Tweetstorm Builder and Blog

Description

People write tweetstorms because they’re “easier” than whatever their blog setup is. And the constraints of 280 characters at a time makes for both careful sentence construction and flow.

But - then you’ve got this lovely writing that is trapped on Twitter. At best, you come back and copy / paste the tweets back into a blog post.

The idea is a blog + tweetstorm builder. You log into it with your Twitter account, compose Tweets, and post to Twitter as a tweetstorm. But, you also get a “blog post” that is generated for you.

Concept Overview

People still don’t seem to be able to get over the hump of blogging. Twitter helps frame bite sized ideas and gets spread and quoting and interaction.

You might get followers, but you don’t have an easy way to keep or highlight that tweetstorm of yours.

Twitter web client now has tools for making multi-tweet threads. Your one option is to fire them all at once, and you are one browser refresh from losing everything you’ve written. Also: no draft tweetstorms.

The tweetstorm client helps you draft and publish tweetstorms.

Once you publish, it also creates a markdown and/or HTML formatted version of your tweetstorm — aka a blog post. Initially, title and optional header description.

This is a bit like Storify, which used to support arbitrary chunks of text between tweets.

Features

A Fission app, enabled with login and file storage

Twitter Auth: Auth with Twitter and keep credentials local per session. Have to figure out webnative<->OAuth connection here.

Cut and Paste: cut and paste the markdown or HTML and publish it on your own blog. (use case for atJSON native storage here?)

Choose timing of tweets: all at once or pace them out by X minutes

Personal Microblog: if we’re already generating the HTML for a blog post — just be a blog! For Fission, select a public folder to post to / edit from. Need to set up a separate “blog app” for display if we want a custom domain.

Full Micropub client: why just multiple posts? Make it a full Micropub client, so you can draft/write tweet length posts and post to anything that supports Micropub.

Long running threads: the other emergent behaviour is long running tweet threads. Search tools within Twitter are pretty hard to do, so this is actually difficult to manage. If you keep threads around and searchable / browseable, make it simple to attach / post a new tweet to the end of a thread.

Also: look up Twitter “collections”? Tweetbot has the option to “create a topic”, but also “make it a collection”. Can collections include tweets from multiple users? Make it easier to do this.

Mastodon support: Initially point people at Moa Party, but first-class Mastodon support may be of interest to some. Means OAuth into your home server, which is pretty much just like Twitter. But, longer posts and other Mastodon specific features.

Medium, LinkedIn, Tumblr, WordPress, Drupal etc posting: various things have APIs. WP and Drupal can both accept Micropub with the right plugin. Also, Micro.blog can accept Micropub posts, and handle cross posting.

User Impact

Who would want to use this and why?

Anyone that wants to compose tweetstorms in a richer environment while also having it post to their own site.

Blogging, but easier. Twitter promotion, without having to be “on” Twitter.

I recently found out about typefully.app which is a nifty tweet thread editor by the makers of Mailbrew. I’ve found myself looking for one of these on many occasions, and I guess Typefully shows there’s enough demand for it.

I love the idea of having an interface that can both post to twitter and to a person’s own destinations (including IPFS) as a step towards competitive compatibility/adversarial interoperability/permissionless something.

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hello @agentofuser thank you for the heads up about typefully.app

having an interface that can post both to twitter and to own destination

With IndieHub powered by Fission I look to the future where people can bring their own favourite editors to their own(ed) data and bring capabilities to their creations to publish to any channel

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Boris, I love this idea of this and how it could work.

If you haven’t come across it, ThreadReaderApp does something similar to this but in a reverse syndication instead of the method you’re describing. It allows one to publish a thread on Twitter and then use ThreadReaderApp to roll the thread up and post a copy of it to one’s website that supports Micropub. I’ve written a bit about how it works here: boffosocko.com/2020/05/28/threadreaderapp-micropub-to-blog/

I’d love to see something more like what you’re describing.

