If you've procrastinated downloading your tweets archive from Twitter, I would do it now. It takes up to a day to get it, and who knows if it will change or break in the future.
2023-04-10
Importing tweets to Micro.blog
Today we launched a new feature: importing an archive of your tweets to Micro.blog. This is available to all paid subscriptions and can be accessed on the web under Posts → "..." → Import.
Very early Micro.blog customers may remember that we used to have a Twitter import feature alongside our traditional blog import from WordPress, Tumblr, and other platforms. We disabled this years ago because I kept hearing from people who realized that it was a mess importing tens of thousands of tweets into their new blog. I've taken that feedback to build this new feature into something that I think works much better.
There are a few unique twists with how this works:
- When you import your tweets, we create a new blog in your Micro.blog account just for the tweets. This is in the format username-tweets.micro.blog. There's no extra charge for this blog.
- This new blog stores all your tweets as blog posts. Micro.blog also copies any photos in tweets to this tweets blog.
- A new plug-in is installed that links your existing blog with the tweets blog. This plug-in provides a streamlined interface for browsing tweets by month or searching across all your tweets.
You can see my own tweets on my blog here: manton.org/tweets
Structuring the tweet storage this way means we can leverage many of the powerful features built in to Micro.blog:
- There's a new API that the plug-in uses. You can make your own version of the plug-in from GitHub by copying its HTML and JavaScript. You can even access the API of tweets from apps and blogs outside of Micro.blog.
- The separate tweets blog is a full Micro.blog-hosted blog so you can use custom Hugo templates to make your own web interface for browsing tweets, or add your own domain name to it.
- If you have multiple Twitter accounts, you can create additional blogs for those accounts. The trick is to name the blog with a "-tweets" suffix. (We only include one extra tweets blog for free. The rest will be added to your subscription just like any additional blog.)
Because the storage is just blogs, you can use existing apps to manage the tweets and photos. For example, you can use MarsEdit to download and search all your tweets. It's also easy to zap all your tweets and start over without touching your actual blog.
Some limitations: I've decided to only copy photos from the archive, not other types of media. If you have a lot of photos, expect this to take a long time as Micro.blog extracts the photos from your archive and uploads them to our servers. You can keep an eye on what it's doing on Account → View logs. I expect we may tweak this as we get feedback from more people.
Enjoy! I hope this makes it a little easier to say goodbye to Twitter.
2023-04-11
Substack Notes is interesting but they seem to have forgotten a valuable part of the rest of Substack: content ownership and portability. Your newsletter/blog can be at your own domain name, but "notes" are just another silo on someone else's platform.
2023-04-12
Share extension is back, and better! There's a new beta of Micro.blog 3.0 for iOS with support for sharing photos and links from other apps. Grab it on TestFlight. Note that this is still a beta and there are a couple glitches, for example with cropping photos sometimes.
2023-04-12
Twitter clown car strategy
It’s not all about Elon Musk. Ben Thompson has made variations of this argument on Stratechery and Dithering, but I wanted to quote this segment from the Sharp Tech podcast where I thought Ben particularly nailed it:
Part of the irony of everyone getting upset about Elon Musk killing all the third-party Twitter apps is that that’s what Twitter’s management should have done a decade ago. If you’re going to go in that direction, go in that direction. Instead they didn’t have the guts to sort of follow through in their strategic decision to its logical endpoint.
I stopped posting to Twitter in 2012 exactly because of this strategy. I’ve said that Elon has greatly accelerated what was already the path for Twitter fading into silo irrelevance. I wish I could come up with a less violent analogy, but what comes to mind is Twitter leadership in 2012 loading the gun and pointing it at third-party apps, but it wasn’t until 2023 that anyone pulled the trigger.
Elon deservedly gets most of the blame for Twitter’s recent chaos. But I don’t think Twitter was going to last forever under any version of its clown car leadership over the last 15+ years. In the long run we will be thankful that Elon is effectively putting the company out of its misery. We’re going to see innovation on the open web as third-party developers realize they are the ones who have actually been given new life.
2023-04-12
Daniel Jalkut blogs about Micro.blog’s new tweets import and how it can work with MarsEdit.
2023-04-12
I recorded a video on YouTube showing how Micro.blog's new tweets archive import feature works. It's 6 minutes long and I explain more about how the different parts fit together.
2023-04-13
More and more I find myself keeping ChatGPT open and asking it even dumb questions that Google or DuckDuckGo could answer just as well. "If it's 1pm in California, what time is it in Poland?" Having an ad-free, simple response is nice. This is going to completely upend the search engine business.
2023-04-13
There's a lot of talk about how AI can get facts wrong. That's fair, but in my experience it's correct most of the time. Even when it's slightly off, there's usually some useful truth in the answer. Much more frustrating is voice assistants who can't even begin to give an answer.
2023-04-13
Congrats to Rogue Amoeba on the major update to Farrago. They've done some really nice work in this app.
