Converting threaded posts to blog proposal

Based on my incessant posts it’s clear that I’m a fan of littleFedi and the static blog integration. Currently, it is possible to take an existing public post and mark it as a blog post and takes that existing post and all the interaction on it and creates a blog post from it (with the interactions as comments), brilliant.

Desired State

> The idea is that if you end up writing a series of posts and it becomes something that is more meaty and has some value for longevity it can be persisted by simply changing the post type to a blog, after the fact.

This is what I wrote when I first learned about this feature and the more I think about it the more it makes sense for me. The whole premise was that you start writing something and have interactions with others or have updates over time and now it is a “body of work”. How can that be made into a full-on blog post without the venerable copy-paste method. And again, from that original post > it’s cognitively easier to write a series of posts instead of sitting down to write a blog post.

Proposal

A threaded post is a known quantity in the Fedi world and littleFedi does a great job of showing threads. So when editing a post the threaded replies that are either nested replies OR replies to the top post from the original author can be considered for inclusion into the blog post. Making an assumption on which posts should be part of the blog is not possible since the author did not write the posts originally with intent for a blog post. This is a potential way this can be achieved but I can imagine how the implementation can be hairy and supported scenarios could be difficult to define and explain. Here’s a visual to illustrate the idea, I created this with the littleFedi UI and developer tools in Firefox

link to post shown: https://littleone.littlefedi.social/@shom/1ad99f9c-2c9a-47d2-80fa-04399dc477d5

Thoughts/context on Fediverse

The federated universe (Fediverse) is awesome: different applications, networks, sub-cultures all able to interact with each other via a rather lightweight protocol, ActivityPub. It’s this very lightweightness is interesting because not all the servers are architected to be lightweight because they are architected to scale. There’s a lot of debate about the role of centralization, discoverability, “flagship” instances this post isn’t that. BUT, decentralization is a big selling point of ActivityPub and being able to run many small instances on low power hardware democratizes participation. I’m all about that, GoToSocial fits the bill perfectly and I have been very happy hosting it and the team is doing great and thoughtful work.

Why am I excited about littleFedi!?

Well maybe it’s a better idea to talk about what is littleFedi is?! I’ll let Stefano talk about that: littleFedi: a Fediverse Server That Doesn’t Need a Data Centre. That blog is actually served directly by littlFedi and the post was created as any other regular post AND the blog is statically served AND a regular post can be retroactively turned into a blog post AND it supported threaded comments (since it also remains a regular ActivityPub post). littleFedi has a load of other great features as well and I don’t want to take away from that but this is definitely what sets it apart from GoToSocial.

Blogging vs Microblogging

Blogging and maintaining a separate social feed is difficult. The ability to do it all in one platform and also convert existing posts into blog posts if they need to be persisted as a “body of work” is great for folks who don’t want to mess around with tech and just want to share with their community. Also it’s cognitively easier to write a series of posts instead of sitting down to write a blog post and being able to convert it later is great.

What’s next?

I’m on the test instance and have been doing some testing and providing feedback. Stefano is both very prompt and gracious in receiving feedback and fixing issues. The project will be released as a MIT licensed self-hostable application and I plan on trialing a niche community hub (more on that later) using littleFedi. I wish the project well and will be following it closely and eagerly.