703 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2023
    1. Trakt DataRecoveryIMPORTANTOn December 11 at 7:30 pm PST our main database crashed and corrupted some of the data. We're deeply sorry for the extended downtime and we'll do better moving forward. Updates to our automated backups are already in place and they will be tested on an ongoing basis.Data prior to November 7 is fully restored.Watched history between November 7 and Decmber 11 has been recovered. There is a separate message on your dashboard allowing you to review and import any recovered data.All other data (besides watched history) after November 7 has already been restored and imported.Some data might be permanently lost due to data corruption.Trakt API is back online as of December 20.Active VIP members will get 2 free months added to their expiration date
    1. It’s difficult to find people who are being sincere, seeking coherence, and building collective knowledge in public.While I understand that not everyone wants to engage in these activities on the web all the time, some people just want to dance on TikTok, and that’s fine!However, I’m interested in enabling productive discourse and community building on at least some parts of the web. I imagine that others here feel the same way.Rather than being a primarily threatening and inhuman place where nothing is taken in good faith.

      Personal websites like mine since mid 90s fit this. #openvraag what incentives are there actually for people now to start their own site for online interaction, if you 'grew up' in the silos? My team is largely not on-line at all, they use services but don't interact outside their own circles.

  2. Apr 2023
    1. Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere

      Publish (on your) Own Site, Spam Everywhere

  3. tantek.com tantek.com
    In https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/20/23689570/activitypub-protocol-standard-social-network, author @pierce@mas.to does an excellent job covering a broad range of #ActivityPub related updates, and goes beyond the usual #Mastodon focus to describe numerous implementations. I was very happy to see that he also clearly communicated several #IndieWeb principles^1, practices, goals, and reasons why^2. Like this quote: “But the advice you’ll hear from most people in this space is this: own your own domain. Don’t be john@/mastodon.social or anna@/facebook.com. Have a space that is yours, that belongs to you, a username and identity that can’t disappear just because a company goes out of business or sells to a megalomaniac.” and this: “It’s [your own domain is] your YouTube channel name and your TikTok username and your Instagram handle and your phone number and your Twitter @, all in one name.” Great interviews with @stevetex@mozilla.social, @mike@flipboard.social, @dustycloud.org (@cwebber@octodon.social), @evanp.me (@evan@cosocial.ca), @anildash.com (@anildash@me.dm), @coachtony@me.dm, and @manton.org. As Manton said in the article: “If you solve identity with domain names, it makes things easier because it fits the way the web has been for 20 years,” Pierce also noted: “you might soon be able to turn your personal website into your entire social identity online” Already can. I replied to Pierce’s post^3 about his article noting this^4, from #federating directly from my website for the past ~6 months^5, to over a decade of using it as my social identity with the POSSE method^6 with various #socialMedia silos. It’s important enough that I’ll repeat part of Pierce’s quote at the top: “own your own domain. Don’t be john@/mastodon.social or anna@/facebook.com. Have a space that is yours” He gets it. Don’t be someone at someone else’s server. Big Chad or Little Chad’s garages^7 are social media stepping stones towards owning your own domain and IndieWeb presence. We’re here when you’re ready to take that next step: https://chat.indieweb.org/ This is day 38 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb. #100Days ← Day 37: https://tantek.com/2023/109/t2/years-ago-first-federated-indieweb-thread → Day 39: https://tantek.com/2023/112/t2/account-migration-post-blog-archive-format ^1 https://indieweb.org/principles ^2 https://indieweb.org/why ^3 https://mas.to/@pierce/110231624819547202 ^4 https://tantek.com/2023/110/t1/ ^5 https://tantek.com/2022/301/t1/twittermigration-bridgyfed-mastodon-indieweb ^6 https://indieweb.org/POSSE ^7 https://tantek.com/2023/001/t1/own-your-notes - Tantek
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    1. In Notes, writers will be able to post short-form content and share ideas with each other and their readers. Like our Recommendations feature, Notes is designed to drive discovery across Substack. But while Recommendations lets writers promote publications, Notes will give them the ability to recommend almost anything—including posts, quotes, comments, images, and links.

      Substack slowly adding features and functionality to make them a full stack blogging/social platform... first long form, then short note features...

      Also pushing in on Twitter's lunch as Twitter is having issues.

  4. Mar 2023
    1. I want to bring to your attention one particular cause of concern that I have heard from a number of different creators: these new systems (Google’s Bard, the new Bing, ChatGPT) are designed to bypass creators work on the web entirely as users are presented extracted text with no source. As such, these systems disincentivize creators from sharing works on the internet as they will no longer receive traffic

      Generative AI abstracts away the open web that is the substrate it was trained on. Abstracting away the open web means there may be much less incentive to share on the open web, if the LLMs etc never point back to it. Vgl the way FB et al increasingly treated open web URLs as problematic.

