My microblogging has moved to MeWe

I should have announced this here sooner.

Following the demise of G+, my microblogging has moved to MeWe.

Find me at https://mewe.com/profile/5a66494451ee975004c3cdf8

Why MeWe? Technically I would have preferred a Federation platform, but MeWe had an importer for my G+ content. It lost the video links, alas, but text and still links from G+ are in my timeline.

35 comments

  1. This means you stop posting here at esr.ibiblio.org or will this stay a backup copy?

    MeWe doesn’t support RSS feeds to follow feeds which is kinda bad for anybody who uses a feed reader. Am I mistaken? Or is there a meta-service that converts the posts to an RSS feed (such exists for twitter, e.g.).

    1. >This means you stop posting here at esr.ibiblio.org or will this stay a backup copy?

      No. I do essay-length stuff here and will continue to.

      >MeWe doesn’t support RSS feeds to follow feeds which is kinda bad for anybody who uses a feed reader. Am I mistaken? Or is there a meta-service that converts the posts to an RSS feed (such exists for twitter, e.g.).

      I don’t know of one.

    2. Don’t expect anything to support RSS in 2019. RSS is like XMPP: great for the users, terrible for the business because then they can’t silo you in and upsell you on their incompatible extensions. Therefore, it won’t be supported.

  2. And did young Stephen sicken,
    And did young Stephen die?
    And did the sad hearts thicken,
    And did the mourners cry?

    No; such was not the fate of
    Young Stephen Dowling Bots;
    Though sad hearts round him thickened,
    ‘Twas not from sickness’ shots.

    No whooping-cough did rack his frame,
    Nor measles drear, with spots;
    Not these impaired the sacred name
    Of Stephen Dowling Bots.

    Despised love struck not with woe
    That head of curly knots,
    Nor stomach troubles laid him low,
    Young Stephen Dowling Bots.

    O no. Then list with tearful eye,
    Whilst I his fate do tell.
    His soul did from this cold world fly,
    By falling down a well.

    They got him out and emptied him;
    Alas it was too late;
    His spirit was gone for to sport aloft
    In the realms of the good and great.

    (Also this and John C. Wright’s comment section are the best fora for discussion.)

  3. Yech. Briefly pops up your page, then obnoxiously redirects me to a login page. I was going to have a look for an RSS feed or similar, but it seems they only want me as a reader if I create an account.

  4. It briefly popped up the page and then redirected to the hard-sell, time-share page or whatever that is.

    Such a shame. You should really move it to the Fediverse. Mastodon (and I think Pleroma) have RSS feeds too.

    1. >Such a shame. You should really move it to the Fediverse. Mastodon (and I think Pleroma) have RSS feeds too.

      Can anything in the Fediverse import my G+ timeline?

      1. As far as I know, not directly. However, if your G+ content is available as RSS, then feed2toot can easily pump it over.

        If that doesn’t work, there are plenty of Mastodon libraries that can be used to iterate over the G+ content, which I believe is easily exported as JSON. And the Mastodono/Pleroma API is just REST if you didn’t want to use those libraries.

        I’m not a G+ user, but it might be that such a simple tool would be useful to a lot of G+ refugees.

        1. >As far as I know, not directly. However, if your G+ content is available as RSS, then feed2toot can easily pump it over.

          It isn’t. What I have is the Google Takeout dump, which is a huge blob of JSON.

          I’d be open to moving off MeWe to the Fediverse if there were some way to take that stuff with me.

          1. Alright, got my hands on a Takeout dump. It is not apparent how to marry up the image files to the posts, but it would be possible to upload posts and media.

            The only one gotcha is that there does not seem to be a way to backdate the posts. One simple solution might be to prepend/append something like “Originally posted on G+ on XXXX/YY”

            I can probably hack it together in Ruby if you’re serious about moving to the Fediverse.

            1. >Alright, got my hands on a Takeout dump. It is not apparent how to marry up the image files to the posts, but it would be possible to upload posts and media.

              On G+ you could only have one image or video per post. So as long as the image/video links are associated with the posts seems like it ough to be possible to append them to the post content in such a way that the right thing would happen.

              Hm. Could we find a Fediverse engine we could talk into supporting this? See below…

              >I can probably hack it together in Ruby if you’re serious about moving to the Fediverse.

