Some readers on refactorcamp.org mastodon flagged an interesting but difficult UI problem with my blogchains format. They’d like to be able to follow along like Netflix, picking up where they last left off. If they’ve only read 7/10 parts, part 8 should be their view.
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Technically this would take an advanced series plugin that maintains personalized reader queue state as a cookie perhaps (not hard... n blockchains = n integers, 1 for each) and display a home page with all the “next episodes” highlighted, BUT...
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This fundamentally alters the blog experience from monotemporality to multitemporal. If RSS was like single-channel appointment tv (“new episodes of ribbonfarm drop on thursdays around 5pm” was my standard for years) to something like streaming TV.
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I would *love* it if blogchain writing got popular enough that it would be worthwhile for someone to reinvent RSS along these lines. In stead of being subscribed yo a bunch of channels on a push clock, you’re subscribed to a bunch of shows (blogchains) on a pull clock.
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This is unfortunately a 2-sided market problem with chicken-egg dynamics. I could probably fund someone to write a wordpress plugin to do the destination server side (you see custom page when you land on a blog) but this is more naturally a client side problem.
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Done server side, cookie-based management is janky (expiration timing and cross-device persistence mess) and more stable stateful user accounts for all readers is a nightmare for both publishers and readers (and both are GDPR nightmares; I don’t want to manage users)
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Client side is far cleaner. Not email. Email is push. Not RSS. That’s also push. Though both have queuing of unreads, it is not quite what you want. You want it factored by “show” and pick up where you left off. Need new streaming style UX. Not unread-buffer style.
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Cc
Might not be a solvable problem. We may be at a QWERTY-like bad equilibrium with blogs, but worth laying this out in case someone wants to use this to own the future of blogging.
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might be unhelpful, but does something like that which is why i read digital content pretty much exclusively on there
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Yes, the readlater market is how individuals are solving the problem now but I doubt it will be the answer. This needs a protocol level attack to become more than a niche solution.
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Interesting problem! As a reader I would not mind site-specific accounts / reading tracking.
As an author, not sure user accounts *has* to be a nightmare (though added hassle, yes)
Reinventing RSS…also great but seems a much bigger problem :D
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