If you spend a lot of time on Twitter, you’re probably familiar with Twitter threads. They show up in your timeline because either someone quotes or retweets someone else’s threaded tweet, or, if you’re lucky, you see all the tweets in the right order because (a) someone takes the time to thread them properly by sending one tweet, and then replying to the original tweet with the rest, and (b) you either follow the threader, or their account is public and you have it on a list, so you see the tweets as they come in. If you’re on Facebook or some other social network, and one of your friends wants you to see the thread, they’ll share one of the tweets from the thread in the hope that you’ll click on it and read it. But Twitter threads are not good for all sorts of reasons, and because I feel rather strongly about the subject, I decided to write a ranticle about it.

Why do people thread in the first place?

People thread on Twitter because Twitter’s 140-character limit is almost never enough when you really need to get something off your chest. Also, Twitter, (including third-party applications), has an incredibly simple posting interface without a lot of distraction involved. The fact that you can use a third-party app on your phone which may have an even simpler posting interface, through which you can fire off tweets at the drop of a hat, makes it even better. When you add up a 140-character limit, plus a really simple posting interface, it’s easy to see why Twitter threads have become as popular as they are.

Still, I would like to discourage you from Twitter threading. In the strongest possible terms.

Threading might be great if you’re the one posting the content. I use the word “might” because whether it’s great for you or not is debatable. But if you’re trying to read it, that’s an entirely different story. For one thing, it takes a lot of time and effort to scroll back through tweets, and that’s assuming you’ve stumbled on the original tweet that started the thread. If not, you’re stuck in the hell that is Twitter’s user experience trying to scroll back through tweets. If someone quotes a tweet in your thread, the thread is now broken, which makes the effort needed to put into reading an entire thread much more involved. It means that you might have to spend more time in Twitter’s horrible user experience hellscape trying to find out where the thread begins because someone quoted in the middle of a thread. Second, since Twitter threads are by their nature chunks of ideas, it’s realy difficult to cite a thread in such a way that keeps all the comments in context. Since tweets are now making up a large part of what gets reported by news outlets of all stripes, that means this has become more important, both for those reporting the news and for those reading it.

Next, there’s the problem of linking to this content. Since each tweet has it’s own link, and that link is based on a user ID, linking to all the pieces of content that make up a thread is somewhat like collecting individual rice grains once you’ve dropped the bag of rice. Not easy. And depending on how many tweets are in the thread, (I’ve seen threads of over 300 of them), a metric ton of work.

Then, there’s the part about how the content you create is yours and not some corporation’s. There are a lot of good ideas floating around Twitter, (and other social networks for that matter), but as long as that content is being posted on Twitter and nowhere else, you don’t own that content. If Twitter decides to change its link structure, that content may be lost.

This is important for people, but it’s also important for businesses. Posting your content on Twitter in the form of a thread, (or really, on any social network), instead of your website means you no longer own that content. It’s like going and setting up a stall at the local flee market and calling it your office. You’ve invested time in creating that content, you should own it. It should have a permanent link that won’t change unless you want it to, and which anyone can link to. Then, you can syndicate that content to Twitter, or Facebook, or anywhere else you like, and even if someone isn’t on any of those networks, (believe it or not, there are people who don’t use social media, and have no desire to start using it), can read and benefit from your content.

But what if I’ve already threaded on Twitter?

Fortunately, there are some tools you can use to collect all the parts of your thread and turn them in to blog post for later linking and enjoyment. Spooler is an excellent choice for converting Twitter threads into blog posts. You can start with the last tweet in a thread, and it will also grab any videos and images you’ve posted to Twitter that are part of the thread. If you find that you’re live-tweeting a talk or something similar, Noter Live is a great option which will, (once you’re done tweeting), allow you to copy all your tweets from the event into one post, along with including the speaker’s Twitter handle if they have one. If it’s the feedback you’re after, you can always enable webmention on your site. Popular web platforms like WordPress and Drupal have plugins to do this, and you can use a service like Bridgy to syndicate your content to the social networks, and then pull in reactions and responses to your own site so you have them all in one place, coupled with the content you created.

