I have actually found the perfect use-case for #Madblog and the new federated visibility features today.

[fabio@manganiello.eu]

I have actually found the perfect use-case for #Madblog and the new federated visibility features today.

I've got an upcoming gig with a friend who also happens to have a Mastodon handle.

Sharing setlists is a notorious nightmare across musicians. Sending Excel or Word documents back and forth over email or WhatsApp, and gradually lose track of the changes, is still the most common way.

Until recently I used to share spreadsheets on my Nextcloud instance instead, but that also proved to be cumbersome (creating a public shared URL, asking your friends to install the CollaboraOffice app on their phones because the default rendering of spreadsheets in the Webview is suboptimal, deal with friends who would accidentally wipe rows or cells without having a proper versioning system...).

Today I got a better idea: what if the setlist is just a Markdown post on my blog, set with visibility: direct, and where I tag my fellow musician(s) on the parts where I need their input?

It won't clutter my blog index because it's neither public nor unlisted.

My friends over Mastodon get a notification when I save the file where they're mentioned, and they can opt whether to see the setlist directly in their Mastodon client or on the Madblog URL.

If they have any comments, they just drop them as direct replies on their Mastodon thread, and they're also rendered as comments under the Madblog page.

The process is documented. Comments persisted. Changes versioned over git. The document can be shared as a simple URL. Songs have all the space that they want on a Markdown page (you can add chords, lyrics, notes, without cramming them into an Excel row). Everyone gets notified on their favourite app when there are some changes. And I get notified when they have comments.

I don't think I'm going back to spreadsheets.