"What matters is... immersion in comprehensive treatment of a topic, as opposed to a blog-style linear sequence of short, frequent postings commenting on the hot topic of the day. It doesn't matter what software is used to host the content, the distinctions are:
in-depth vs. superficial
original/primary vs. derivative/secondary
driven by the author's expertise vs. being reflectively driven by other sites or outside events"
Quello che sta iniziando a succedere proprio in questi giorni è che qualche perzoncina in più sta notando come funziona bene ad oggi la mia trovata del #WordPress#federato (o meglio, come funziona bene ad oggi il #plugin#ActivityPub che non ho scritto io, lmao), e sta installando il plugin sui propri #blog… ❤️🔥
Il che è #epico, è un’ottima spinta in più verso il #selfhosting del #Fediverso anche per chi non è #TechSavy e vuole una roba già pronta… però oi, state tutti solo attivando #AP sui vostri blog #longform, ancora nessuno che riprende esattamente la mia #idea e inizia a fare anche #MicroBlogging e #shitposting dal proprio #sitarello… Prenderò la cosa come una conferma del mio primato, allora. 🙉
Happy to report no data loss, in the end, during yesterday’s kerfuffle with the #longform plug-in and/or #Obsidian sync. I had access to copies of the files via Time Machine and Backblaze, and the text I wanted was also in my Paste clipboard history.
But ... rightly or wrongly, I think that ends my experiment with longform as my writing environment. It's back to #Ulysses for me when writing novels.
1 of 2: I set up a folder in #Obsidian as a #Longform#plugin project yesterday. This morning, on my laptop, two files are blank, and they have no sync history. The Longform app is still installed, but no longer recognizes that I had a project in progress.
When I ran to my desktop machine and opened Obsidian, I was relieved to see my files and project intact -- but then Obsidian synced ... and the same files blanked, and now the desktop also fails to recognize my folder as a Longform project!
Dan takes us on deep dives of fascinating moments in history, weaving a narrative tapestry from many historical sources and making the past more alive and accessible while exploring extreme human situations. If you're a history nerd and enjoy storytelling, this is the podcast for you. It is by far my favorite podcast and I...
Like, everyone outside of Mastodon must issue a #CW if they use
bold type
italics
a code block
a bullet-point list
or anything like that because it irritates those who are still used to the #Fediverse only being old-school Mastodon. You know, just like #LongPosts with over #500Characters.
But most people will hear about #mastodon first and there are many #mastodon instances with longer limits that would suit those people perfectly, if only they could find them easily.
Does anyone know any good fediverse instances that allow long form posts? I want to post and read short stories, so we'd be looking at 60000ish character limit. The only one that does this isn't really a fiction based instance so I don't feel right to apply.
How do you keep small independent communities both small and interesting?
-- pixl97 @ HN
One inspiration I've had comes from thinking about intentional communities --- communes, utopian towns, and the like. The thought occurred some years back that amongst the most successful intentional communities are college towns. These are, hands down, some of the best places to live, and certainly on a per-population basis, in the US and Canada, based on a wide range of measures (though housing costs tend to be higher than surrounding areas).
There are a slew of smaller, non-dominant, and often quite small towns to be found around the world, though the US might be a good exemplar, whose central focus is often a university or college. Some public, some private (though virtually all benefit by public financing of research or student aid / loans).
These virtually always contrast sharply with surrounding towns, even for relatively small schools.
As to what makes these tick ... I don't have any solid evidence, but I've a few theories:
There are a number of associated populations for the institutions, with widely varying residency periods. Students pass through in 2-8 years typically (net of transfers, drop outs, extended undergraduate programmes, a/k/a "five year" and "six year" plans, and graduate / professional programmes). Faculty tend to remain much longer, often much of their professional career (40+ years). Alumni may settle in the region (though most do not). And there is the "town" (vs. "gown") component, which may be sympathetic, adversarial, or a mix of both --- residents of the community who are not directly affiliated with the university. (Instances of town-gown conflict, including actual armed battle and shooting wars, date back to mediaeval times, e.g. the St. Scholastica Day riot of 10 Feb 1355.)
The school itself has a central organising principle and mission, which many other intentional communities lack.
The school has associations with other institutions, organisations, and agencies, some of higher learning, many not, and tends to form strong relationships with government, business, cultural, and religious sectors.
Since the 19th century, official government recognition of the significance of both higher education and research has resulted in an increasing degree of official sanction and financial support, initially the German Humboldtian model, technical schools (e.g., M.I.T., founded in 1861 in large part to support the U.S. Navy's newfound interest in steam propulsion), land grant universities (organised in the US under national acts of 1862 & 1890), and the modern research university (largely spawned by the Manhattan Project and Vannevar Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) and formation of the US National Science Foundation, and widely emulated in other countries). In the UK there is a distinction made between the Ancient Universities (Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dublin), the Red Brick Universities, chartered in the 19th century, the Plate Glass Universities, chartered between 1963 & 1992, and ... whatever comes after. See: https://www.ukuni.net/articles/types-uk-universities.
