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in reply to Jeff Atwood

mastodon - Link to source

Cory Doctorow

Here is a detailed explanation of how and why I use Mastodon, how to follow me and other thread posters by configuring your own filters, where to get my material on other services or in machine readable form, Etc. if you don't like threads, I encourage you to unfollow me and get my work in some other way. pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how…

How To Make the Least-Worst Mastodon Threads – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

pluralistic.net
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to Jeff Atwood

mastodon - Link to source

Cory Doctorow

I love constructive feedback.

"Constructive feedback" isn't "I would prefer that you do things in a different way because that is my preference," however.

I'm fully aware that other people have preferences that are different from mine.

That's why I do 2-3/hours per day of unpaid administrative work to ensure that everything I post is available in other formats (including machine-readable ones) under the most permissive CC license.

in reply to Cory Doctorow

mastodon - Link to source

Cory Doctorow

If you don't like my feed, but you want to see the things in it that are not threads, why wouldn't you write a bot that ingests my feed, discards the threads, and republishes the rest? The feed is both labeled *and* licensed to permit this.

Surely this is as valid a response to "I have different preference from you" as "therefore you should work in a way I prefer, rather than the way you prefer."

in reply to Cory Doctorow

mastodon - Link to source

Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.

@pluralistic I don't know that this will work for you, Jeff, but I additionally subscribed to @pluralistic.net which only has one post per thread and then added a filter for "Long thread" to my account preferences.

So, I get all of the pluralistic interactions and are unique to Mastodon (retoots, replies, etc.) and I also still get notified on his longer form content. Long thread from pluralistic are not seen due to the filter, but the bot posts a link and summary that is seen.

in reply to Cory Doctorow

mastodon - Link to source

Jeff Atwood

@pluralistic I liked some of the suggestions to make the first post in the thread regular public and the rest of the thread “public quiet”, as well as mastodon clients that will collapse long threads automatically (or to your preference). I apologize for initiating the conversation in this semi-provocative way, but I assure you my goal, as always, is to improve the fediverse experience / open source software for everyone. I’m here to help, have fun, and find allies.
in reply to Jeff Atwood

mastodon - Link to source

Cory Doctorow

What's "public quiet?"

I only know "unlisted" which does nothing to decrease the likelihood that the subsequent posts will appear in TLs but DOES make those posts unsearchable, which sucks - it's all downside, no benefit... to anyone.

pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how…

Unlisting Doesn’t Work the Way You Think It Does Mastodon has an extremely confusing “unlisting” feature. When a post is “unlisted,” that means that it won’t show up on “local” timelines (the list of posts from users on the same server as you) or “federated” timelines (the list of posts made by people followed by the other users on your server). This is useful for servers that are primarily closed discussions among the server’s users, but not for people who want to be part of a federated discussion among all Mastodon users. Here’s what unlisting doesn’t do: it doesn’t hide the posts you make from the people who follow you. A writer can’t make threads “collapse” for their readers by publishing an initial post and then unlisting the subsequent posts. It would be fantastic if this was the case, but it’s not. This misunderstanding about how unlisting works is so prevalent among Mastodon users that it might just be the first urban legend of the Fediverse. There are even beginners’ guides for new Mastodon users that repeat this misunderstanding and insist that unlisting your threaded posts is a considerate thing to do.
That’s just wrong. What’s more, it’s counterproductive, because hashtags in unlisted posts are also hidden. Remember, by design, Mastodon doesn’t have a search function — instead the way you include a post in the federated discussion of a topic is by opting in with a hashtag. Unlisting the posts in a thread won’t make your thread less intrusive for your readers — but it will rip the hashtags you include out of the public discourse, even though you’ve followed the Fediverse’s best practice for making them a part of that discourse. Perhaps someone with the capital or technical know-how will make the technical changes needed to make unlisting work the way that everyone intuitively assumes it works (maybe this post will even contribute to that decision). But until and unless someone does, unlisting doesn’t work the way you think it does. Really. People message me all the time to tell me that I’m wrong about this. They are supremely confident that unlisting works the way their intuition tells them it should. Their intuition is perfectly reasonable — but they are perfectly wrong.