  5. Feb 2023
  6. tantek.com tantek.com
    Five years ago last Monday, the @W3C Social Web Working Group officially closed^1. Operating for less than four years, it standardized several foundations of the #fediverse & #IndieWeb: #Webmention #Micropub #ActivityStreams2 #ActivityPub Each of these has numerous interoperable implementations which are in active use by anywhere from thousands to millions of users. Two additional specifications also had several implementations as of the time of their publication as W3C Recommendations (which you can find from their Implementation Reports linked near the top of each spec). However today they’re both fairly invisible "plumbing" (as most specs should be) or they haven’t picked up widespread use like the others: #LinkedDataNotifications (LDN) #WebSub To be fair, LDN was only one building block in what eventually became SoLiD^2, the basis of Tim Berners–Lee’s startup Inrupt. However, in the post Elon-acquisition of Twitter and subsequent Twexodus, as Anil Dash noted^3, “nobody ran to the ’web3’ platforms”, and nobody ran to SoLiD either. The other spec, WebSub, was roughly interoperably implemented as PubSubHubbub before it was brought to the Social Web Working Group. Yet despite that implementation experience, a more rigorous specification that fixed a lot of bugs, and a test suite^4, WebSub’s adoption hasn’t really noticeably grown since. Existing implementations & services are still functioning though. My own blog supports WebSub notifications for example, for anyone that wants to receive/read my posts in real time. One of the biggest challenges the Social Web Working Group faced was with so many approaches being brought to the group, which approach should we choose? As one of the co-chairs of the group, with the other co-chairs, and our staff contacts over time, we realized that if we as chairs & facilitators tried to pick any one approach, we would almost certainly alienate and lose more than half of the working group who had already built or were actively interested in developing other approaches. We (as chairs) decided to do something which very few standards groups do, and for that matter, have ever done successfully. From 15+ different approaches, or projects, or efforts that were brought^5 to the working group, we narrowed them down to about 2.5 which I can summarize as: 1. #IndieWeb building blocks, many of which were already implemented, deployed, and showing rough interoperability across numerous independent websites 2. ActivityStreams based approaches, which also demonstrated implementability, interoperability, and real user value as part of the OStatus suite, implemented in StatusNet, Identica, etc. 2.5 "something with Linked Data (LD)" — expressed as a 0.5 because there wasn’t anything user-visible “social web” with LD working at the start of the Working Group, however there was a very passionate set of participants insisting that everything be done with RDF/LD, despite the fact that it was less of a proven social web approach than the other two. As chairs we figured out that if we were able to help facilitate the development of these 2.5 approaches in parallel, nearly everyone who was active in the Working Group would have something they would feel like they could direct their positive energy into, instead of spending time fighting or tearing down someone else’s approach. It was a very difficult social-technical balance to maintain, and we hit more than a few bumps along the way. However we also had many moments of alignment, where two (or all) of the various approaches found common problems, and either identical or at least compatible solutions. I saw many examples where the discoveries of one approach helped inform and improve another approach. Developing more than one approach in the same working group was not only possible, it actually worked. I also saw examples of different problems being solved by different approaches, and I found that aspect particularly fascinating and hopeful. Multiple approaches were able to choose & priortize different subsets of social web use-cases and problems to solve from the larger space of decentralized social web challenges. By doing so, different approaches often explored and mapped out different areas of the larger social web space. I’m still a bit amazed we were able to complete all of those Recommendations in less than four years, and everyone who participated in the working group should be proud of that accomplishment, beyond any one specification they may have worked on. With hindsight, we can see the positive practical benefits from allowing & facilitating multiple approaches to move forward. Today there is both a very healthy & growing set of folks who want simple personal sites to do with as they please (#IndieWeb), and we also have a growing network of Mastodon instances and other software & services that interoperate with them, like Bridgy Fed^6. Millions of users are posting & interacting with each other daily, without depending on any large central corporate site or service, whether on their own personal domain & site they fully control, or with an account on a trusted community server, using different software & services. Choosing to go from 15+ down to 2.5, but not down to 1 approach turned out to be the right answer, to both allow a wide variety^7 of decentralized social web efforts to grow, interoperate via bridges, and frankly, socially to provide something positive for everyone to contribute to, instead of wasting weeks, possibly months in heated debates about which one approach was the one true way. There’s lots more to be written about the history of the Social Web Working Group, which perhaps I will do some day. For now, if you’re curious for more, I strongly recommend diving into the group’s wiki https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg and its subpages for more historical details. All the minutes of our meetings are there. All the research we conducted is there. If you’re interested in contributing to the specifications we developed, find the place where that work is being done, the people actively implementing those specs, and even better, actively using their own implementations^8. You can find the various IndieWeb building blocks living specifications here: * https://spec.indieweb.org/ And discussions thereof in the development chat channel: * https://chat.indieweb.org/dev If you’re not sure, pop by the indieweb-dev chat and ask anyway! The IndieWeb community has grown only larger and more diverse in approaches & implementations in the past five years, and we regularly have discussions about most of the specifications that were developed in the Social Web Working Group. This is day 33 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days ← Day 32: https://tantek.com/2023/047/t1/nineteen-years-microformats → 🔮 Post Glossary: ActivityPub https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ ActivityStreams2 https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/ Linked Data Notifications https://www.w3.org/TR/ldn/ Micropub https://micropub.spec.indieweb.org/ Webmention https://webmention.net/draft/ WebSub https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ References: ^1 https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg ^2 https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/2015-03-18-minutes#solid ^3 https://mastodon.cloud/@anildash/109299991009836007 ^4 https://websub.rocks/ ^5 https://indieweb.org/Social_Web_Working_Group#History ^6 https://tantek.com/2023/008/t7/bridgy-indieweb-posse-backfeed ^7 https://indieweb.org/plurality ^8 https://indieweb.org/use_what_you_make - Tantek
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  7. Jan 2023
  8. tantek.com tantek.com
    Your #IndieWeb site can be the home you’ve always wanted on the internet. https://indieweb.org/images/e/ee/the-home-youve-always-wanted.png https://indieweb.org/homepage While posting on a personal site has many^1 advantages^2 over only posting to #socialMedia, maybe you already quit social media silos^3. There are lots of reasons to get a domain name^4 and setup your own homepage on the web. If you’re a web professional, a personal site with your name on it (perhaps also in its domain) can make it easier for potential employers to find you and read your description in your own words. If you’re a web developer, a personal home page is also an opportunity to demonstrate your craft.^5 If you’re a writer, you can organize your words, essays, and longer form articles in a form that’s easier for readers to browse, and style them to both be easier to read, and express your style better than any silo. Similarly if you’re an artist, photographer, or any other kind of content creator. See https://indieweb.org/homepage for more reasons why, and what other kinds of things you can put on your home page. Thanks to Chris Aldrich (https://boffosocko.com/) for the header image. This is day 13 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days. ← Day 12: https://tantek.com/2023/012/t1/six-years-webmention-w3c → 🔮 ^1 https://tantek.com/2023/001/t1/own-your-notes ^2 https://tantek.com/2023/005/t3/indieweb-simpler-approach ^3 https://indieweb.org/silo-quits ^4 https://tantek.com/2023/004/t1/choosing-domain-name-indieweb ^5 https://indieweb.org/creator - Tantek
    1
    1. https://cplong.org/2023/01/return-to-blogging/<br /> reply to https://hcommons.social/@sramsay/109660599682539192

