We can do better than Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon, by taking the same approach we took with audio in podcasting, with text.

[davew@mastodon.social]

We can do better than Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon, by taking the same approach we took with audio in podcasting, with text.

Predictably, it’s called https://textcasting.org.

[davidbhimself@mastodon.social]

@davew Have you heard about blogging?

[dan@m.danq.me]

@davew So Textcasting is:

1. Rich text of the kind that can be generated by e.g. Markdown (presumably rendered as HTML),
2. Of arbitrary length (author decides), optionally with titles,
3. Editable after the fact,
4. Optionally with enclosures (referenced attachments),
5. Distributed to subscribers, presumably via RSS.

I feel like this might be something you already helped invent and popularise! Textcasting is... blogging!

I'm all in favour of more people doing it, of course, and if calling it "textcasting" makes that happen, that's cool. But I'm not sure this is actually something new...

[davew@mastodon.social]

@dan

It’s not that trivial. The point is we’re using systems like mastodon that omit most of those features, and blogging is missing the good features of twitterlike systems, like masto, Bluesky etc.

You can of course use RSS, but there are other useful transports like websockets.

[davew@mastodon.social]

@DavidBHimself

Yes, of course. I am the OG blogger.

[davew@mastodon.social]

Btw all the people who say textcasting is just blogging, you can apologize after admitting you didn’t read the post. 😀

“We can do better than Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon, by taking the same approach we took with audio in podcasting, with text.”

I don’t see anything about blogging there do you?

[davew@mastodon.social]

This is why you think this is "just" about blogging.

Blogging started before twitter put severe limits on what parts of writing you could use when writing on the web.

That was 19 years ago!

So if you want to trivialize my manifesto, you could say all i want is social media to put back the features twitter took away.

And there's progress --

https://mastodon.social/@scripting@daveverse.org/115241788363705334

Kind of looks like a blog post, but look at where it is. That's thanks to the work Automattic is doing with ActivityPub.

[fahrni@curmudgeon.cafe]

@davew Dave, I believe part of what you’d like to see is a “Show more…” link/button that allows you to expand and collapse your clients view of a post so you can read long posts in line? Some client apps are doing that today, which is really nice.

I wish Mastodon would support Markdown.

[davew@mastodon.social]

@fahrni

i don't care how they deal with it, but yes, Show More is one way.

we do it differently in FeedLand, just click in the text and it shows you all of it. why make the reader aim at anything in particular.

we initially had something like Show More, but this was easier and totally intuitive it turns out.

[bdentzy@mstdn.plus]

@davew @fahrni Personally (and I have no real dog in the hunt), I think that defaulting to showing the entire post would make for a difficult scrolling experience experience with text posts of extremely variable lengths - especially if titles are optional. But to be fair, I’m also not a UX guy. So maybe there are ways to do it.

[davew@mastodon.social]

@bdentzy @fahrni

of course they shouldn't show the whole post. but scroll through the list of posts here on mastodon or any of the social nets, and you'll see lots of big colorful things. when people think about writing taking up too much space, they're not actually looking at the software we use.

[dan@m.danq.me]

@davew I don't want to trivialise your manifesto, and - even though I never really "did" Twitter in the first place (centralised? character limits? nope, not for me!), there've been times that I wished it had some of its original features back (not being such a walled garden, having RSS feeds, etc.).

What I mean to say is that what you're describing seems to me to be the direction blogging's going anyway.

Blogging has never been technologically static: there are countless technologies that grew up with, or alongside, or supported the growth of blogging. Off the top of my head, such technologies (all of which are younger than my blog; i.e. I've seen them be invented and applies to blogs!) include:

• Syndication/subscription tools like RSS, h-feed, and ActivityPub
• Interaction features both centralised (comments, likes) and decentralised (Trackback, Pingback, Webmention)
• Content type differentiation through microformats allowing services to differentiate e.g. recipes from reviews from replies
• Social network building features like FOAF and XFN

Everything you're talking about is good! It just feels like for some of us, we've already put all those jigsaw pieces together to solve the problem! I agree there's more to do, but it feels like we're already moving in the right direction!

That said, it's possible you're addressing a different audience than me! I've possibly put myself in a filter bubble where I'm already liberated from non-interoperable social media silos!

[davew@mastodon.social]

@dan

i see it the same way.

the difference is the user interface.

i've been blogging about this regularly for the last couple of years dan.

here's a piece that explains the big picture.

http://scripting.com/2025/08/28/140604.html