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#25 2023-12-14 22:05:11
- GugUser
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- From: Quito (Ecuador)
- Registered: 2007-12-16
- Posts: 1,473
Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
Yes.
Incidentally, I share jakob’s arguments and I’am very grateful to him for keeping some plug-ins up to date in that sense.
I’m only 66 years old and I think there’s still a lot I want to do.
Many thanks to all those who continue to work on the further development of Textpattern.
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
Destry wrote #335948:
All speculation, but informed by near 7 years of floating around in the fediverse, watching and listening to the vibes and trends.
Destry, as I try to wrap my head around the ActivityPub issue, a few questions spring to mind that I hope you might be interested in answering:
- Didn’t we old-timers have all this when Atom/RSS feeds and feed readers were still a thing?
- How is ActivityPub different from feeds, apart from the fact that nobody wants to run their own website anymore, but rather live in a rent-free corporate silo?
- Can I follow the money, i.e. who pays for my Mastodon or pixelfed resource consumption if there are no advertisers around to pay for my presence?
Curious to hear your thoughts…
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
Wall of text alert!
wet wrote #336178:
Didn’t we old-timers have all this when Atom/RSS feeds and feed readers were still a thing?
I guess I see what you mean. Feeds are like fedi TLs (timelines), and if you saw an article you liked in your feed, you could jump to that website (instance), regardless what software it was using, and if they had comments on, you could comment. A kind of decentralized system, yes.
How is ActivityPub different from feeds…?
I don’t know if I can answer this, but one problem with feeds, in fact, maybe this has nothing to do with feeds at all, but one problem in regular web is that commenting on a blog puts your content in their DB. Once there, you could rarely change it and never delete it. Even in these days of GDPR, many blog owners ignore requests to delete comments from their site. I’ve tried. (I kick myself for ever falling for article comments.)
Exceptions to this, surprisingly, are commercial commenting services, where you had to have an account before using their service for blog commenting (we used one on TXP Mag for a while, but I forgot the name). Because they are a commercial service (not a private blog), they have to acknowledge requests for account deletion, and when you delete such an account, they then have to anonymize all the posts you made, or simply delete them all in bulk. I deleted the account on the platform who’s name I forget, and it first anonymized all my comments on their servers, then simply deleted them. I was quite happy about that. It was probably easier for legal reasons.
Anyway, you could argue the same is true in a system of Mastodon instances, for example. In other words, you’re putting your posts/replies in the DB for that instance, a ‘Robert’s Law’ concern. :)
But there’s a couple of differences:
First, if the instance is not yours, there’s still the better culture of Mastodon to give you more control over your data. You can auto-delete your posts after a time of your choosing (what I do), or you an kill your account entirely, zapping all data from the instance, and start anew elsewhere (I’ve also done that, four times now).
Second, a person can run their own instance instead of having an account on someone else’s, which is like having your own Txp install instead of being on Blogger, or whatever. Mastodon is rather hard to install/setup for most people, though, which is why they join an existing instance and don’t mind donating a few spondulicks to the admin once in a while. There are even pop-up resellers who specialize solely in providing/maintaining Mastodon instances for people, e.g. MastoHost. This is why I think if simpler systems (e.g. Txp) adopt the AP protocol to integrate in the fedi, it will give more individuals the power to interact on their own terms.
The one snafu in both situations above, as I understand it, is that if other instances your instance federates with cache your posts (I’ve heard about this), then you lost control of those. You can delete your source posts, but cached versions remain in the wild for a while. That’s why I like to use the auto-delete feature on my posts, so they don’t linger and circulate too long, which reduces the odds of them being cached. Celebrities, on the other hand, probably like that kind of sticky thing.
…apart from the fact that nobody wants to run their own website anymore, but rather live in a rent-free corporate silo
Well, as mentioned, a lot of people donate to their admins, which is a neat local-community thing I’ve only ever seen happen in the fedi. No kickstarter BS, just straight up by me a coffee donations. That’s part of the interesting culture I speak of. When admins make it clear they need cash for the servers, people usually kick in, or move on. And of course, Masto instances are typically not corporate (Threads aside). And if one tried to be, no other instance would federate with it.
Part of that donating and moving around, though, is due to the complexity of the current tech. I know I couldn’t and wouldn’t install Mastodon. I don’t have that energy or interest. But I’d certainly explore the fediverse via my own Txp starship. @fake@wion.com would be a cool way to fly. Regardless, I don’t put stock in keeping socmed posts for long anymore, so if Txp ever did integrate in the Fedi, I’d like that auto-deletion feature included. ;)
Can I follow the money, i.e. who pays for my Mastodon or pixelfed resource consumption if there are no advertisers around to pay for my presence?
Part of appreciating the Fediverse is looking at it through a different filter; not the capitalist one that has taken over centralized web, where everyone’s reason to be online is to exploit, profit, and be keynote speakers. The fedi is the exact opposite. People are there to get away from that kind of thing, and tools are built in to help with it.
That said, solo makers, crafters, builders, artists, scientists, teachers, academics, open-source devs, etc are pretty well accepted in the fedi from what I’ve seen. Content marketers, journos, and loud silicon valley types… not so much. I guess that’s why twitter is still lurching along, vanity loves an audience.