      IndieWeb, blogging, fountain pens?!? I almost hate to mention it for the rabbit hole it may become, but: https://micro.blog/discover/pens. Happy New Year!

    1. Gwern’s suggestion for how to design internet communities to allow for conversation on different time scales:

      While done in the framing of Reddit, this general pattern is the one that is generally seen in the IndieWeb community with their online chat and wiki.

      Chat rooms + wiki = conversational ratchet for community goals

    1. IndieWeb citizen IndieAuth support (OAuth2 extension) Microformats everywhere Micropub support Sends and processes Webmentions RSS/Atom/JSON feed

      https://docs.microblog.pub/

    1. I don't presently have plans to expand this into an annotation extension, as I believe that purpose is served by Hypothesis. For now, I see this extension as a useful way for me to save highlights, share specific pieces of information on my website, and enable other people to do the same.

      I wonder if it uses the W3C recommendation for highlighting and annotation though? Which would allow it to interact with other highlighting/annotation results.

      To me highlighting is annotation, though a leightweight form, as the decision to highlight is interacting with the text in a meaningful way. And the pop up box actually says Annotation right there in the screenshot, so I don't fully grasp what distinction James is making here.

    2. https://jamesg.blog/2022/12/30/highlight-js/

    1. While that discourse is very important, the complexity it would add to the site to manage it, just isn’t worth it in my eyes.

      Valid point Kev makes here. A site should do only what its author needs it to do. I want interaction visible on my site, though I probably will cut down on the facepiles.

