Author: Aulia Masna

Former tech journo, used to write for Macworld, DailySocial, e27. Ex , ran a national startup initiative program in Indonesia. Very much into the news.

Mirror time!

I’ve got a blog at another place that I doesn’t support RSS so I’ve been thinking of importing them here or to Medium, but Medium looks too serious and sophisticated for something like my blog. I also thought about reviving my Blogger account but too much time has passed and it’s just a whole different vibe now, so I guess Tumblr wins (or lose).

Initially I was going to have different content on different platforms but it would be too impractical and inconvenient. I’ll be going through one site looking for stuff I may have posted somewhere else and waste too much time.

The plan is to post all of the entries here as is and then backdate them so they appear in the correct order.

I haven’t used Tumblr from the web for a long time, been almost exclusively on the mobile app for years. Turns out the web interface is just so much more elaborate and lets you do so many more things, like backdating a post.

Calls for the return of personal blogs are getting louder

I restarted blogging a month and a half ago here on this channel having taken time out away from Twitter and since then I’ve seen more and more people either returning to blogging or calling for the return of personal blogging.

A few days ago I saw this site by Ash Huang and Ryan Putnam, Bring Back Blog, looking for people to join their movement. Their reasons are the same as why I started blogging again, the Internet community was much better when people posted longer, more complete thoughts for the public to read instead of easy to twist bits and pieces, and the responses being equally thoughtful and on their own spaces as well.

Launching your newsreader in the morning and going through the feeds was a shared experience among internet users way back when but the web culture seems to have kind of moved on from there. We’re supposed to reduce the layers between publishing and public conversation and it seems the incorporation of the social web would be a fundamental part of it.

Twitter was ideal for information exchange, entertainment, and quick conversations but turns out it’s terrible for legitimate exchange of thoughts and ideas even if it’s taken 16 years for many people, myself included, to finally shake it off. 

The rise of Mastodon shines the spotlight on ActivityPub and other social protocols like it which means we could be on the verge of a new internet era especially as Automattic and Flickr are considering its integration to their products.

A second piece I saw was this post from The Verge, asking for the same thing with the same reasons with the added point of being able to control your own content and presence. I’ll just repost her argument that drives home the point of personal blogging.

Buy that domain name. Carve your space out on the web. Tell your stories, build your community, and talk to your people. It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be fancy. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It doesn’t need to duplicate any space that already exists on the web — in fact, it shouldn’t. This is your creation. It’s your expression. It should reflect you. 

*[update] I’d be remiss to not mention this post by Ernie Smith, formerly of shortformblog, from 2019, about reviving blogs. Have a read through it.

Social Media Diversity Gets Reinvigorated

I think I’m pretty happy that one of the major things that came out of 2022 was the implosion of Twitter which opened up a whole range of other destinations for the social web that may have always been there but saw little attention.

The social space is exciting again with people flocking to places like Mastodon, Post, and Tumblr and the federated space is getting far more attention than ever. 

In a lot of ways it seemed to have brought back some of the web development energy of the 2000s as people began to rethink what’s possible.

Much of the development back then was fueled by VC money which ultimately halted many innovations in pursuit of growth and dominance so it remains to be seen how this new energy is going to be funded. I have doubts that crowdfunding will be able to generate the necessary resources without being supported by other forms. 

What that would be I guess is something that we’ll eventually find out in the coming years if the stance against capitulating to VC demands becomes more widely adopted.

anakinskywalkerog:

happy holidays and may the kylo be with you 🎄

Movie studios could be liable for releasing misleading trailers

Two Ana de Armas fans successfully sued Universal for not featuring the actress in the movie Yesterday despite being part of the trailers, after they rented the movie to watch at home.

This is dangerous territory. Trailers come out months before the final cut of the movie gets approved and often there are rewrites and reshoots.

The judge said the ruling is limited to whether an actor or actress and scenes are in the movie. Teasers and trailers are made and released based on what’s available to the trailer editors at the time which does not include decisions to alter the movie down the line.

One of the most obvious examples is Rogue One which had an extensive third act rewrite and therefore reshoots after several trailers were released. Tony Gilroy, who took over from Gareth Edwards, made substantial changes to the movie that several footage from the trailers didn’t make it to the movie. Promoted scenes were dropped. 

The American legal scene is crazy enough that based on this ruling someone can sue Disney for not including the train station scene from the trailer in the movie.

If a trailer is actually deceptively released, with a “malicious” intent of lying to the audience about aspects of the movie, sure, you can claim false advertising but you have to prove intent. 

