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j
related to #1100875505701486612 . My brain has a thinking side and a building side, and the building side has been screaming to actually get some work done these past few days. But, one last thought... in trying to envision the ideal state of social media etc, I've often wondered if it's necessary to preserve the model of twitter et. al. where you have a bunch of short-form posts. It simplifies things a lot if you work in larger chunks, like a weekly newsletter. That's been an attractive part of the unbundled model where you have newsletters/blogs for broad dissemination of ideas, and short-form posts are kept within small communities like discord servers, slack groups etc. And yet--I have a nagging, half-formed feeling that the simplicity of that model just won't cut it. I think I may need to figure out what the best way is to accommodate short-form posts. I did grapple with that idea to an extent in https://tfos.co/p/rebuild-social-media/. I don't think the ideas there are sufficient though. Aggregating users' posts from various discussion platforms has significant barriers to mass adoption because (1) plenty of platforms don't even have APIs/RSS support, e.g. substack notes, (2) even if they did, the majority of users simply aren't going to connect any external services. In the long-run, it might be worthwhile to add posting capabilities to Yakread, while preserving the ability to use other publishing/discussion platforms for those who choose to. So I'm starting to mull over what that might look like.
(Maybe it ends up actually following precisely the model I described in the blog post linked above--but rather than starting out by trying to aggregate external discussion platforms, I just build all the pieces into yakread first--like pre-assembled legos that can be taken apart if needed)
Maybe yakread would have a separate "writing" page, where you can write blog posts, send newsletter issues, write short-form posts... You get a public profile that maybe looks like a mix between a standard blog/newsletter and a discord server? I really like the forum channel thing here in discord. Though perhaps a standard social-media-feed thing would work fine too. Perhaps the kicker here is to make it so you never need to explicitly trigger any emails. Your "profile"/website has an email signup form (and rss feed), and every week or so it compiles all your posts (long-form and short-form) into an email/rss entry and sends it for you. If you want you can take more control, e.g. turn off automatic sending. You'd still get a draft post populated automatically, which you could edit as needed before sending. I think this brings me to a fundamental question I'm wondering about: even if people need the ability to write public short-form posts that are attached to their own profile instead of some separate community, do those posts have to be distributed individually, or can they be batched up like a weekly newsletter? If the latter, maybe we can preserve some of the simplicity of the unbundled model.
In the "how to rebuild social media" post linked above, I assumed they should be distributed individually, hence doing it via a separate RSS feed. But maybe no need; maybe the weekly newsletter format is good enough. It would make social media a bit slower. Your posts may not become visible to people for several days. But maybe that doesn't matter? If you really want to have a real-time discussion about e.g. some breaking news, then I think posting in a separate discussion community is fine. Maybe that's a good way to think of it: stuff that goes over protocols is slower but has greater reach; stuff that goes in a platform is faster but is restricted to a particular community. No need for real-time posts that reach huge audiences within minutes, as is currently the case on Twitter et. al.
Then say you want to "eject" from yakread. There's nothing stopping someone else from buildng: 1. a newsletter platform 2. that lets you write short-form posts 3. that lets other people write comments/replies on your posts 4. and compiles all your posts into a weekly newsletter for you. On the reading side of yakread/any other reading app, in either case it's just another newsletter.
taking my posts here on discord as an example: it would be nice to have a summary of them auto-inserted into my weekly newsletters, and if readers click a link to one of the posts they're auto-signed in and can reply without going through another signup flow + have the posts available publicly, so e.g. if yakread recommends my post to a non-subscriber, they can at least see the posts. and then they can sign in in one way or another if they want to reply. The posts could also be shown on tfos.co for anyone perusing there.
A huge benefit of this whole approach is that it works with any email client: all the short-form post stuff happens on the publisher side. Someone can subscribe with yakread or gmail or anything and they get the full experience.
could be aggregation opportunities on the publisher side. e.g. if you have auto-posting turned on with yakread, you don't even have to send emails to your whole list at the same time. yakread could send readers a daily email with posts from everyone they follow. (note that the recipients would not necessarily be using yakread--you can publish with yakread and have people read it in gmail, or publish on substack and have people read it in yakread, etc). Other publishing platforms could do the same for all the publishers on that platform. Might be some incentive issues. If the automated posts cap emails at, say, 50 posts per email, maybe you prefer to turn it off so that your subscribers always get your post. That'll put more burden on readers to unsubscribe from stuff as they accumulate subscriptions. Not a problem for readers on yakread :). But maybe best to not attempt any publisher-side aggregation.
Another way to think about all this is that creating a dedicated community on e.g. discord or wherever as an alternative to having a twitter account is a bit heavyweight. It's worked well for me but perhaps not the ideal general solution.
OK I have to force myself to actually start writing code now, this is getting ridiculous
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