  9. Dec 2022
    1. https://tellico-project.org/

      Tellico<br /> Collection management software, free and simple

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Fernando Borretti</span> in Unbundling Tools for Thought (<time class='dt-published'>12/29/2022 15:59:17</time>)</cite></small>

    1. https://maya.land/blogroll.opml

      Maya has an awesome OPML-based blogroll with some excellent buttons/banners.

    1. https://schopie1.commons.msu.edu/2022/12/05/microblogging_with_mastodon/

      OMG! There is so much to love here about these processes and to see people in the wild experimenting with them and figuring them out.

      Scott, you are not alone! There are lots of us out here doing these things, not only with WordPress but a huge variety of other platforms. There are many ways to syndicate your content depending on where it starts its life.

      In addition to Jim Groom and a huge group of others' work on A Domain of One's Own, there's also a broader coalition of designers, developers, professionals, hobbyists, and people of all strips working on these problems under the name of IndieWeb.

      For some of their specific work you might appreciate the following:<br /> - https://indieweb.org/Indieweb_for_Education - https://indieweb.org/A_Domain_of_One%27s_Own - https://indieweb.org/academic_samizdat - https://indieweb.org/WordPress - https://indieweb.org/Category:syndication

      Incidentally, I wrote this for our friend Kathleen Fitzpatrick last week and I can't wait to see what she's come up with over the weekend and the coming weeks. Within the IndieWeb community you'll find people like Ben Werdmuller who created large portions of both WithKnown and Elgg and Aram Zucker-Scharff who helped to create PressForward.

      I'm thrilled to see the work and huge strides that Humanities Commons is making some of these practices come to fruition.

      If you're game, perhaps we ought to plan an upcoming education-related popup event as an IndieWebCamp event to invite more people into this broader conversation?

      If you have questions or need any help in these areas, I'm around, but so are hundreds of friends in the IndieWeb chat: https://chat.indieweb.org.

      I hope we can bring more of these technologies to the masses in better and easier-to-use manners to lower the technical hurdles.

    1. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/12/the-ethics-of-syndicating-comments-using-webmentions/

      Not an answer to the dilemma, though I generally take the position of keeping everything unless someone asks me to take it down or that I might know that it's been otherwise deleted. Often I choose not to delete my copy, but simply make it private and only viewable to me.

      On the deadnaming and related issues, it would be interesting to create a webmention mechanism for the h-card portions so that users might update these across networks. To some extent Automattic's Gravatar system does this in a centralized manner, but it would be interesting to see it separately. Certainly not as big an issue as deadnaming, but there's a similar problem on some platforms like Twitter where people will change their display name regularly for either holidays, or lately because they're indicating they'd rather be found on Mastodon or other websites.

      The webmention spec does contain details for both editing/deleting content and resending webmentions to edit and/or remove the original. Ideally this would be more broadly adopted and used in the future to eliminate the need for making these choices by leaving the choice up to the original publisher.

      Beyond this, often on platforms that don't have character limits (Reddit for example), I'll post at the bottom of my syndicated copy of content that it was originally published on my site (along with the permalink) and explicitly state that I aggregate the replies from various locations which also helps to let people know that they might find addition context or conversation at the original post should they be interested. Doing this on Twitter, Mastodon, et al is much harder due to space requirements obviously.

      While most responses I send would fall under fair use for copying, I also have a Creative Commons license on my text in an effort to help others feel more comfortable with having copies of my content on their sites.

      Another ethical layer to this is interactions between sites which both have webmentions enabled. To some extent this creates an implicit bi-directional relationship which says, I'm aware that this sort of communication exists and approve of your parsing and displaying my responses.

      The public norms and ethics in this area will undoubtedly evolve over time, so it's also worth revisiting and re-evaluating the issue over time.

    1. https://werd.io/2022/the-fediverse-and-the-indieweb

      The idea behind this is great, but the hurdles for supporting dozens of publishing specifications can be awfully daunting. Where do we draw the line?

    2. So instead of Publishing on my Own Site and Syndicating Elsewhere, I plan to just Publish and Participate.

      The easiest publishing (syndication) workflow of all.

  10. Nov 2022
    1. https://mxb.dev/blog/the-indieweb-for-everyone/

    2. Generally speaking: The more independence a technology gives you, the higher its barrier for adoption.

      I've previously framed this as a greater range of choices (towards independence) requires more work--both work to narrow down one's choices as well as potentially work to build and maintain..

    3. I love the IndieWeb and its tools, but it has always bothered me that at some point they basically require you to have a webdevelopment background.

      Yeah this is definitely a concern and a major barrier for adoption at the moment.