Another interesting option for this that has a lot of the functionality you’re looking for is Kevin Marks’ Noter Live. I know he’s considered adding Micropub functionality to it. I suspect he’d be very open to anyone who’d like to add that or other refinements via pull request to GitHub - kevinmarks/noterlive: A tool for indieweb live noting (aka live tweeting/live blogging).. It does post live threads to twitter and currently gives the output as raw HTML that one could cut/paste into their site.

2 Likes

Thanks for adding all those references @chrisaldrich.

I did see the ThreadReader stuff, but that just adds a third party dependency.

Some of Kevin’s stuff might be adaptable. Looks like it needs a Heroku server at the moment.

Our goal here is to build apps “Fission style” – serverless, with data owned by users. Hence, the forum here with lots of ideas and gathering people that might like to work on it or support it.

Feel free to post ideas for other apps that you’d like to see, or flesh out existing ideas like you’ve done with these links!

@boris I’m sure you meant to say hostless, no backend, no server, WebNative

Thanks @chrisaldrich for alerting me to “Note Taker live”. It is eminently “Fissionable” Hypothesis annotation for github.com
Can be a useful yet simple experiment for TrailHub to PlugOut to pushing stuff to Twitter while turning Note Taker Lite WebNative with Fission in the process.

Welcome too, to the hostless, no backend, No server, WebNative future that is emerging here.

I rely on Fission to allow us to forge the future of Indie Web as IndieWeb 3.0, IndieWeb that is (decentralized) and WebNative powered by Fission’s Constellations for Commons Based peer production of user First data and born interoperable Apps.

Currently I am piloting IndieHub powered by @TrailHub1
supporting meta-design conversations between edge-users and Indie edge-developers with the aim of forging the IndieVerse of Commons Based peer production of Inter (Planetary/Personal) Lively HyperMedia.

I like to do “icon driven development”. @boris said something like that in one of the calls. I may have remembered it in my own words?

So this morning I created an image intended to derive an icon to drive development.

I am faking it till I make it. Create a visual that conveys a hazy impression towards the vision for IndiHub where users act as their own hubs in their own interest based social networks of networked conversations that are continuous without being synchronous, yet contiguous with the participants own Networked Thoughts as long as their favorite Networked Tool for Thought can support data exchange with TrailHub. Working on figuring out how that can be done in the simplest way.

image
This is using Polar Inversion of a single HyperMap to give the illusion of overlapping individual Personal HyperMaps in a snapshot of collaboration as their own IndieHubs
And here is one for the IndiVerse?
suggesting how “improvement communities” are travelling through Concept Space

where two-way links between communities act as “portals” or “stargates”

I’ve created a placeholder Github repo with the discussions feature turned on that has some more details Building an app from scratch through Open Collective · Discussion #2 · bmann/tweetstorm-blog-app · GitHub

Including that I intend to use a non-commercial license and Cross License Collaborative to work on this project.

I’m doing a call for developers right now, let me know if you have questions or know someone.

Threadmaker? Threadcast? Threadpost?

i was going to mention typefully as well, would be great to just repurpose that for publishing where you want.

+1 for getting people to just make a post out of their threads already.

i was going to work on a ‘broadcast from self-hosted/serverless space’ app, originally for creating rss feeds, but maybe including other types of subscribe mechanisms, maybe including podcasts.

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Yeah, I’d love to evolve Typefully, but it’s not open source. So I’d like to build an app that hopefully many can build on top of.

I think these are all hosted SaaS products, probably be good research to go through all of them Top 10 Alternatives to Typefully | Product Hunt

Which is why I want a Zero Data version. We might experiment with “premium” features or other things, but initially, trying to gather app users who want to essentially be part owners of an app.

i found these open-source projects that might be useful references:

also, this closed-source extension could be an inspiration to broaden the idea:

Thanks @rosano.

Yep, Twemex is something I have in mind as well. There’s a whole set of features about managing and searching long running threads that I think is interesting.

Ideally I can write up a sketch of some of these features and/or inspire others to do so in a way that we post those as separate features to get funded.

Here’s another commercial app:

https://getchirrapp.com/upgrade

Recent discussion

https://merveilles.town/@zens/111010139040747493

Tool being worked on:

https://tools.yip.pe/literkeet/