              I an really annoyed about MeWe requiring readers to have a login, so that’s reason to move. But the reason you should think about that hack isn’t just me, it’s a boatload of G+ users who were drawn onto MeWe by their import feature.

              I’d certainly be interested in collaborating with you on some testing. If we can get a clean upload of takeout data to somewhere in the Fediverse I think a lot of people besides me would use it. Do you think we can find a Fediverse site admin who’d collaborate on the testing?

              1. Your point about other G+ users is a good one.

                I’m an admin for masto.rootdc.xyz, so I can do the back and forth necessary to get something going.

                Shoot me an email, and I’ll give you a heads up when I have some code.

  5. Serious question, ESR: what features would a microblogging framework that published directly to, say, AWS, require in order for you to use it?

    I imagine it’d need to:

    1. Regenerate a (static?) index page.
    2. Update an RSS feed.
    3. … anything else?

    So you could do something like:

    cat message.md | mb-post

    … and voila! Like magic, a new post appears a minute or two later.

    I ask because I have sufficient experience w/ publishing Web content to AWS that it wouldn’t be (too) difficult to write such a tool. You’d need an AWS account, and a domain, … and not much else actually.

    1. >1. Regenerate a (static?) index page.
      >2. Update an RSS feed.
      >3. … anything else?

      Comments are the big deal, I think.

        1. Though actually, it looks like the Mastodon folks may already have a better solution. As appealing as a direct-to-AWS publication tool would be, I think the advantages would be outweighed by the benefits of joining a federated network like Mastodon.

          Your thoughts?

          1. Though actually, it looks like the Mastodon folks may already have a better solution. As appealing as a direct-to-AWS publication tool would be, I think the advantages would be outweighed by the benefits of joining a federated network like Mastodon.

            Yes.

            The federated network that includes the Mastodon constellation started way back in 2008 at the latest, and we’ve had to go through several iterations of protocol design and battle-testing over the last decade+ (no to mention everything else involved in growing software and its userbases); building the mechanisms, and a deployed base of compatible software, and a community of users turned out to all be…, well, a quite harder problems than one can reasonably expect to just solve on the back of cocktail napkin.

            Answering “how would you like comments to work?” has itself been a long, hard process.

            Now we’re at some combination of OStatus + ActivityPub (the two have different featuresets–with enough overlap between them that we can all communicate, but still enough non-overlapping that neither protocol outright wins at this point).

            I was going to encourage you to leave the `website’ napkin and look more into what we’ve been doing all these years, but it looks like you’ve just joined at mastodon.social. Welcome to the network.

            Now how do we convert esr and all of the other Google+ exiles? And do we now need to convert the MeWe users?

            1. >and a community of users turned out to all be…, well, a quite harder problems than one can reasonably expect to just solve on the back of cocktail napkin.

              Have you turfed out the censorious SJW site admins yet? Because that’s what worries me about getting involved with Mastodon. I don’t have the time to spend on fighting hellbans because someone’s got his knickers in a twist.

  6. MeWe is shit, just provide a link to your old stuff somewhere on your new profile and use a federated platform like Mastodon. You will almost certainly have a better experience in the long run.

    I make this recommendation, almost certain it won’t be followed because the decision ya se hizo, out of vast love.

  7. There is Pluspora, a Diaspora* pod for former Google+ users, supposedly with import from G+. It is a federated platform (for The Federation, not the Fediverse like Mastodon).

    HTH.

    1. >There is Pluspora, a Diaspora* pod for former Google+ users, supposedly with import from G+.

      I have an account there. I never found a G+ import feature.

      >(for The Federation, not the Fediverse like Mastodon)

      Wait. These are different things?

      1. >Wait. These are different things?

        In the sense that Diaspora speaks the Diaspora protocol, whereas Mastodon, Pleroma, etc… speak ActivityPub and/or OStatus. I don’t think I’v ever seen a Diaspora post on any other platform, whereas it is quite common to see Pleroma posts while using Mastodon, etc…

        https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse/

  8. That’s sad, but I absolutely can’t read your posts without creating an account there. The site also does not work with javascript disabled.

    Joining the chorus here, please come to the Fediverse (but keep away from some SJW-infested instances: QOTO and mastodon.sdf.org seems to be good ones).

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