One of the excellent features of Micro.blog is crossposting. The idea is you post something to your website, micro.blog picks it up from your RSS feed and then posts it to other services, such as Mastodon or Bluesky. This allows us to “own” our posts by publishing them to our website before sending them to whatever social media service we happen to be on. If you’re moving between services, or you have more than one social media account, it can make life a lot easier, and means you’re less beholden to the whims of fascist billionaire website owners.

Last weekend micro.blog implemented backfeeds, which means we can also see responses to our crossposted content in the micro.blog stream, even if that response was made on Mastodon or Bluesky or whatever. Furthermore, you can then reply to replies made elsewhere without leaving micro.blog 🤯.

I get the why of this idea – being able to conduct social media conversations in one place saves jumping between services, while also introducing your micro.blog followers to other fediverse accounts that aren’t on micro.blog. Of course, it also demosntrates more “engagement” with one’s posts.

I can also see where micro.blog’s owner Manton is heading with the idea. If the social media landscape is fragmenting and new services offer open APIs and federation, then having a hub to manage your micro.blog, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky and whatever interactions is a good proposition.

However, there are few problems with this feature.

The most important is privacy. While you could argue that publishing something on the internet means it’s fair game to use elsewhere (in a Google search result, for example) I would argue that our social media interactions at least feel limited to the context in which they’re published. Publishing them on another platform without permission seems a betrayal of an unwritten agreement between poster and responder. This is bad enough when we backfeed comments to our own website, worse when they’re sent to a social media stream where perhaps hundreds or even thousands more people might see them.

Secondly, there are edge cases which haven’t been considered. My Mastodon account is protected, which means I have to approve followers. So if I post something to my site, which then goes to micro.blog and gets a reply on Mastodon, my replies won’t appear, but the response does, in splendid isolation.

Worse still, it’s buggy. On a couple of occasions I’ve seen responses to Mastodon posts that I never even posted on micro.blog, which is plain weird.

Backfeeding is a really interesting feature, but its complexity and the privacy and permission questions it raises mean it should be opt-in.

An algorithm in the hands of the Man is a powerful and dangerous thing. It’s bad enough when [clears throat] “content creators” and bad actors learn how to game a platform so they elbow their way to the front of the attention queue, but when the platform itself controls what everyone sees, we’ve entered a new level of propaganda and manufacturing online reality.

So one of the things we like about Mastodon is there’s no algorithm beyond what you decide to follow. That’s then presented in reverse chronological order. Technically speaking, that’s another algorithm. So we can perhaps say what we actually like are straightforward, transparent algorithms that help us control our own streams.

However, these apparently objectively helpful algorithms can cause problems. Firstly, I live in the UK and follow a more or less standard work day. That means I’ll probably first look at my Mastodon feed at around 7am, and last look at 9pm (earlier if I’m being good). Let’s say I’m following someone eight hours behind (on the West coast of the States, for example) and they’re active during a similar local pattern. That means our online activity overlaps from 11pm yesterday to 1pm today my time – just six hours. I’m simply less likely to see what they post when my stream is sorted chronologically.

Now, there’s an awkward bit of me that quite likes the idea of limiting my online network to something similar to what’s geographically possible. Maybe the aim of all this should be to make social media as asynchronous and plain difficult as possible. We could start by making it look like the pre-internet network. Speaking to someone in Berlin or Bologna by phone is easy enough, but calling someone in Portland Oregon at 5am my time would be rare and take some sort of effort on both sides.

Secondly, a reverse chronological feed favours high volume posters, both in terms of numbers and voice. Anyone posting several hot-takes an hour will simply have more chance of being seen more often than someone who posts once a day, especially if that post takes place at 1am my time.

So perhaps Mastodon should allow more algorithms – as long as they’re transparent and controlled by us. Something like “Show me a non-reverse chronological feed between the hours of x and y” or “Show me all posts where the poster has only tooted x times in the last 24 hours”. Or maybe we just limit our online connections to a meaningful number so this isn’t a problem. Or just email each other if we have something worth commenting on.

This is my 1147^th blog post, the 1147^th time I’ve felt the urge to tell you what I think about something.

I can trace a few themes through 16 years of blogging, one of which is how I’ve unlearned bad habits and ways of looking at the web and social media. Some are obvious – I think handing over your words and thoughts to centralised and commodified services is a bad idea – others not so much. For example, I came to question the value of any form of public discussion attached to any internet text, partly in light of the techno-optimist roots of online discussions.

So I guess it was inevitable I’d eventually examine the nature of blogging itself.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy writing as a form of thinking and mild therapy, and publishing those words makes the process more valuable. But what about the bundle of assumptions and influences tied up in the act of blogging?

Also:

It’s an indieweb truism that having your blog is a good thing, along with your hosting and your platform. Publishing independently from social media such as Substack is unequivocally positive, but it doesn’t follow that your blog – and even your writing – has to live in splendid isolation, a monument to your opinions, self and primacy.

This is hard for me. My tastes in writing and art are largely romantic and individualistic. After all, my favorite music is by The Fall, a band led by a genius, autocratic singer who bullied and humiliated his bandmates for decades.

But if writing and publishing doesn’t have to be a solitary act, what could more collective blogging look like?

Well, you could start with an actual collective – a group of likeminded internet folk co-authoring a manifesto or corpus of shared principles. Perhaps it would have a shared website, although maybe we want to keep our own blogs (but why?, Leon). The website could syndicate its members’ posts, formalising existing connections and networks, and maybe extending their reach and size in the process.

Technically, the collective could share hosting, and expertise, saving money and pooling resources. Maybe set up a Mastodon instance for federation, discussion etc.

Members could review and give feedback on drafts, or even initial ideas. I’ve written all 1147 of these posts on my own – it’s always good getting feedback post-publication, but what if I’d have got this feedback while writing the post?

And what sort of posts would we write? The atomised blogosphere encourages ultra-personal perspectives, and a form of marketing in our writing – we need to be noticed, and sometimes unconsciously develop a brand, evident in our posts, blog descriptions and straplines. This does of course develop some form of “character”, but what if we lose the need to do this and are free to concentrate on the content rather than the form?