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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
