I took a screen shot of this post, gave it to Claude, asked it to write a short paragraph summary. Then I asked it to rewrite with using no more than 300 chars, the limit on Bluesky. Now I can post the summary there, but I won't, at the moment of truth I had to disclose this wasn't written by me, and it was 290 chars and there wasn't enough room for that. And here's a screen shot of the conversation with Claude.#
There was a long discussion last night on Bluesky about whether twitter-like apps should show blog posts in addition to tweet-size things. Should it have a character limit, allow titles, links, bold, italic, editing, enclosures, markdown, etc? This is a permathread, it's been going since 2006. I didn't contribute, because there are no new ideas at this point, except this -- there are readers and writers and they have different needs. #
As a reader sometimes I want a concise intro to the idea and I'll decide if I want to read more.#
As a writer, I want to write in one place, and broadcast it out the world, and let their reading app decide for them if this is something they want to read based on whether it has a title, is over 300 chars, has links or uses styling, or if the writer doesn't disclaim editing, and the reader doesn't like editing. #
We can do a lot better than the hard restrictions our reading environments force on us. It's now 20 years since the inception of Twitter, I think we know enough now to try out some new approaches. There should be a million readers, and they all read the same content flows. They can look at a post and see if it meets the reader's limits, and only show it if it does. If a post has a title and we don't want posts with titles, don't show it. Then writers could all use exactly the writing tools we like, and it wouldn't matter where you read it.#
This route has always been there, but now I think people will be open to trying out some new ideas. #
PS: This is the post linking to this piece on Bluesky. Wrote that post in their editor. #
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)
