Consider adding your blog to diff.blog

[diffblogbot]

Hello 👋 👋

Over the past decade, we have seen the rise of centralized publishing platforms like Medium. A lot of self hosted blogs were migrated to these platforms in hope of a bigger audience. Sadly, most of these blogs lost their unique identity and became just another page on them.

Our mission is to fight back against monopolies like Medium and promote independent self hosted blogs like yours. We think the best way to make this happen is by improving the visibility and reach of self hosted blogs. And that's why we built diff.blog.

diff.blog is an aggregator of developer blogs. It was started in 2019 to improve the visibility of self hosted blogs. Whenever you publish a new blog post on your blog, it would automatically appear in the diff.blog news feed. The title and summary of the post would be visible to the users of diff.blog and they can click on the post to read the full post on your blog.

We also have a weekly email digest, which would email the most popular blog posts in our index to all diff.blog users.

diff.blog index over 637 blogs at the moment. And our network is growing steadily every day. And we would like to invite you to include your blog in diff.blog as well.

Adding your blog to diff.blog is super easy and takes less than a minute.

• Go to https://diff.blog
• Sign up with your GitHub account.
• Go to blog settings https://diff.blog/account/settings/blog/
• Add the URL of your blog

We are looking forward to have your blog in diff.blog. Let us know if you have any questions. Happy to answer.

[lionirdeadman]

Hi @hackerkid,

Have you considered not using a bot to try to grow your silo? I think this type of behaviour really puts me off from this silo.

Also, please consider offering IndieAuth rather than Github for authentification. It allows much more variety and doesn't rely on a proprietary service, something you seem to not want to do.

[hackerkid]

Have you considered not using a bot to try to grow your silo? I think this type of behavior really puts me off from this silo.

That is a totally fair criticism. Using the bot was probably not the right way to do it. Anyway, the bot has been disabled a while back and it won't be creating any more issues in GitHub repos.

Also, please consider offering IndieAuth rather than Github for authentification. It allows much more variety and doesn't rely on a proprietary service, something you seem to not want to do.

Cool. I will definitely add it to my list. I do remember coming across IndieWeb a while back. Likely from micro.blog. I have since completely forgotten it.

The reason I want for GitHub auth was to make use of public data in GitHub like the users you follow, languages you use etc to make better user recommendations. I also have a plan to make better post recommendations in the future using that info. Though it's a lot of work so it will probably take some time.

Thanks for the feedback anyway. Your blog design looks pretty neat :)

[lionirdeadman]

That is a totally fair criticism. Using the bot was probably not the right way to do it. Anyway, the bot has been disabled a while back and it won't be creating any more issues in GitHub repos.

Seems it was blocked by Github as spam too (which is why I didn't see it until yesterday).

The reason I want for GitHub auth was to make use of public data in GitHub like the users you follow, languages you use etc to make better user recommendations. I also have a plan to make better post recommendations in the future using that info. Though it's a lot of work so it will probably take some time.

That should definitely be said somewhere publicly on the diff.blog website.

Also worth mentioning, instead of only using Github auth to get the information, you could read rel=mes to see which identities I have online (which would allow you to see Github amongst other things).

Thanks for the feedback anyway. Your blog design looks pretty neat :)

Glad to be able to help and thanks.

[hackerkid]

That should definitely be said somewhere publicly on the diff.blog website.

Yes. Its mentioned in F&Q.
https://diff.blog/FAQ/

Also worth mentioning, instead of only using Github auth to get the information, you could read rel=mes to see which identities I have online (which would allow you to see Github amongst other things).

That's actually pretty neat. Would have been super useful if more users were using this. Anyway I am intrigued. Would spend time thinking more about the possibilities.

[lionirdeadman]

Ah, right, It is mentioned there. Maybe that particular information should be shown before making an account to make sure the people are aware of this data collection.

Also, since I wouldn't want to have dead comments there, would it be possible for them to send webmentions? Some websites will automatically show them as comments (the wiki has some examples) although I personally just look at them (they're private) with the atom feed provided by my webmention provider.

[hackerkid]

Ah, right, It is mentioned there. Maybe that particular information should be shown before making an account to make sure the people are aware of this data collection.

Yes. I can probably mention that. But just to be clear, all these data are already public in GitHub for anyone to access. The only private data that is accessed is the email id. To be honest even that is not private since once can fetch that easily from commit messages.

Also, since I wouldn't want to have dead comments there, would it be possible for them to send webmentions? Some websites will automatically show them as comments (the wiki has some examples) although I personally just look at them (they're private) with the atom feed provided by my webmention provider.

Yes. Actually it's in my near term roadmap to provide a plugin like Disqus that can be used to display comments. Maybe I can built it using webmentions?

[hackerkid]

Anyway, I think it makes sense to have a page that talks about data collection. I will add it to todo list.