    1. From a technical point of view, the IndieWeb people have worked on a number of simple, easy to implement protocols, which provide the ability for web services to interact openly with each other, but in a way that allows for a website owner to define policy over what content they will accept.

      Thought you might like Web Monetization.

    1. Natalie @natalie@hcommons.social Follow @chrisaldrichoh wow, your website is mind-blowing! i have to check this out in detail. This is what I hope my future (social) media presence is going to look like one day.A question about syndicating your posts: What happens to the syndicated copies of a post after deleting it?.. my ideal would be: I have full control over my contributions. Probably an illusion? November 27, 2022 at 1:59 AM

      https://hcommons.social/@natalie/109415180134582494

    1. Matthew Hindman, in his book "The Internet Trap" <http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s13236.pdf>, notes that most research on the internet has focused on its supposedly decentralized nature, leaving us with little language to really grapple with the concentrated, oligopolistic state of today's online economy, where the vast majority of attention and revenue accrue to a tiny number of companies

      This is a really nice summary - "the internet" is still talked about as if it is still 1999 whereas in reality today's internet can be equated to "where I consume services from FAANG" for most people

    1. First, to experiment personally with AP itself, and if possible with the less known Activities that AP could support, e.g. travel and check-ins. This as an extension of my personal site in areas that WordPress, OPML and RSS currently can’t provide to me. This increases my own agency, by adding affordances to my site. This in time may mean I won’t be hosting or self-hosting my personal Mastodon instance. (See my current fediverse activities)

      Interesting for me to explore and understand too. How does AP compare to micropub which can be used for similar purposes? As far as I can tell it is much more heavyweight

    1. https://whatever.scalzi.com/2022/11/25/how-to-weave-the-artisan-web/

      “But Scalzi,” I hear you say, “How do we bring back that artisan, hand-crafted Web?” Well, it’s simple, really, and if you’re a writer/artist/musician/other sort of creator, it’s actually kind of essential:

    1. Can someone point me to a writeup or venn diagram explaining the relationship between the #Fedivers and #IndieWeb?Doing a lot of learning and not afraid to dig in on the protocol level. Do these protocols compete? Interoperate? Complement each other?

      https://mastodon.social/@tbeseda@indieweb.social/109368520955574335

      At a base level, the Fediverse is a subset within the bigger IndieWeb. Parts of the Fediverse, have and support some of the IndieWeb building blocks, but none that I'm aware of support them all. Example: Mastodon has microformats markup, but doesn't support sending webmentions or have micropub support. Currently it's easier for the IndieWeb to communicate into and read the Fediverse, but the Fediverse doesn't do a good job of seeing or interacting with things outside it.

    1. Dr. Johnathan Flowers @shengokai@zirk.usThis is a good one. My response? These platforms host publics, but are not publics themselves. Publics form through using the affordances of the platforms to give rise to a community of shared interests which enable members to cooperate for mutual flourishing.https://sci

      https://mastodon.social/@shengokai@zirk.us/109352048879045130

      https://sciences.social/@Chanders/109352022415374012

    1. manton Interesting post by @simon@simonwillison.net that Mastodon is just blogs. Except Mastodon’s design runs counter to blog features like domain names and custom designs. I’d say Mastodon is more Twitter-like than blog-like… Which is fine, but not the same as a blog-first platform.

      https://micro.blog/manton/14045523

      @manton When I was looking at Fediverse instances the other day I noticed that one of the biggest platforms within it was Write.as, which are more blog centric. Is there a better/easier way for m.b. to federate/interact or serve as a reader for that part of the ecosystem? Perhaps worth exploring?

  11. tantek.com tantek.com
    #TwitterMigration, first time? Have posted notes to https://tantek.com/ since 2010, POSSEd tweets & #AtomFeed. Added one .htaccess line today, and thanks to #BridgyFed, #Mastodon users can follow my #IndieWeb site @tantek.com@tantek.com No Mastodon install or account needed. Just one line in .htaccess: RewriteRule ^.well-known/(host-meta|webfinger).* https://fed.brid.gy/$0 [redirect=302,last] is enough for Mastodon users to search for and follow that @tantek.com@tantek.com username. Took a little more work to setup Bridgy Fed to push new posts to followers. Note by the way both the redundancy & awkwardness (it’s not a clickable URL) of such @-@ (AT-AT) usernames when you’re already using your own domain. Why can’t Mastodon follow a username of “@tantek.com”? Or just “tantek.com”? And either way expanding it internally if need be to the AT-AT syntax. Why this regression from what we had with classic feed readers where a domain was enough to discover & follow a feed? Also, why does following show a blank result? Contrast that with classic feed readers which immediately show you the most recent items in a feed you subscribed to. Lastly (for now), I asked around and no one knew of a simple public way to “preview” or “validate” that @tantek.com@tantek.com actually “worked”. You have to be *logged-in* to a Mastodon instance and search for a username to check to see if it works. Contrast that with https://validator.w3.org/feed/ which you can use without any log-in to validate your classic feed file. Why these regressions from the days of feed readers? - Tantek
    1
  12. Oct 2022
    1. Honestly, the lack of support for RSS is one of the reasons I'm disinclined to embrace the standards they promote. Maybe if I understood why this is the case I'd feel better about seeing myself as part of this group.