I feel like we’re going to hear much more about this sooner than later. Like how Universal’s undoubtedly expensive lawyers failed to make convincing arguments. 

If you’re going to watch a movie at home, especially one that supposedly features your favorite actress, I feel like you should have the time to at least look it up on IMDb or read reviews. The movie had been out for months, reviews had been published, and her being dropped from the movie was widely known by the time it made the home release. Ignorance shouldn’t be a reason for winning lawsuits.

Unless this ruling gets thrown out on appeal, it could change how studios promote movies. Trailers would have to be crafted around potential lawsuits from late changes to the movie. 

Ana de Armas Fans’ Lawsuit Puts Studios at Risk Over Deceptive Trailers

Mastodon’s Moment of Truth

Despite the apparent mass migration of Twitter users to Mastodon in the past several weeks, I don’t feel that this network has experienced anything like the 2009 Hudson River moment when a plane landed in the water and its pilot, Captain Sully, became sort of a household name after Twitter users began sharing photos of the plane and the rescue/evacuation attempt that followed.

In Indonesia that moment was the 2009 twin bombing in Kuningan, Jakarta. It thrusted Twitter to national prominence when terrorists bombed the Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels and a survivor live tweeted the entire moment starting from the explosions near the coffee shops of both hotels.

I’ve read people describe the vibe of Mastodon being like Twitter circa 2010 but to me it still feels a little earlier than that. On the other hand maybe it doesn’t need a moment like that because people already understood how it works in general. 

Mastodon is a network that, while technically different to Twitter, serves similar functions, which means unless there are more migration level events or perceived existential threats to Twitter, the general public won’t fly the coop.

The appeal of the elephant site right now is the ability to fully isolate undesirables and to be where people like Elon Musk have no control but if you and your community aren’t affected by their shenanigans (not necessarily due to political leanings or social views but because for you it’s like looking at foreign news on TV), there’s no reason to move because everything still works just fine. Moving there means doing the same thing at a different place which has slightly different features but with more technical barriers.

Yes, the technical barriers exist and not just from the need to choose servers but things like finding out who to follow (because people’s followings are limited), posts not being carried over when moving servers, inconsistent display of metrics, having to follow accounts before you can add them to lists, etc. 

It certainly doesn’t work as a 1:1 replacement and people looking for that won’t see the appeal. Mastodon’s pull factor has to be something else and the reasons will be different from one person or community to the next. 

One thing’s for sure, both sites are about the communities, without which, they won’t survive, let alone thrive. A social network is its people, not the features or the platform. 

Mastodon’s features and platform may help support a healthier community but as long as the community leads, public figures, or thought leaders haven’t moved over, the majority of the population won’t either.

Matt Mullenweg is probably the ideal web company CEO

Automattic has been running for 17 years. The company is home to nearly two dozen brands and products powering or leveraging the web, including WordPress, WordPress VIP, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Simplenote, Day One, PocketCasts, and Tumblr.

When Automattic purchased Tumblr, they somehow managed to pay just $3 million from Verizon who got it as part of its acquisition of Yahoo. Tumblr was a billion dollar company at one point and since 2019 it belongs to a multibillion dollar company.

The transaction cost for us buying Tumblr was de minimis. But it was a deal in which we took on all of its liabilities and all of its legal cases, we kept all the employees and all the costs to run it. Tumblr was, and still is, burning quite a bit of cash.

Matt said Automattic was prepared to pay $100 million but they managed to only spend $3 million. Sounds like a steal? Well, in the three years since the acquisition Tumblr was being cleaned up from the inside. 85% of the team joined after the acquisition and he’s had to reorganize the company to reassign staff because Tumblr has to downsize to 50-60 people to match their revenue before they can go up again.

From the interview it sounded like he didn’t let people go but reassigned them to the other products under Automattic.

Matt understands that the web is a decentralized network built on protocols. He also understands talent is also decentralized. Automattic allows its staff to work from anywhere and no longer has a physical office since shutting down its headquarters in 2017. Everyone who works at WordPress (even Matt) has to spend time handling customer support to understand their pain points.

Understanding what decentralized entails is core to Matt’s goals for the web. It’s why the idea of federating Tumblr and WordPress sites and pages and allow those sites and pages to be connected to join the federated network and become the social web is one of the company’s top priorities and when you run a social web company, content moderation is key.

I would say that it is about 20 percent pruning out the bad stuff as if you’re weeding a garden and about 80 percent encouraging the things that you want to grow. It definitely needs to be a long-term thing. You need to water it every day, but the results are going to happen over months or years.

