Take the power back (iA blog post)

Destry · 2018-03-04 13:45:27

There is so much yes in this article it doesn’t do justice to quote any one piece. You have to read and appreciate it all. It’s good medicine, or at least therapy.

I’m about to launch a “blog” again (I also hate that word); a resurrection of writing effort I used to do at wion.com. Long-form stuff, mostly, but a backlog of ideas boiling inside of me for years now, and especially lately. So this whole idea of “re-revolution” hits home with me.

Also, I’ve quit centralized socmed. I just need to kill a few more accounts that are sitting abandoned at the moment until I properly package and wipe them. Mastodon is my micro-blather replacement, where I mostly vent into the void. Old, independent forums like this one are my groups/communities now. Protonmail for email, etc. And I’m hoping we see a return to independent websites/writing again.

Textpattern can play in role in the re-revolution. That’s an article that needs written.

I don’t tend to put agency blogs in blog rolls, but when they consistently write on important topics with such clear insight to the evils and shit, then they earn a spot. iA’s blog is one!

I’m not intentionally promoting iA, but yes, I guess I am here. Credit where due.

Oh, btw, iAWriter is coming to Windows. Not that I care (Mac user currently) but you might, as it’s one of the best writing applications on the market. I’ve recently been enraptured with Scrivner too, which is invaluable for organizing/drafting long-form, but that’s a different/specialized tool in the kit. Someday I will own Purism’s Librem 13” (and Librem 5 phone) and begin my permanent migration to ‘nix everything, at which time Manuskript might have to be my Scrivner replacement, and I don’t know for iA Writer. But I digress.

Seriously, if you’re not fired up to write a blog post after reading that article, then maybe you should just hand it all in. ;)

bici · 2018-03-04 20:33:35

Thanks for the link! I read the iA post with great interest. And i wasn’t too surprised that i am more or less in complete sync with the thoughts expressed therein. And i have more or less adopted the internet habits as outlined in the post.

I won’t be blogging, I use Twitter sparingly, using DuckDuckGo more, and never use farcebook if at all possible.Sometimes people insist on writing on that platform. But i let the author know the i dont’ like being directed to farcebook when there are other possibilities pen to them.

A very enjoyable and informative read. And i was not aware that iA had a blog!

gaekwad · 2018-03-05 12:37:14

Great find, Destry. Many thanks for sharing. I’ll be reading this in detail later on today.

philwareham · 2018-03-05 13:15:59

Obviously we welcome blog article submissions for the .com site. I’m too busy right now to write one myself (and probably not the right person to write one) but I agree that with the new-found interest in personal blogging, less centralisation and owning your own content – Textpattern is a good fit for that.

We’ve also, at Textpattern 4.7: removed the callbacks to the RPC server, strived to make language support much improved (including better support of non-Latin alphabets), and toiled over accessibility additions to make Textpattern more inclusive (which, I can tell you, is not an easy task). This will continue in 4.8 (especially language improvements – such as making the pophelps localised, adding yet more languages, and hopefully making the default ‘Welcome’ article and content localised).

mistersugar · 2018-03-05 15:50:19

Phil, I’ll write a blog post for your consideration for the Textpattern site. Have been working on a post for my own blog (zuiker.com on Txp since 2004) about how I just can’t quit Txp, and why I keep coming back to my personal blog.

Destry, I checked in on the iA blog last week and read that post, too. Thanks for flagging it for our community.

Bloke · 2018-03-05 17:36:35

mistersugar wrote #309661:

I’ll write a blog post for your consideration for the Textpattern site.

Yes please, that’d be brilliant.

colak · 2018-03-05 18:41:58

Related to the original post…. And close to my heart.

kuopassa · 2018-03-05 22:33:44

A blog should have the option for readers to comment (to participate in) what’s written. If readers can’t comment then it’s just an article, a Web page. :-/

Destry · 2018-03-06 09:53:16

mistersugar wrote #309661:

Have been working on a post for my own blog (zuiker.com on Txp since 2004) about how I just can’t quit Txp, and why I keep coming back to my personal blog.

That’s a good article you need to finish. ;) On the surface, it sounds like it could be different from what I was proposing above, though. More sentimental, like a favorite ball-cap?