How To Make the Least-Worst Mastodon Threads – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

pluralistic.net
in reply to Cory Doctorow

mastodon - Link to source

Jeff Atwood

this is an excellent explanation but "Threading an essay requires the author to compose it in stanzas, each of which is a standalone, complete thought — and that means that readers can engage with each though separately, by replying to just that stanza." Why not post a brief summary of the blog entry with a hyperlink to the full blog post on Mastodon (this I 💯agree with and support) .. and let the users decide for themselves which parts of the blog post they want to reply to? Why duplicate every single sentence / paragraph of the blog post on mastodon? Surely your audience is smart and sophisticated enough to quote the bits they want to talk about in the replies?
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to Jeff Atwood

mastodon - Link to source

Josh Kingsley 🍋

I don't follow @pluralistic because I don't want the huge threads in my feed. But it feels like I'm missing out from seeing Cory's writing at all - as well as any interesting boosts, replies, or other posts. I always thought that a reasonable tradeoff would be to post the long threads to a separate Mastodon account, and boost the first post from the "main" account. That seems like a benefit for everyone.
in reply to Cory Doctorow

mastodon - Link to source

Josh Kingsley 🍋

@pluralistic do you have code or some kind of plugin which automates posting the threads? Can you share it with me? Depending on the complexity of the existing solution, I can probably pull something together if that would be a benefit for you and your readers. My suggestion would be moving the long threads to a different account, and then boosting the initial post of each thread on your existing account.
in reply to Jeff Atwood

mastodon - Link to source

Jeff Atwood

@pluralistic Example. Hey, everyone, I posted a blog entry here. blog.codinghorror.com/the-road… .. summary: "Should the obscenely wealthy in the second gilded age share their money with desperately poor people in rural areas, and generate scientific data on the results of GMI studies, that is, a manual redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poorest among us, in areas where money goes the furthest, to unlock their untapped potential?" reply with any questions or clarifications.

The Road Not Taken is Guaranteed Minimum Income

The dream is incomplete until we share it with our fellow Americans.
Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror)
This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to Jeff Atwood

mastodon - Link to source

Cory Doctorow

From this and other posts, it's becoming clear that you think that the way I use digital publishing tools is organized around maximizing engagement or selling books or some other idea.

You are laboring under a misapprehension.

I publish the feed, newsletter and blog I would like to read. I do it for free, to the tune of many hours, every day, under an open license, so that you can alter and republish it the way you would want to see it.

in reply to Jeff Atwood

mastodon - Link to source

Kevin Marks

@pluralistic I read Cory's posts in a feed reader, and I have a related UX improvement suggestion. Could you wrap the long thread of footer info after each post in a block like this:
<details open><summary>Hide footer</summary>[long thread of footer stuff]</details>
so I can close it and read the next post without scrolling past it for ages? That would be nice.
in reply to Cory Doctorow

mastodon - Link to source

Kevin Marks

@pluralistic I don't know how you do it in WP, that's a standard HTML way to make sections collapsible. Are your sections separate plugins? developer.mozilla.org/en-US/do…

: The Details disclosure element - HTML | MDN

The
element. HTML element creates a disclosure widget in which information is visible only when the widget is toggled into an open state. A summary or label must be provided using the
MDN Web Docs
in reply to Jeff Atwood

friendica - Link to source

Martijn Vos

@Jeff Atwood @Cory Doctorow

I think there are very good arguments to be made for both "just link to the blog" and "post each separate thought as a separate threaded message". There's also the third option: "post the whole thing as a single, long post", which twitter and some Mastodons don't support, but Friendica and other Mastodons do, but let's leave that out.

I think the advantage of the thread is that you can keep the entire discussion here, and people can discuss each paragraph separately. With the blog, people have to go there to read it, and then come back here to discuss it. Or discuss it in the comments section of the blog platform (if it has that), which fractures the discussion.

So I think for discussion, Cory's approach might be superior. But Mastodon doesn't make it very readable, and it does require writing in separate thoughts, which isn't how most writers write.

Maybe we need a better platform to support open discussion of long articles.

in reply to Jeff Atwood

mastodon - Link to source

Cory Doctorow

Because that's how *I* prefer to read other people's posts.

Again, this is the feed, newsletter and blog I would like to read, and it's open licensed and machine readable, so you can transform it into the feed you would like to read.

I'm curious about why you're so invested in changing how I publish, rather than changing how you read? You could write a bot that publishes my work in the form you prefer in an hour. Why wouldn't you?

in reply to Cory Doctorow

mastodon - Link to source

Jeff Atwood

@pluralistic As my dad often said to me, "take my advice and do as you please". This is a short-form space, not a long form space. But it's also far from the end of the world, more of a minor party foul. We can push it over to the clients to suppress behind a click-to-expand after, say, 5 rapid-fire sequential threaded replies from anyone, and that's a net benefit for the whole ecosystem anyway. (Reddit already kinda does a form of this. It's a good design pattern to adopt for the safety of Everyday People.)
in reply to Jeff Atwood

mastodon - Link to source

Cory Doctorow

> This is a short-form space

[Citation needed]

Is this your preference, or an objective truth?

The internet was created by Darpa as a military project. Does that make the internet a "military space?"