      I agree that Indieweb focus sites should provide and promote RSS/Atom feeds. However, I do not see a tension with embracing some Indieweb projects (e.g., microformats, webmentions) without being a part of the Indieweb community.

    1. Over time, this overt position against RSS/Atom feeds has subsided, and (per the IndieWeb website), I would say the current focus is on the principles of (1) principles over project-centric focus, (2) publish on your site, and (3) design and UX come first, then protocols and formats are developed second. In that list, RSS and Atom become part of a “plurality of projects“, acknowledging that there can be “more than one way to do it”, as Perl devotees like to say.

      "Plurality of projects" is the correct approach.

    2. In the meeting, however, I asked how the attendees expected people to keep up with site updates without some type of feed to monitor. Aaron’s response was that more people needed to adopt microformats. I said that this was a “boil the ocean” strategy and that people who use feeds to monitor sites expect to use RSS and Atom, not microformats.

      I agree 100% with the author here. As I opined in my own article about gaming on Linux, I opined that you have to meet people where they are. To the extent people curate their own reading list, they use RSS/Atom readers, not microformats readers. Trying to force the adoption of microformats readers will only lead to people who rely on RSS/Atom ignoring microformats-only sites.

    3. What I found in looking at other Indieweb-type sites was that they did not have any RSS feed for posts. Specifically, the two co-founders, Aaron Parecki and Tantek Celik, did not have feeds available for their sites. In the next meeting I attended, I brought this up. The response was that they were using microformats to encode data within their websites, and that there were microformat parsers which could read that formatted data and present it in a feed reader application.

      Microformats are neat and I an interested in their potential to add social functionality to individual websites. However, microformat parsers are far-less used than RSS/Atom feed readers, and there is too little awareness of RSS/Atom readers as it is.

    4. RSS and podcasting are a crucial part of what I call (and others have called) the “independent web” (websites and web presences that are not part of a silo like Twitter, Facebook, etc, where people own their data and control it (also an IndieWeb principle)). The two areas (IndieWeb and independent web) share some features, but in my opinion, should not be considered “the same” – there are differences.

      I agree fully. I think that aspects of the IndieWeb, potentially Webmentions, have great potential and should be used by more sites. But RSS/ATOM feeds are an essential way of consuming content, regardless of whether the reader maintains his or her own site.

    1. Yes! My IndieBlocks plugin is now up on WP.org. Current version offers a single “Context” block, and, optionally, (1) some custom post types, and (2) the ability to add microformats2 to block-based (!) themes.

      Very interesting project to add IndieWeb blocks to WordPress's Gutenberg editor. I will be following it, although I am not keen on its adding custom post types - something I prefer to do with my own plugins.

    1. Current IndieWeb set-ups do not support the Gutenberg editor in WordPress as blocks are not supported. Jan’s plugin is created for blocks. Will need to try this out (also because my recent presentation at WordCamp on making WP IndieWeb compatible by default played a small role). Nice timing Jan, releasing it just so it can dominate my weekend

      An IndieWeb plugin for implementing IndieWeb functionality in WordPress blocks. I have added some IndieWeb functionality to my site, although it does not support it by default. I am curious how it would work on my theme - but I will wait until information about its effect on page speed and its options/database tables (if applicable) are available. Also not keen on its adding two custom post types - I prefer to not tie that to a plugin I may have to uninstall.

    1. And it’s important that it does, for I want to have the data that I share through these services on my own server, under my own full control. Plazes, YASNS and other can then come and have that data collected by software agents.

      IndieWeb POSSE avant la lettre. However I don't point to syndication here, but to services coming to me to fetch the relevant content. Like inbound RSS on micro.blog.

  13. Sep 2022
    1. https://web.archive.org/web/20120122115952/http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/2006/10/13/one-pocket-rule/

      Noguchi Yukio had a "one pocket rule" which they first described in “「超」整理法 (cho seiri ho)”. The broad idea was to store everything in one place as a means of saving time by not needing to search in multiple repositories for the thing you were hunting for. Despite this advice the Noguchi Filing System didn't take complete advantage of this as one would likely have both a "home" and an "office" system, thus creating two pockets, a problem that exists in an analog world, but which can be mitigated in a digital one.