While I’m pretty certain this one post isn’t going to stop you from threading tweets, I hope that you’ll consider the people who are reading the content you’re creating, and instead of creating a thread that’s not even enjoyable to read on Twitter, you’ll at least consider turning it into a blog post afterwords.

Replied to

I know I’m very late to the party after a tiny bit of research I’ve done so far. I’ve seen the same names pop up all over the place. These folks have worked very hard to get where it is now and I’m sure they know of dozens of roadblocks I couldn’t imagine today. But, I hope that, even if I’m late, there’s still room at the table.

Source: The Open Web, by Brandon Kraft

It’s never too late to join the indieweb. The more people who join, the better, and I would personally love to see all the indieweb technology become part of WordPress core and/or Jetpack. And I think the point of the indieweb is that everyone shouldn’t just rent their seat at the table, but own it.

This is the most accessible implementation of webmention and reactions I’ve seen so far. The little faces have alt text associated with them, (the names), and all the reactions are identified, with their post kind. Now I need to get this set up on my own sites. 🙂

Starting on June 30, 2017, att.net customers will no longer be able to log in to their Yahoo and Tumblr accounts through email addresses with the following domains: att.net, ameritech.net, bellsouth.net, flash.net, nvbell.net, pacbell.net, prodigy.net, sbcglobal.net, snet.net, swbell.net, and wans.net.
If you’re affected, all you need to do to ensure continued access to your Tumblr account is to update your registered email address to something other than one of these addresses mentioned above.

Source: Tumblr’s Helpdesk

The help article then goes on to tell people how to update their registered email address. Neither self-hosted WordPress, (or even WordPress.com), care what email address someone uses to log in, once that email address is associated with an account. And you can definitely create Tumblr-style sites with either platform. If you use self-hosted WordPress, you have even more options for adding features to your site thanks to plugins. There’s at least one plugin that will import all your Tumblr posts into your WordPress site, keeping them intact.

This really wasn’t a necessary move on the part of Tumblr. There’s no technical reason why someone’s email host should matter. A lot of these people have probably had these email addresses for a very long time, and to ask them to go get another one from somewhere like Gmail just so they can log into and use your service is wrong on every level.

If you're playing along with those of us who are taking the Gutenberg Challenge, this is my post for week two. This time, I'm using the text editor. I decided to go with the text editor this time because it's slightly easier. Sorry WordPress, not even you can win the WYSIWYG VS. text editor war. 🙂 As with the first post, these are my not-so-edited thoughts.

First, a working analogy for blocks

I spent some time mulling over this throughout the weekend, and I've decided to settle on the following working analogy. Part of this is because I cheated and looked at some of the code, as well as the generated markup. This will probably also work for widgets. So let's say that you have a bunch of magnets in different shapes and sizes. With widgets, your shapes and sizes are pretty uniform, and widget areas in themes are like metal surfaces you can stick them to. I'm thinking of a toy I got as a kid that was a big metal board/frame/rectangular surface, with letters that had magnets on the back so you could make words on the board but with the letters raised. Yeah, it's incredibly simplistic, but it works. With the introduction of Gutenberg, WordPress is just going to magnetize everything, and the pile of magnets now includes letters, numbers, special characters, punctuation, and every other shape under the sun. OK. So far so good. I think though that this has the potential to make web pages/other web things pretty much fluid from a design perspective, protean even, and I hope there's an upper limit somewhere. Something like, let's try to educate people about design principles, because hamburger menus inside posts, and I would like to reserve some things for the CSS/HTML realm. I know we're democratizing publishing and everything, but democracies have rules. Not sure what I think of this wp:core/freeform tag, which basically means we're using a text widget to add text to a post. I'm keeping an open mind, but it seems to me as though WordPress wants to create its own
tag, and that we've definitely stepped into overengineering territory. After all, it's just text, HTML already has tags for this, (tons of them), and if this is for possible styling later, we're just trading div soup for non-standard WordPress self-created tag soup. So yeah Gutenberg, we're not friends yet, but I'm not kicking you out either. I'm missing my meta boxes though. My screen seems so lonely without them. So I'll be heading back over to my tried and true edit post screen to put the finishing touches on this, and you can hang out down here in your little submenu, well away from my other content types for now.

