 Hi all - if you're a longtime reader you may remember my comments thrashing from a year ago, in which I tried to implement blog comments via Mastodon. It didn't work. By which I mean, it worked technically, but nobody used it. Chirp. In the intervening year the buzz around Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter/X has largely subsided; as usual, the network effect won. Even Facebook's Threads have barely made a dent.
And so poof, bye Mastodon, we hardly knew ya.
Also in the intervening year, I became more of an X user. Partly this is because of Feedly and rss.app, which make following X feeds as easy as following RSS feeds, and mostly this is because X itself has become better, with less political bias and better filtering. (Okay, you can debate that, but do so on X, not here :)
So I'm back to wanting blog comments on X. As I wrote:
The perfect experience is, links to blog posts appear on Twitter. Each of these Tweets has a Reply button. Each blog post has a Reply button, which does exactly what the Reply button on Twitter does. Each of these Tweets has a link to display the Tweet and all its Replies. Each blog post has a Comments button, which links back display the Tweet and all of its Replies.
With the Mastodon experience in hand, this can be even easier:
The experience is, links to blog posts appear on X (as Tweets*). Each blog post has a Comments button, which links back display the Tweet and all of its Replies. To reply to a blog post, a reader clicks through to the Tweet, and replies to it. Yes they can like it, and re-tweet it. And yes they need to be an X user to do this, but many/most of you are already...
[As of 4/4/24: this is the current experience]
* the Xiverse haven't yet decided what to call Tweets now that Twitter is renamed to X**. Some people call them Xeets.
** Possibly interesting fact: Back in the dawn of time, 2001, I worked for PayPal; at that time we owned the X.com domain as an alias of paypal.com, and my email address was o@x.com
But but ... this brings me back to the original challenge of linking blog posts on X. No it doesn't! Because also in the meantime, dlvr.it have figured out how to do this! So my posts automagically post there, just like they posted to Mastodon. (Who knows, maybe people will even [gasp!] find them there... you may have found this one that way too.)
So now ... how do I figure out how to link to the Tweet. Surely that is possible? Stay tuned...
[Update 4/4/24: yes it was possible, and yes it has been done. Comment away!]
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