Note that universities themselves don't necessarily make money directly (through tuition), though some are extraordinarily wealthy (e.g., Harvard ($50 billion), Yale ($40 billion), Stanford ($38 billion), Princeton ($35 billion), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment). Those funds tend to come from grants (both government and privately-funded research), alumni donations, and increasingly technology licensing. In the case of Stanford, real estate is a massive contributor. Schools often also benefit from tax breaks and other legislative relief and exemptions.
So, you say, that's really interesting, dred, but how do you translate that to online communities, especially those for which locality and location are not central elements, as they are for brick-and-mortar institutions.
I don't know, though ... I've been pondering just that for a decade or so.
The insight does suggest a few solution-shaped objects and/or characteristics, however:
A key failing of venerable fora is that the membership often becomes exceedingly stale. Not only do new members fail to arrive, but the more interesting and dynamic members of the old guard often leave as both the noise floor rises and the clue ceiling drops. Reward for participation simply decreases. Universities subvert this by pumping fresh students through. I suspect HN's YC affiliation and fresh founder classes in part aids HN in this regard.
A forum is almost certainly not a freestanding enterprise but an adjunct to another institution or set of institutions. Again, HN serves, but does not profit, YC.
Universities are mission rather than profit driven, and both teaching and research are a key element of that mission. This ... plays poorly with the notion of a VC-funded online community start-up. Ezra Klein in a podcast on media earlier this year noted that a key challenge in organising new ventures is that the profit motive and VC / investor interests tend to conflict strongly with journalism's prerogatives.[1]
Several of the most successful previous online communities formed either directly through or closely affiliated with educational institutions. The Internet itself, email, and Usenet directly, Facebook originated on the campus (and with the student body) of the most selective-admission university in the world, and I'd argue that Slashdot's early tech-centric membership was at least strongly academic-adjacent.
Universities are focused not only on the present moment, that is, streams, but on accumulated wisdom and knowledge. Here, HN is less a model than, say, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, in which something of a community forms through the editor community which creates (and fights over) the informational resources being created. Wikipedia doesn't quite have a social network, though various discussion pages and sections approach this.
On the "small" bit, there's both a selective-admissions and graduation element that academia shows. That is, you don't just let anybody in, and, after they've "completed the course", they're graduated and moved on, with the exception, again, of faculty and staff. Just how that translates to an online community I'm not entirely sure.
Another element of the "small" bit is that universities are organised: into colleges (that is, interest areas), departments (specific faculty), courses (specific topics of study or interest) and sections, that is, specific groups or meetings of students for lecture and/or discussion. Individual class size is a key dynamic, and much of the experience of the past 75 years or so shows the challenges of scaling lectures and the profoundly different characteristics of a small seminar (say, 5--15 students), a modest upper-division class (25--30), and moderate-to-large lectures (50 -- 1,000 or more students). Strong interactivity is sharply curtailed above about 15 students, and the options for interactivity above about 50--100 are near nil. Choosing how groups are organised, who's permitted in, and what size limits exist, as well as communications between various divisions (sections, courses, departments, colleges, universities) all come into play, as I see it.
And then there's politics. One of the notorious elements of universities is how various divisions rival amongst one another, gatekeep, define what is in (or out) of a specific discipline's remit, resist challenging new concepts, and form cliques and fads ... just like any human domain, only more so. I have a nagging suspicion that online communities might in fact have similar tendencies, and that these would also have to be subverted somewhat to avoid pathological development.
There are a whole slew of other factors --- techical capabilities, UI/UX, online abuse, legal issues, privacy and identity, spam, propaganda, surveillance, censorship, etc. So many dumb ways to die.
"How the $5500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works" (14 Feb 2023), interviewing Tim Hwang. Specifically: "If you’re able to aggregate a lot of attention online, we just have this almost religious faith that there’s just some way that you’ve got to be able to turn this into money. You will become a Google. You will become a Facebook.... [T]he flip side of that [is] that if you come to a V.C. and you say, I want to do a subscription business model, they’ll say, well, I don’t know — we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that really blowing up, so why don’t you just do advertising?" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-tim-hwang.html Which is to say: unless you're planning a pure-play advertising monetisation model, which is to say, the Sidam Touch (advertising turns everything to shit), you won't get funding.
Quick thought on interactions between micro-posting servers like Mastodon, and blogging servers like WriteFreely or WordPress.
What if a micro-post app receiving a long text as a post displayed each paragraph as a separate post in the UI, forming a thread? Replies to any of those separate posts would be received by the back-end as comments on the one post received.
Me:
> implementations that allow longer posts federate any post longer than that limit by breaking it into a chain of Notes?
Just remembered why I thought this could be useful. If each paragraph in long texts is a Note, people reading it on micro-post apps could post replies to particular paragraphs. That would allow a blog reading UI to display comments as annotations, linked from each paragraph, as an alternative to the usual comment thread under the article.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History (www.dancarlin.com)
Dan takes us on deep dives of fascinating moments in history, weaving a narrative tapestry from many historical sources and making the past more alive and accessible while exploring extreme human situations. If you're a history nerd and enjoy storytelling, this is the podcast for you. It is by far my favorite podcast and I...