Those of you who were around in the pre-Web 2.0 era (before 2005-ish) will remember that early bloggers used to have a list of other blogs they read in their sidebars. That list was known as the “blogroll” and it was a great way for newbies to get to know established bloggers. The other neat thing about the blogroll was that it was a token of respect to the bloggers you admired.

–RICHARD MACMANUS, AltPlatform

Blogrolls used to be a thing in WordPress, except WordPress refered to them as “Links”, and you managed them using the Links Manager. I think there’s still a working plugin for this, and if you’re like me and you’ve had a long-running WordPress installation, the links manager is still in your administration panel. I think blogrolls got an amused mention last weekend at WordCamp Europe as well, but I have to agree with the post I’m quoting. they were a fun part of the web, and I’m thinking that, they really should be brought back. I used to have quite a full blogroll, and yes, I made a point of reading most of them every day. Mine specifically didn’t have a lot of news sites on it, just blogs, mostly personal ones. I’m not saying that news sites couldn’t be listed, (the cool thing about blogrolls was that you could list whatever you wanted, and other people could see what you were reading), but I always liked to keep mine more personal and less edited.

There’s a site called WPRoll that I think still lives, but it seems to be more of a list of influencers. There is, however, an OPML file you can get that has all the blogs, that you can then import into your RSS reader. I’ve done this, and for the time being I’m using the WordPress.com reader, because it’s the most accessible one that I’ve found that I can also use on my phone.

But yes, we should definitely bring blogrolls back. The web, and the world, could use a little more let’s-get-to-know-each-other, and that’s what blogrolls provided.

Last weekend, during WordCamp Europe, Matt Mullenweg announced that Gutenberg, (the upcoming WordPress editor that will replace TinyMCE as well as become integrated into the WordPress customization experience), is now available for downloading and testing. So of course people have started playing with it, and Aaron Jorbin issued the following challenge on Twitter today.

The Gutenberg Challenge

I broke my own cardinal rule and installed this on a live site, because I need content to play with. I'll start with the good first. I appear to be able to add blocks and move them around using the visual editor part and a screen reader. Now for the not so good.

I can type a post title, but I have to add a block just to start typing text. I can see myself switching to text when this goes live, because writing a post like this is turning out to be incredibly inefficient, cumbersome even, and I'm not sure if that's because I'm just used to writing HTML and can do that in my sleep and so I don't use WYSIWYG editors, or if it's because of the software, or both. I'm also not sure if paragraphs are supposed to be in their own separate blocks although I suppose if you're going to be moving them around, they probably should be each in their own block. I can see this increasing the cumbersomeness exponentially. Right now I'm thinking of what it would be like to write one of the WordPress with a Screen Reader posts in this and I want to just crawl under my desk and never write again. I've lived in the WordPress dashboard daily since 2005, and I'm finding this really frustrating. I can see someone new to WordPress who uses a screen reader just giving up on this. Admittedly, as I mentioned above, this could all just be I'm not used to using a visual editor like this. I also realize that this is only six months along, and that it's in its early stages. I'll also continue to play with it so I can get used to this, and then explain it to other screen reader users. But I think I'm going to end here for now because this is completely overwhelming, I'm unable to separate my own experience from what's supposed to be happening and be fair and objective about this, and, (I'm only half joking here), Gutenberg is causing me to question my life choices right now.