      The one pocket rule can be seen in the IndieWeb principles of owning all your own data on your own website and syndicating out from there. Your single website has the entire store of all your material which makes search much easier. You don't need to recall which platform (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et al.) you posted something on, you can save time and find the thing much more quickly by searching one place.


      This principle also applies to zettelkasten and commonplace books (well indexed), which allow you to find the data or information you put into them quickly and easily.

  14. Aug 2022
    1. Indie sites can’t complete with that. And what good is hosting and controlling your own content if no one else looks at it? I’m driven by self-satisfaction and a lifelong archivist mindset, but others may not be similarly inclined. The payoffs here aren’t obvious in the short-term, and that’s part of the problem. It will only be when Big Social makes some extremely unpopular decision or some other mass exodus occurs that people lament about having no where else to go, no other place to exist. IndieWeb is an interesting movement, but it’s hard to find mentions of it outside of hippie tech circles. I think even just the way their “Getting Started” page is presented is an enormous barrier. A layperson’s eyes will 100% glaze over before they need to scroll. There is a lot of weird jargon and in-joking. I don’t know how to fix that either. Even as someone with a reasonably technical background, there are a lot of components of IndieWeb that intimidate me. No matter the barriers we tear down, it will always be easier to just install some app made by a centralised platform.
    1. https://www.kevinmarks.com/memex.html

      I got stuck over the weekend, so I totally missed Kevin Marks' memex demo at IndieWebCamp's Create Day, but it is an interesting little UI experiment.

      I'll always maintain that Vannevar Bush really harmed the first few generations of web development by not mentioning the word commonplace book in his conceptualization. Marks heals some of this wound by explicitly tying the idea of memex to that of the zettelkasten however. John Borthwick even mentions the idea of "networked commonplace books". [I suspect a little birdie may have nudged this perspective as catnip to grab my attention—a ruse which is highly effective.]

      Some of Kevin's conceptualization reminds me a bit of Jerry Michalski's use of The Brain which provides a specific visual branching of ideas based on the links and their positions on the page: the main idea in the center, parent ideas above it, sibling ideas to the right/left and child ideas below it. I don't think it's got the idea of incoming or outgoing links, but having a visual location on the page for incoming links (my own site has incoming ones at the bottom as comments or responses) can be valuable.

      I'm also reminded a bit of Kartik Prabhu's experiments with marginalia and webmention on his website which plays around with these ideas as well as their visual placement on the page in different methods.

      MIT MediaLab's Fold site (details) was also an interesting sort of UI experiment in this space.

      It also seems a bit reminiscent of Kevin Mark's experiments with hovercards in the past as well, which might be an interesting way to do the outgoing links part.

      Next up, I'd love to see larger branching visualizations of these sorts of things across multiple sites... Who will show us those "associative trails"?

      Another potential framing for what we're all really doing is building digital versions of Indigenous Australian's songlines across the web. Perhaps this may help realize Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly's dream for a "third archive"?

  15. Jul 2022
    1. https://collectionbuilder.github.io/

      CollectionBuilder is a set of flexible, static web templates for creating digital collection websites. These templates are driven by metadata and powered by modern static web technology. Using three primary components—a spreadsheet of metadata, a directory of assets, and a configuration file—CollectionBuilder helps users to build and customize sustainable, digital collections and exhibits for free, learning valuable development practices in the process.

    1. Searx is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. Additionally, searx can be used over Tor for online anonymity. Get started with searx by using one of the Searx-instances. If you don’t trust anyone, you can set up your own, see Installation.

      https://searx.github.io/searx/

      Mentioned by Taylor Jadin.

    1. reply to: https://ariadne.space/2022/07/01/a-silo-can-never-provide-digital-autonomy-to-its-users/

      Matt Ridley indicates in The Rational Optimist that markets for goods and services "work so well that it is hard to design them so they fail to deliver efficiency and innovation" while assets markets are nearly doomed to failure and require close and careful regulation.

      If we view the social media landscape from this perspective, an IndieWeb world in which people are purchasing services like easy import/export of their data; the ability to move their domain name and URL permalinks from one web host to another; and CMS (content management system) services/platforms/functionalities, represents the successful market mode for our personal data and online identities. Here competition for these sorts of services will not only improve the landscape, but generally increased competition will tend to drive the costs to consumers down. The internet landscape is developed and sophisticated enough and broadly based on shared standards that this mode of service market should easily be able to not only thrive, but innovate.