2023-04-13
Good morning, Austin! At Progress Coffee. ☕️
I've been keeping an eye on our OpenAI bill since we added automatic podcast transcripts for all podcasts hosted on Micro.blog. It's working out great and sustainable. Micro.blog for podcasts is best for solo microcasts anyway. Perfect for quick transcripts and the way our hosting is structured.
2023-04-14
We redesigned the Micro.blog home page this year and it's so much better. Yet I still wonder if we're telling the complete story about what Micro.blog can do. Full blogs. Social network. ActivityPub. Podcast hosting. Newsletters. Tweet import. Hugo. Cross-posting. More open APIs than any platform.
2023-04-14
New episode of Core Intuition is up! On episode 553 we talk about WWDC 2023 tickets, conferences, and Micro.blog's new Twitter import feature.
2023-04-14
Substack Notes moderation
Nilay Patel's Decoder interview with Substack co-founder Chris Best is excellent. If you've only seen the excerpt where Chris declines to answer Nilay's hypothetical moderation question, that clip was not taken out of context. It is exactly how the interview went, but a small part, and they cover a lot about Substack's business and the founder's approach to the web.
I've been interested in Substack since the beginning because I think they get a lot of things right:
- Writers get their own space on the open web. It's an email newsletter, but it's also a blog with its own domain name and RSS feed.
- Writers own their subscription list. They can export email addresses of subscribers and move to another email newsletter platform.
It seems clear from listening to Chris that this focus on identity and portability is no accident. Substack believes in empowering writers, and giving them their own "island" on the web, largely free of platform rules. There is little need for content moderation because readers are actively choosing to subscribe to a writer, not stumbling on random viewpoints that may be offensive or controversial.
Enter Substack Notes:
- Notes uses the same "social graph" as the main Substack platform. You don't follow people in the way you do on Twitter or Mastodon. You subscribe to both their notes and email newsletter, giving the writer your email address.
- Notes is driven by algorithms. By default, the first thing you see is an algorithmic timeline ("Home") that shows you notes from both people you subscribe to and whatever Substack thinks you should see. You can then switch to an alternate timeline ("Subscribed") with people you're following, but even there you will see "restacked" notes or replies from other people.
- Notes has post permalinks at Substack, not at your own domain name. This is a major shift in identity and ownership.
This is a very different design than the rest of Substack. As it grows, Notes will have much more power to amplify viewpoints and be central to how users discover new writers. It will need to be moderated like a traditional social network. It will need some kind of lightweight following model instead of jumping straight to giving a writer your email address.
In the Kickstarter video for Micro.blog in 2017, I talked about how I viewed the distinction between the Micro.blog timeline (the social network) and the blogs we hosted (or that you can host elsewhere):
If we start to separate the publishing from the social network, it unlocks something. It empowers writers to feel like they own their work, even if that's short posts. And it frees social networks to build a safe community, without worrying about censorship, because no matter what the networks do you can always post to a site with your name on it.
This has guided our approach to moderation all along. I expanded on it in several chapters of Indie Microblogging, especially the one called Open gardens. It remains a unique part of how Micro.blog works compared to pretty much every other platform.
Substack could adopt a similar philosophy with Notes. Instead, they seem stuck on... something. I'm honestly not sure why they haven't thought this through in a little more detail.
I'm not rooting for Substack to fail, but I do think Notes needs changes. And while I'm offering unsolicited advice, they should drop the "building a new economic engine for culture" tag line. It means nothing. Forget about the VC money, the drama, whatever is happening with Twitter, and get heads down to build something that makes the web better.
2023-04-14
Dave Winer writes about the Twitter API changes:
Corporate platforms always fail, given enough time. The Twitter API had a good run. Now the deck is clear, and there’s room to make some new stuff, or just take a break and smell the roses a bit, or go for a bike ride. 🤪
This seems like the right attitude to me too, even if it's frustrating to deal with platforms failing. When one door closes, another opens.
2023-04-15
For folks trying Micro.blog's Twitter import, note that the tweets page is just a web page, so you can add intro text or other formatting if you want to. I added a little intro to mine here to give some context.
2023-04-15
Another unexpected use for ChatGPT: asking it for examples of using command-line tools like rsync for specific scenarios. Faster than digging through a man page.
2023-04-15
Didn't get much feedback about my Substack blog post yesterday, so I started to doubt myself. I wrote it quickly and glossed over some details. But that's how it is with blogs... Sometimes you put things out in the world and hardly anyone notices. That's okay! Still worth it. On to the next post.
2023-04-15
We pushed a new Micro.blog beta out to TestFlight, improving blog selection to move the list of blogs to the toolbar area. Here's a partial screenshot of what it looks like.
Happy Monday, everyone. Starting the week at Progress Coffee again. ☕️
Some great NBA playoff games over the weekend. Too many injuries, though. Can't believe Tyler Herro hit that 3-point shot with a broken hand. Shooters gonna shoot. 🏀
2023-04-17