Do users get to decide what a technology is, or does the dead hand of the designer sit on our shoulder forever, dictating our uses?

I assert that this is a long-form space. I assert that this is incontrovertibly true, because I use it to publish long-form work.

QED.

in reply to Jeff Atwood

mastodon - Link to source

Jeff Atwood

@pluralistic I mean, Omit Needless Words and all that. I think it's fine for individual sites to have higher limits to taste, but here on infosec it's some ridiculously large character limit of 11000 or something and you almost never see people post anything remotely close to that long. We did not come here to read your friggin' novella, buddy roe. (also, I supported twitter's move from 140 to 280 in the pre-hellsite days, though there was ENDLESS bitching about that, too, of COURSE, because, well, people.)
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Kevin Marks

mastodon - Link to source

roland

@KevinMarks @pluralistic phanpy.social is amazing. I support Chee Aun (thanks for the fab phanpy) with a wee 😀 spot of cash monthly. Thanks Chee Aun! @davew 's wordland -> wordpress-> Activity Pub is amazing and basically supports everything AFAICT. Unlimited characters, links, bold text, the whole textcasting thing we lost from blogging!!!!!!! Thanks yet again to you too Dave! <-- All of you know this probably. Just letting the many folks who will read this thread know!
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Cory Doctorow

mastodon - Link to source

JuliesBits 🇺🇲 🍑

@pluralistic
Just keep doing what you're doing in the way you're doing it!

I subscribe to your RSS feed, but also follow you here. I've got a filter in place to filter out your long threads, but am able to see the comments folks post here in response to your posts. Seeing the replies others post often piques my interest enough to open up my RSS feedreader and read your blog post in its entirety.

Thanks for your generosity in sharing your insights so freely in this way.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to Cory Doctorow

mastodon - Link to source

George B

@pluralistic
I have avoided following you because of the long threads but if there's one thing this conversation has shown me it's how to configure my filters to not have that problem.

Another thought although it may be more complicated: what if you have a second account that posts only the long thread blog posts in response to the header from your main account and gets boosted by the main account? Muting an account is a lot more discoverable and easy than configuring a filter

in reply to Jeff Atwood

nodebb - Link to source

julian

Re: Look, Cory, I love you man, but have you considered blogging?

codinghorror@infosec.exchange hey Jeff, to be fair I think pluralistic@mamot.fr has been doing the best with the tooling available at the time.

We're at a place now where that isn't the case, and a different software could be used (like a truly federated forum!!) or at minimum just a server that sends more than 500 characters at a time.

in reply to Cory Doctorow

mastodon - Link to source

Pax Ahimsa Gethen

@pluralistic @julian
Thanks for (re-)sharing the explanation on why you're on that particular server; I wondered about that.

Though I primarily read your blog posts on @medium, I'm glad to follow you on Mastodon because unlike many popular writers, you frequently engage with people in your comments and share posts by others, even randos like myself.

Cory Doctorow reshared this.

in reply to Cory Doctorow

mastodon - Link to source

Lea de Groot TZ+10

@pluralistic @jorgecandeias yeah, thats what i did. Im really pleased when someone boosts part of your threads, and i click through and read the long post 😀 but when i came in to dip my spoon and have a sip of fedi, and my 20 post allowance was almost all the one post in many parts from you… that made me sad.
Much better like this!
But please do continue writing - you are fighting the good fight!
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

Cory Doctorow

@leadegroot @jorgecandeias

I have never, and will never, do SEO.

I don't even keep logs.

I don't know how many people "engage" with my work. I don't compare different headlines. I don't get "open rates" from my newsletter.

I publish the newsletter/blog/feed I would want to read, and I open license it so you can turn it into the newsletter you would want to read.

in reply to Lea de Groot TZ+10

mastodon - Link to source

Cory Doctorow

@leadegroot @jorgecandeias
Again, you're laboring under the severe, total, complete misapprehension that I care about - much less gather - quantifiable and measured engagement.

I.

Do.

Not.

I believe that doing so is a kind of sickness that reduces the quality and authenticity of one's work, and leads to audience capture and other horrors.

You couldn't pay me to do i.

in reply to Cory Doctorow

mastodon - Link to source

Marco

@pluralistic @cavyherd @mekki @KevinMarks @joncruz @jorgecandeias epic.

xkcd-time.fandom.com/wiki/Hugo…

Cory Doctorow accepted the award on behalf of Munroe. Upon reaching the podium he donned a red cape and goggles - the uniform Doctorow is drawn as wearing in xkcd comics

Hugo Award

On August 17, 2014, "Time" won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story at the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) in London.   More information about the Hugo Awards is available on the official website.
Contributors to xkcd Time Wiki (Fandom, Inc.)
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