Whomst styles the whostyles?

I love this idea… and who better to introduce it to me than Robin Sloan, writer, note-maker, and ambassador of Keep the Blogosphere Weird in his note Whomst styles?:
This is a “whostyle”: an attempt to carry the ~timbre~ of an author’s voice, in the form of their design sensibility, through into a quotation. It’s the author who defines their whostyle; the quoting site just honors it, a frame around their words.
The idea of giving each personality a little speech bubble to represent their creative identity is lovely, and reminds me of Microsoft Comic Chat. Let's keelhaul tiktok and bring back altcomix-inspired IRC chats!
Robin frankly didn't make this easy at all, with his subtly changing background and header colors1. Jacob Hall made this easier with a lovely reference to all: revert
, and the resulting conversation in his indie-web comments is a sort of charming internet House of Leaves, which Robin echoes:
I’ll add that even this glancing encounter with whostyles sharpens my annoyance with Twitter, the way it “smooshes” contributions into uniform, stackable blocks. But a timeline demands this, right? Maybe; I think a timeline of tweets brimming over with typographic variation would be tons of fun. Give us a miniature grid, let us play Müller-Brockmann!
Hear hear! I may very well try to make my own whomstyle.css... just for giggles.
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I gave up Robin... I'll try again later. :P ↩
Changelog
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2022-06-08 11:31:29 -0500Rename articles
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2022-05-03 11:53:25 -0500Put links tag back
What if people want to find these posts?
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2022-05-03 11:51:42 -0500Implement replies
- remove unused `.tag__emoji` css class
- implement indie web u-in-reply-to
- add pseudo class to denote replies
- backfill old reply posts with information -
2021-08-21 10:04:36 -0500link jacob
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2021-08-21 09:45:48 -0500Confess that I gave up
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2021-08-21 09:40:41 -0500whomstyles