It's "freedom of speech without freedom of reach". Or whatever buzz phrase we're using to describe it, these days.
That's what I'm talking about because that's what it will take. No one has shown me anything like that, yet. Screenshots will be fine! But planet doesn't seem to do what I'm asking for, based on my (admittedly brief) look at it.
Or, you know, be a shill and carry on with Twitter. :)
Most of the planets I know are usually maintained by group of people who already have their discussions sorted out in a different ways via mailing lists, forums, subreddits ... (eg. http://fedoraplanet.org/), so this is not something I have seen elsewhere.
It could be a value in this, esp. since people are less and less willing to maintain and moderate comments on their own blog sites, but for the same reason, it would not be that easy to bootstrap a community in this way, as someone will have to be responsible for it's operation, moderation, fighting spam and so on.
But I guess I should be more clear about the pitch because I know it's a little obtuse. Rather than thinking about a centralized blogging platform as the solution, I see that as only one part (the lesser part) of the solution. The other part is the aggregation sites.
So, for the centralized blogging, you get seamless, free, hosted (no domain), and ANONYMOUS blogging (no registrations to track you). Easy sign up, collects many users, and broadcasts them to the aggregation sites.
The aggregation site, on the other hand, doesn't do any moderation, doesn't do any comment handling, doesn't do any filtering. It just collects a list of urls that people want to subscribe to (so that those urls can be advertised to others), and negotiates with those blog urls to get the other endpoints that will allow for realtime commenting and interaction with the blog, itself.
The centralized blog would be a lot like twitter, and it would handle its own content moderation, just like any large host would.
But "power users" would have their own blogs which, when rendered as iframes, provides them with the entire publishing power of the internet. That kind of richer content serves as a reason for people who want to make a living on the internet to move away from the centralized blog(s; no reason others couldn't advertise their own apis to the aggregates; twitter included!) and on to their own servers.
So yeah! I see some value there, at least. An 'on-ramp to self publishing', as it were. Without the ever-present threat that your host can de-platform you (without recourse).
This Closure Planet is still active - https://planet.clojure.in I designed the theme about a decade ago as a fork from my website, and it still is holding strong today.
Does this type of aggregation allow for commenting and interaction?
Does this type of aggregation notify a user when they have commented on a blog in their feed and someone has responded to them?
Does this type of aggregation provide ad-impressions for the syndicated content?
Is this type of aggregation as simple to start with as it is to write your first tweet?
Again, I don't mean to be dismissive. I'm just trying to get across that what I'm talking about is a REPLACEMENT for social media. It's not some libertarian/technologist idea of what would be BETTER. It's harnessing the momentum that we know we have and focusing that into better technologies. But it has to work the same, or it's just another "hey guys, we should try this instead", which doesn't inspire a lot of my confidence (ymmv).
The notification that my website is discussed in another corner of the Internet is, I believe, what the Fediverse[1] is trying to do.
Ad-impression and revenue share has always been there. I can push ads via my RSS Feed, which used to be very popular and lucrative for good readership blogs.
It is definitely not easy to just start off but now I'm beginning to think, you are making fun. Anyways, it takes a village to build and maintain Twitter.
Case in point: grandmas use facebook, but they don't use hackernews. Grandmas will use a site that works like facebook, but will not create blogs or do even one extra step other than "sign up" and "write text into a box"/"upload images from their camera".
Social media isn't all journalists and the terminally online. I'm picking on "grandmas", but those dudes that sit in their truck and record political rants on tiktok apply as well. These people need an immediate outlet, and these are the biggest percentage of users (by consumption, rather than content production). MOST people just want to comment. The internet loves a peanut gallery, and god do people love to participate. So comments and realtime interactivity have to be a priority.
Moving on; I'm glad to hear that ads are available via RSS! I genuinely didn't know (though, I suspected they could be snuck in there, if it wasn't 'technically' a feature). I wonder, though, if they're modern enough to be useful? I doubt RSS can do pre-roll video content, or interstitial video ad insertion? If so, that's pretty great! But I think you'd need stuff like that for people who - say - posted webcomics and wanted to monetize that with video ads before and after their "articles". Or news outlets that wanted to share their latest "headline" clip.
