Thread by @squidlord

Today has been a frustrating wrestle with technology and trying to decide what the best method for writing my ideas down going forward really is.

Social media in general is a bloody mess.

The center of my writing life has been @obsdmd for a while. Having a personal wiki with links which are automatically managed, a visual graph of related topics and ideas, integration with other writing tools – honestly it's a perfect environment.

What I would really like to do is to get Obsidian Publish and simply push my notes and new articles up to the network with all of the links and references and notes and interconnections that create a rich experience.

The problem with that is that despite me being on board as a paying customer from the beginning, I didn't get into the Publish side of things to grab that early discount. So we be talking $100 a year.

And that ain't chicken feed.

Especially for a web interface to the writing which doesn't have a comment system, isn't connected with IndieWeb tools so that if someone else references something I wrote in their own space, I get notified and it just works like a comment system…

It doesn't have any of the social integration aspects that really make for the classic blogging experience that some of us people who've been around from the beginning had the whole time.

And I kind of want those.

Plus it doesn't have any monetization option in any real sense, and while I know that's not a big deal because who's going to want to pay for my random thoughts, I like to maintain at least the illusion that it might be worthwhile.

If you've been following, you know that today I decided to post to @Medium for the first time in a very long while. That does have the advantage of a beautiful interface for reading and not a terrible one for writing, even though it stupidly doesn't understand Markdown.

While it's beautiful, it's just not ideal because a lot of their monetization method. They really love the hard sell. They really want subscriptions.

But those marginalia comments – those are chef's kiss. Beautiful. Lovely.

Some of you are out there thinking, "why not just give @elonmusk $8 a month and post to @Twitter in longform?"

And I'll tell you: because the results are ugly as sin. Longform content on Twitter is terrible to experience.

It breaks nearly every useful convention of both blogging and Twitter. Embedded links don't expand (which is one of the beautiful things about individual tweets). The font is horrid. People can't respond to the specific bit that excites them.

Between that and the fact that Twitter is truly a bad place to have an ongoing conversation because threading doesn't really exist as a first-class entity, I can't really justify it. Even though they are looking at pushing more monetization, which might be nice.

Actually having a thought on the platform that is longer than two sentences is also an agonizing nightmare. The only tool that makes that worthwhile is @chirrapp , and for some reason that's been broken for the last day for me.

(My suspicion is that it's rooted in the same issue that is making my Tweet to Markdown plug-in return 403 Forbidden errors. Twitter is, if I'm not mistaken, effectively locking down all of their APIs with iron fists.)

github.com/kbravh/obsidia…

(Yes, I have my own bearer token. No, it has not run out of transactions according to the dashboard. No, it doesn't give any further information on why that transaction fails. It's just broken.)

Sure, I could use Markbase for $5 a month. It doesn't have comments, it's about as lightweight as it gets, it doesn't have the graph view, but it is marginally cheaper. But I don't feel like it's cheaper enough to make it worthwhile.

markbase.xyz

I don't want to self host, even though that solves the IndieWeb problem because – mainly I just don't want to. Too much overhead, too much pain in the ass, even/especially if I want to use @IPFS to distribute the content.

I can hear the hecklers in the back:

No, I do not want to publish on @SubstackInc . The interface is garbage, the look is garbage, the thing handles like a truck, and while I appreciate they won't kick me off (probably) for heterodoxy, that's not enough.

Really, what I want is Obsidian Publish to roll in Obsidian Sync for the same price under the same umbrella – even though I have no need for either revision management, multiple team use, or even mobile posting. It would just be more value.

That and integrating some sort of comment system or at least IndieWeb notifications and integration so that if, say, someone makes a comment on something I've written via Twitter, Mastodon, or on their own IndiePub blog it gets integrated with my post.

I would pay for that. Absolutely. That might be just right next door to the perfect blogging platform. A digital garden/blog which is intimately integrated with my desktop experience, handles the links and embeds without sneezing, does the graph thing – perfection.

As it is, I literally can't justify paying for any of it. And as scary as it is, the best place to have an actual complete thought/set of ideas along with the discussion might be – Google's #Blogger.

Which still exists. And understands Markdown.

blogger.com

How sparse does the good tool space have to be for that to end up being potentially the best thing on the table? How far have we fallen as a species?

Try not to think how much a pain in the ass this Tweet storm has been to post. It will make you cringe. One wrong click and everything goes away. And forget easily adding to it.

Now, this is why we need proper blogging tools.