Tumblr recently reopened itself to adult content but it’s doing so in a more careful and controlled manner to accommodate the needs of those working or with interest in the adult industry and those wishing to keep their neighborhood safe for children and acceptable at work.

Tumblr, WordPress, and Automattic may not be as glitzy and glamorous as other major web companies but more than 40% of websites run on WordPress today and they’re quietly marching towards 80% by embracing openness and decentralization.

When TechCrunch interviewed Matt as the new CEO of Automattic in 2014, he said, “The power of the web is not in centralization, it’s not in closed systems or anything like that. It’s in its open nature and that’s what allowed it to flourish for the first 10 or 15 years”

Someone wake Instagram’s Twitter admin up. They haven’t posted in days.

The suspensions of journalists from Twitter should have been a wake up call for media organizations 

There were just too many things going on about Twitter over the past week and all of them absurd. I’m happy that John Gruber took the time to summarize it all and even added the parts about Tesla and Jack Dorsey that I might not have touched on. 

I was in the Spaces discussion hosted by Buzzfeed reporter Katie Notopoulos but left just before Elon joined. At that point I was too upset at Jason Calacanis insisting on hypotheticals and the journalists refusing to answer one question so the discussion could move forward. Had I stayed I might have caught Elon rage quitting mid question.

This should have been a moment in which media companies realized and took a stand for their social presence instead of hoping or demanding that the suspension of their reporters’ accounts be lifted. The CNN statement is stronger but only by a smidgen.

This is an opportunity for media outlets to take control of their own social presence and join the fediverse. I touched on the issue last month in my post about the need for identity authentication but by hosting their own social presence, not only will companies be hosting their own and their own staff’s posts, they are not beholden to the rules, limitations, issues, or restrictions of other people’s platforms. 

The online social presence of media companies or any organization in general doesn’t even have to take the form of established platforms. They can create and design their own and still be connected to the federated network thanks to ActivityPub, the protocol that allows such things to happen.

Imagine Washington Post’s website address looking like washingtonpost dot wordpress dot com or their work emails looking like jbezos at gmail. Of course they have their own website and email with official corporate addresses.

For organizations with a half decent tech team, setting up and managing a fediverse presence is trivial. It’s time for them to take control of their own social presence.

Expanding Twitter’s Character Limit. Again.

The point of Twitter was its brevity. The need to conform to SMS standards was why it was limited to 140 characters with 20 set aside for the username. Five years ago they raised it to 280 long after it no longer needed to match SMS and now they apparently want to raise it again to 4,000. 

Some time after Twitter allowed people post up to 280 characters they said the majority of tweets don’t reach the limit but they never said how popular threads were and how long was the average thread. Twitter has always been more suited for story tellers so it makes sense to let people write longer posts.

Twitter’s reach and discoverability was a major selling point to bloggers and journalists to share their thought streams and link to their work. It’s why they were among the early adopters of Twitter alongside the startup crowd.

Letting people post long tweets is basically coopting the blogging experience, essentially telling people that they can just post everything there, not bothering with links. Most people don’t blog anymore so that’s moot but people do share stories and they make long Twitter threads, which means threads are going to go away. 

Twitter’s plan to release Notes (Twitter Write) was in early stages before the takeover and it was a full blogging experience with embedded images, captions, and titles but they were going to be separate from the regular tweets, a lot like Instagram’s Guide, which was likely inspired by Twitter Moments. Curious how they’re going to roll it out now after the people who worked on it are no longer around. 

It would be relatively easy to just expand the character limit but it’s also lazy. Turning Twitter into a full blown story telling or blogging platform would make more sense and it may serve to head off the migration to other platforms like Tumblr or Mastodon (face it, Google’s Blogger just isn’t a thing anymore) but that’s only looking at it from a product perspective. 

The return and increase of right wing political radicals on Twitter is a major turn off for many people and many have jumped over to other platforms. However there are crowds that are not affected directly by these groups, can’t afford to switch platforms for whatever reason, or simply chose to stay. They may still stick around, oblivious or dismissive to what’s happening, and most likely be taking advantage of the new features instead of jumping to another platform. 

Change is challenging and it’s not just about features or environment. Leaving your playground or asking people to move to a new one is not easy. The push factors need to be stronger than the pull factors and if people don’t feel the need to move, they won’t, no matter how much you try to convince them. Letting people write even longer tweets could be a reason for people to stay.