As far as the fediverse, I like a lot of what it has done, but my concerns remain there, too. It's close to what we need, as far as decentralization goes, but it isn't seamless, yet, and it's simply NOT being picked up by the general public. My guess on that is because of the extra steps involved (again, grandmas and mirrored-sunglasses-bros). But I don't claim to be an expert there.
I used to design apps/programs for Pocket PC[1] Devices for Physicians in the USA, so they can be paid better and faster with lesser errors in the early part of 2000s. I heard the system being still used 10-15 years later. So, imagine building products for tiny screens with very limited power with lots of regulations/restrictions for grumpy physicians who wants to get paid on time. :-)
And yes, I also build Apps/Programs for Teachers so they can generate unlimited fun lessons for kids in 3-6 grades. Imagine making it easy and fun for the teachers to in turn use the tools to generate fun lessons for kids. I heard that thing won BAFTA and stuffs but I never looked back. :-)
It was fun.
Your desire to replicate all the ills of Facebook elsewhere is worse than staying on Facebook.
Curious, what is your basis for this assertion that "realtime" is the primary reason for social media? I think "realtime" has created this incessant need to watch and feed the machine. That has been an interesting diversion for a while, but I can't see it as healthy long term, IMO. I, and many others I know, check up on friends once or twice a day and then got on with our actual lives. With a less frenetic and more sane model of interaction, "realtime" is way down the list of important attributes.
So yeah. My opinion on the role of constant contact in a healthy society notwithstanding, there is a consumer hunger for it and while I can see it contracting, I can't see it ever going away to a point that it shouldn't be a design priority.
its called rss
Show me a site doing this (with rss or without) and I'll be happy to evangelize it!
but video ads? none for me thanks.
Edited to add:
As far as write.as, I like what they've done! I just want more rich content, rather than just text. That's kind of RSS's deal, too. Only text, all the time (exceptions make the rule). There's value in sharing all kinds of content, rather than just text.
Regarding your request for (interactive) commenting allover this thread (just joking), Hey Homepage will soon enable simple and accessible commenting features (in the background based on simple email).
In such cases, there is no backend to do any of what you're describing. But it's still a blog.
Note that this backend-less approach is actually quite common with blogs; it's one large reason that client-JS-driven embedded commenting systems like Discourse are popular with blogs.
I believe that has all the features you listed as wants.
I am kind of half joking but people do have very specific ways they want to consume content even if it is the same content.
I feel like this is 99.9% tackled by existing ActivityPub implementations. There are already a wide variety of clients (and servers) out there with lots of different capabilities, ways of reading/browsing, that suit a variety of consuming styles. Interaction is well-goverened in the spec itself & quite capable.
I would like to see a little more richer-media content. I am pretty partial to toot-threads myself but having more than just text+image post-threads seems like a pretty harsh technical limit. That said, my enemy in RSS feeds is when sites publish heavily stylized content; it's so gross having these blobs of content that don't fit well in my feed.
The TikTok algorithm but for RSS would be a winner.
If you're serious about people "just starting blogs" you need a proof of concept that centralizes various blogs into an updating feed of subscribed blogs.
This isn't insurmountable. It's actually pretty simple, in a technical sense. The real trick is to get blogs to play along by providing an api endpoint that will enable a feeds to be generated in the ways that people use them (latest, hashtags, interest relevancy, searchability, etc), as well as endpoints that allow users to interact with them (comments, notifications, etc). Some of that is currently done with RSS, others will need a new (preferably less verbose) form of syndication.
You could even use simple iframes as the delivery mechanism for the blog content, that way the blogs still get their ad-impressions. So long as the posts showed up in a curated feed, without needing to actually click through to anything, it would be fine. The only other thing you would need is a sign-up process that is as simple as facebook or twitter. To the point where you might not even be sure you're creating a "blog", if that wasn't your explicit intention.
So yeah; when that platform/protocol becomes available, I'd say blogs are the silver bullet! Until then, the idea that we should all go back to scouring the net for bookmark-able content, or dealing with the static interaction of an RSS feed, is a non-starter. We didn't make/choose social media because it was useless. We did it because it was easy. That has to be a priority in any suggested alternative.