Admins in the fedi are mostly just people doing it for the good will of being in a surveillance cap-free system and making it possible for others to share that ability too. When admins need a little help with costs, they generally get it. If admins are smart, they don’t allow more accounts than their tech/time/mind can handle. The instance I’m on is offered for free, but keeps the accounts low to make it manageable.
In my opinion, folks, avoid the big instances. It’s mostly noise anyway. And move to a new instance if/when the one you’re on goes south. Usually admins give a fair early warning if they have to pull up and quit. No big deal. Migrate to a new one. Data migration is built into Masto.
I’d give my fedi location, but I only talk about woodworking anymore, and I don’t follow people who don’t or my home timeline gets overly polluted with posts about things I don’t want to see. That’s what my social web has come to. :)
Last edited by Destry (2023-12-19 11:55:59)
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
Disqus. That’s the commenting system we used on TXP Mag, IIRC.
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
Disq.us has already been bought, made obscene and unethical. I am looking for an open source alternative.
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
We’ve veered seriously off-topic by now, but…
Bloke wrote #336182:
Disqus. That’s the commenting system we used on TXP Mag, IIRC.
As Vienuolis indicates, that could track your commenting behaviour across many sites … making it questionable from a privacy point of view. You could close your account to stop your comments being viewable publicly but the site owner could still view your previous comments (see https://help.disqus.com/en/articles/1886218-privacy-faq).
Vienuolis wrote #336183:
Disq.us has already been bought, made obscene and unethical. I am looking for an open source alternative.
There is commento which is similar but costs, and also isso that is open source.
TXP Builders – finely-crafted code, design and txp
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
jakob wrote #336184:
You could close your account to stop your comments being viewable publicly but the site owner could still view your previous comments…
That just reaffirms my position to never trust not rely on other blog owners with fair processing of my data, thus never bother commenting where I can’t delete, or at least edit, my data if I want to. I certainly would never use a commercial comments system again, from either direction, but there are a lot of dupes in the world that would.
Btw, In addition to being able to delete your posts in Masto, you can also ‘delete-redraft’ them or ‘edit’ them.
The Delete-Redraft is basically a full deletion of that post record, but it gives you all the text in a new record to make redrafting/editing easier. Because the original record is deleted, such a redraft is removed from any threads it might have been in. It was the only way to edit posts for a long time.
The Edit feature is newer and works as you would expect. Edited posts remain in their threads. When a post is edited, an asterisk appears by the date to indicate that fact. Also anyone having favorited or boosted such a post prior to it being edited, will be notified that it has been changed, in case you want to undo the fave/boost.
Last edited by Destry (2023-12-19 11:13:03)
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
This, coming from a popular instance admin, is a decent analogy with regard to regular web vs fediverse.
She also shares my sentiment about not being on big instances.
And regarding what I was saying about the aversion of overt capitalism in fedi, that doesn’t mean exploiters won’t try. They do. Assholes are always trying to exploit a potential audience. Iggy’s Law.
Just this morning I had two spam posts in my timeline, one posting to a hashtag I follow, and one picking me out, along with a lot of other names. I don’t know how that one was managed. I hope it was random.
But in both cases, you can block and report the wayward accounts, or, if the entire instance is generally bad (spam, racism, whatever… and you have to take the time to investigate that a bit), you can simply block the entire instance. I’ve done that a few times.
Sometimes your instance admin may block the instances too (defederate with them), if your instances conduct policy fits, protecting everyone on your instance.
The point is, the fediverse is evolving and probably will be for a while. It’s still not perfect, and may never be, but it’s already way better than ‘out there’ (regular web). And it’s kind of fun to be in there and watch from the side lines.
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
Yes, there is still a need for a small CMS. There must be people like me and you (wet and other forum users) in some respects, even if we are totally unique. And we all like TXP a lot and it is a small CMS.
I once was more widely interested in new webthings but I bet many of you, like me, are tired of much of it. Social media is so fake, even Mastodon, so where do people turn when they see through the fakery and irrelevance? They look for quality, things that stand the test of time, things they can rely on.
So yes, there will always be a need for Textpattern until it is bought up by the Evil Empire hell bent on consuming everything and too blind to see they are wasting their own lives in the process, no matter how rich they get.
Happy Holidays, folks, and all the best for a Healthy and Prosperous New Year.
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
zero wrote #336210:
Yes, there is still a need for a small CMS. There must be people like me and you (wet and other forum users) in some respects, even if we are totally unique. And we all like TXP a lot and it is a small CMS.
Bless you. Yes there is Hope for the Future.
Happy Holidays and Prosperous New Year.
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
Late to this, but at age 70, interest remains in using TXP. I had help installing & designing back in 2005. A now rusty old weblog is still out there, but looks bad on a phone, is probably not secure, has long-dead plugins etc.
Several years back I made another attempt to get Linux installed on a Chromebook (my daily driver), learn to use it so I could run XAMPP to learn how to edit my old weblog offline & bring it up to mobile first, responsive, free of dead plugins, etc. The layers of frustrations & failed attempts & lost time did such damage to my psyche that I gave up once more.
Would I post to a modern version of rodentregatta.com again? Occasionally, yes. But, the effort to relocate it will likely be more frustrating than the attempts to resurrect it.
Last edited by 6sigma (2023-12-29 14:15:11)
“Well, I, uh, don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.” General ‘Buck’ Turgidson
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