The angle I was suggesting, which is key for an article about getting back to owning one’s own content, is somewhat reflected in the tone of the iA article (which should be linked to among many other argument-supporting pieces).

The central theme, or excerpt at top of the article, would be something like…

To heck with the centralized roach hotels of Silicon Valley that profit off your content (all of them), manipulate your post stream by way of their biased algorithms, thereby cheating you and your loyal followers,¹ pull the ol’ bate-n-switch time and again,² or can be bought by the next sinister confidence company like you and your content is so much chopped camel at a Moroccan street market.³⁴ Take back your independence, writing, and soul. Break free of the surveillance capitalism. Reclaim your dignity. Write and share on your own terms, under your own identity, brand, and expression. Textpattern is your ace and ally in the blogging RE-REVOLUTION — in your fight AGAINST THE MONOPOLIES and FOR THE RESISTANCE! And if writing is legendary, humane donation systems like Liberapay can help you better than noxious platforms and advertisers.

But in your own, less-entertaining way, of course. ;)

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Destry · 2018-03-06 10:15:49

kuopassa wrote #309674:

A blog should have the option for readers to comment (to participate in) what’s written. If readers can’t comment then it’s just an article, a Web page. :-/

I think that notion is a little outdated. Comments were useful before social media was popular. Then socmed replaced them — while at the same time comments just became traps for spammers, malware, and trolls. People started using socmed for the “engagement”, but everything got too commercial and political. And now just plain rotten.

In my opinion, the “blogging re-revolution”, as the folks at iA have called it, can take a new strategy for the modern times. Less prone to being screwed by the evils in the world while still getting one’s thoughts out there. And unless you’re a media giant like NYT or The Guardian, etc, you’re not going to get enough comments/participation to make the overhead shit-shoveling worthwhile.

It’s a choice, for sure, but should not be a requirement or distinctive facet of what defines (or not) blogging. And better choices can be made. Maybe the direction is not comments on the blog, but using a different socmed system as the replacement, something decentralized (e.g. Mastodon). That is part of this whole resistance situation, after all, to decentralize away from the centralized monopolies that control everything against you. So by supporting those open source projects too, we also gain allies in the resistance war overall. Probably improves your reach too, if that’s important.

The terms “blog” and “blogging” themselves are tired. So far nothing else has come along or stuck. But site owners should do what they need for their sanity without getting into semantic wars over how their sites are classified.

2 cents.

philwareham · 2018-03-06 10:51:48

I always prefer to see comments directly on articles rather than being lost to the winds on social media, never to be read or seen again. And trackback and webmentions doesn’t really solve that in a satisfactory manner I feel.

Maybe one day webmentions will suffice – but right now if you put every webmention as a comment on an article you get a lot of nonsensical comments.

Bloke · 2018-03-06 11:14:42

Comments are one of those love-hate things and, like Phil, I prefer to see them on the article itself. In context. The trouble with Facebork and the like is that all information is transient. Here and now. Look at me me me sharing this thing already shared by 8000 other people right now dammit.

A post is made on socmed. Three days later it’s forgotten. Three weeks later it’s hard to find without wearing your scrolling finger out. Three years later, forget it unless you’ve enabled the “wot I sed three years ago” feature.

Social media is good for manually pimping visibility of long-form content in the absence of RSS that used to do it for us. It’s good for promotions to drive traffic to a site, or for gimmicks. But for retaining people, engaging people or saying anything of any permanence, it’s next to useless.

Once you’ve made a successful “conversion” – to use Adwords parlance – from a socmed post to your site, sending them somewhere else to comment (or back to the channel they came from) isn’t going to cut it, imo.

And another thing: why can you follow a person on Twatter, add a friend on Facebork, subscribe to a channel on YouTube, or connect in similar ways from all social media sites so you get notifications of people you’re interested in, yet RSS – that allows you to “follow” independent sources of your choosing – gets the cold shoulder?

Is the sidelining of RSS a deliberate ploy by the giants so we get sucked into their playgrounds? Is there genuinely no need for it? Or is there room for something better to come along?

Webmentions are an interesting idea, but as Phil says, they hardly supply context. There’s gotta be a better way.

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#1 2018-03-04 13:45:27