- It was smart for Medium to embrace Mastodon.#
- It gets people talking about Medium again.#
- What comes next? Setting up a Masto-instance is easy. #
- Will Substack, who stole Medium's thunder, be next to embrace Mastoicism?#
- Maybe Mastodon will become WordPress? Just support Markdown and get rid of the character limit and Masto is almost there. #
- I spend a lot of time every day using Mastodon and use WordPress only when i'm testing for compatibility with WordPress. Mastodon is much closer to what I think a centralized blogging host should be.#
- I keep wondering how this will evolve. #
- Meanwhile I'm working every day on FeedLand. Quietly. 😄#
- One thing is for sure -- ActivityPub is complicated.#
- It would be a very hard job I imagine to make Medium an ActivityPub node. #
- I'm not sure ActivityPub gets you all that much, btw.#
- I'm still betting heavy on RSS, just enough syndication.#
- Just some random end-of-day thoughts.#
- TL;DR: RSS is how we move documents around the web. That it works so poorly is because the big social media companies want it that way. We need products and services with big installed bases to serve as counterweights and help pull RSS out of corp-tech control.#
- How I got there...#
- Yesterday I wrote something provocative about WordPress. #
- HiMY SYeD read it, and commented, on Mastodon: #
- My first response was:#
- After pondering a bit...#
- There are other products that could claim ownership of RSS -- like Google Reader, which still controls the market almost 10 years after its demise.#
- And Twitter, by not supporting RSS is also a big definer of RSS, in a negative way.#
- I think we'll be on solid ground once RSS defines itself and the products get out of the way.#
- And I think that's the key point#
- RSS has never had a chance to be itself. #
- Right from the start, all kinds of people and companies sought to own it. No one succeeded at that, but each of them diluted it, added confusion, took some of its power away and gave back nothing in return. Very typical approach of tech to open tech they didn't create. #
- Until we can get RSS leading, as itself, and not being carved up and controlled, we won't really have a good way of moving documents around the web, which is what RSS is for, btw, imho. #
- All the usual disclaimers apply.#
- PS: I hope people at WordPress read this. Right now they're in the best position to help RSS if they're inclined to do so. There aren't many companies I would credit with possibly wanting to do that. Slack was one, and Automattic is another. I still have to write the howto doc for what it would take for that to happen, subject to discussion of course. #
- I got my 2015 MacBook Pro. Two problems to start.#
- It came with Mojave installed. I got this machine because the software I want to use specifically does not run on Mojave. I didn't realize this until after I had copied a huge number of files to the machine via Time Machine backup. I will have to do this again.#
- Today they're selling the same $600 machine on Amazon for $389. I wish I had an idea what the price range was. I could have waited a few days. I thought $600 was a good deal, but it's a ripoff.#
- Anyway, so I thought this morning I'll just copy a High Sierra installer to the hard drive and run it, but Mojave won't run it. The app is there, but it's grayed out. Who knows why. Presumably it won't run on this machine. #
- Next up I went into Recovery mode to install the OS that's in ROM, it was El Capitan. As the machine is rebooting after install it freezes with a totally cryptic error message. Here's a photo. #
- After restarting, the message is gone. I found I couldn't restore from a Time Machine backup because it comes from a machine more advanced than El Capitan. So I then did the minimum to get the machine to boot up, went into the System Preferences app, turned on file sharing and copied an install app for High Sierra. It's running it now. #
- Update: After a lot more bullshit work, I think I'm pretty close to having the laptop working the way I need it to. If so, I will be able to travel and still keep up with my development projects. #
