nov 2022
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whatever.scalzi.com whatever.scalzi.com
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https://whatever.scalzi.com/2022/11/25/how-to-weave-the-artisan-web/
“But Scalzi,” I hear you say, “How do we bring back that artisan, hand-crafted Web?” Well, it’s simple, really, and if you’re a writer/artist/musician/other sort of creator, it’s actually kind of essential:
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- May 2022
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blog.bellebcooper.com blog.bellebcooper.com
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Manton says owning your domain so you can move your content without breaking URLs is owning your content, whereas I believe if your content still lives on someone else's server, and requires them to run the server and run their code so you can access your content, it's not really yours at all, as they could remove your access at any time.
This is a slippery slope problem, but people are certainly capable of taking positions along a broad spectrum here.
The one thing I might worry about--particularly given micro.blog's--size is the relative bus factor of one represented by Manton himself. If something were to happen to him, what recourse has he built into make sure that people could export their data easily and leave the service if the worst were to come to happen? Is that documented somewhere?
Aside from this the service has one of the most reasonable turn-key solutions for domain and data ownership I've seen out there without running all of your own infrastructure.
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First, Manton's business model is for users to not own their content. You might be able to own your domain name, but if you have a hosted Micro.blog blog, the content itself is hosted on Micro.blog servers, not yours. You can export your data, or use an RSS feed to auto-post it to somewhere you control directly, but if you're not hosting the content yourself, how does having a custom domain equal self-hosting your content and truly owning it? Compared to hosting your own blog and auto-posting it to Micro.blog, which won't cost you and won't make Micro.blog any revenue, posting for a hosted blog seems to decrease your ownership.
I'm not sure that this is the problem that micro.blog is trying to solve. It's trying to solve the problem of how to be online as simply and easily as possible without maintaining the overhead of hosting and managing your own website.
As long as one can easily export their data at will and redirect their domain to another host, one should be fine. In some sense micro.blog makes it easier than changing phone carriers, which in most cases will abandon one's text messages without jumping through lots of hoops. .
One step that micro.blog could set up is providing a download dump of all content every six months to a year so that people have it backed up in an accessible fashion. Presently, to my knowledge, one could request this at any time and move when they wished.
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- Oct 2020
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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I just wrote a long, considered, friendly, and I hope helpful comment here but -- sorry, I have to see the irony in this once again -- your system wouldn't let me say anything longer tahn 1,500 characters. If you want more intelligent conversations, you might want to expand past soundbite.
In 2008, even before Twitter had become a thing at 180 characters, here's a great reason that people should be posting their commentary on their own blogs.
This example from 2008 is particularly rich as you'll find examples on this page of Derek Powazek and Jeff Jarvis posting comments with links to much richer content and commentary on their own websites.
We're a decade+ on and we still haven't managed to improve on this problem. In fact, we may have actually made it worse.
I'd love to see On the Media revisit this idea. (Of course their site doesn't have comments at all anymore either.)
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groups.google.com groups.google.com
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Maybe of interest for some readers here: With your plugin, it's also straightforward to import the "tweets.csv" file from the official Twitter archive, which contains all the tweets (and a lot of metadata) from one's personal account. Still don't know what to do with this in TiddlyWiki, but there is certainly potential...
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