      At the other end of the spectrum, if our data are viewed as assets in an asset market between Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, et al., it is easy to see that the market has already failed so miserably that one cannot even easily move ones' assets from one silo to another. Social media services don't compete to export or import data because the goal is to trap you and your data and attention there, otherwise they lose. The market corporate social media is really operating in is one for eyeballs and attention to sell advertising, so one will notice a very health, thriving, and innovating market for advertisers. Social media users will easily notice that there is absolutely no regulation in the service portion of the space at all. This only allows the system to continue failing to provide improved or even innovative service to people on their "service". The only real competition in the corporate silo social media space is for eyeballs and participation because the people and their attention are the real product.

      As a result, new players whose goal is to improve the health of the social media space, like the recent entrant Cohost, are far better off creating a standards based service that allows users to register their own domain names and provide a content management service that has easy import and export of their data. This will play into the services market mode which improves outcomes for people. Aligning in any other competition mode that silos off these functions will force them into competition with the existing corporate social services and we already know where those roads lead.

      Those looking for ethical and healthy models of this sort of social media service might look at Manton Reece's micro.blog platform which provides a wide variety of these sorts of data services including data export and taking your domain name with you. If you're unhappy with his service, then it's relatively easy to export your data and move it to another host using WordPress or some other CMS. On the flip side, if you're unhappy with your host and CMS, then it's also easy to move over to micro.blog and continue along just as you had before. Best of all, micro.blog is offering lots of the newest and most innovative web standards including webmention notificatons which enable website-to-website conversations, micropub, and even portions of microsub not to mention some great customer service.

      I like to analogize the internet and social media to competition in the telecom/cellular phone space In America, you have a phone number (domain name) and can then have your choice of service provider (hosting), and a choice of telephone (CMS). Somehow instead of adopting a social media common carrier model, we have trapped ourselves inside of a model that doesn't provide the users any sort of real service or options. It's easy to imagine what it would be like to need your own AT&T account to talk to family on AT&T and a separate T-Mobile account to talk to your friends on T-Mobile because that's exactly what you're doing with social media despite the fact that you're all still using the same internet. Part of the draw was that services like Facebook appeared to be "free" and it's only years later that we're seeing the all too real costs emerge.

      This sort of competition and service provision also goes down to subsidiary layers of the ecosystem. Take for example the idea of writing interface and text editing. There are (paid) services like iA Writer, Ulysses, and Typora which people use to compose their writing. Many people use these specifically for writing blog posts. Companies can charge for these products because of their beauty, simplicity, and excellent user interfaces. Some of them either do or could support the micropub and IndieAuth web standards which allow their users the ability to log into their websites and directly post their saved content from the editor directly to their website. Sure there are also a dozen or so other free micropub clients that also allow this, but why not have and allow competition for beauty and ease of use? Let's say you like WordPress enough, but aren't a fan of the Gutenberg editor. Should you need to change to Drupal or some unfamiliar static site generator to exchange a better composing experience for a dramatically different and unfamiliar back end experience? No, you could simply change your editor client and continue on without missing a beat. Of course the opposite also applies—WordPress could split out Gutenberg as a standalone (possibly paid) micropub client and users could then easily use it to post to Drupal, micro.blog, or other CMSs that support the micropub spec, and many already do.

      Social media should be a service to and for people all the way down to its core. The more companies there are that provide these sorts of services means more competition which will also tend to lure people away from silos where they're trapped for lack of options. Further, if your friends are on services that interoperate and can cross communicate with standards like Webmention from site to site, you no longer need to be on Facebook because "that's where your friends and family all are."

      I have no doubt that we can all get to a healthier place online, but it's going to take companies and startups like Cohost to make better choices in how they frame their business models. Co-ops and non-profits can help here too. I can easily see a co-op adding webmention to their Mastodon site to allow users to see and moderate their own interactions instead of forcing local or global timelines on their constituencies. Perhaps Garon didn't think Webmention was a fit for Mastodon, but this doesn't mean that others couldn't support it. I personally think that Darius Kazemi's Hometown fork of Mastodon which allows "local only" posting a fabulous little innovation while still allowing interaction with a wider readership, including me who reads him in a microsub enabled social reader. Perhaps someone forks Mastodon to use as a social feed reader, but builds in micropub so that instead of posting the reply to a Mastodon account, it's posted to one's IndieWeb capable website which sends a webmention notification to the original post? Opening up competition this way makes lots of new avenues for every day social tools.

      Continuing the same old siloing of our data and online connections is not the way forward. We'll see who stands by their ethics and morals by serving people's interests and not the advertising industry.

    2. Silos, by their very nature of being centralized services under the control of the privileged, cannot be good if you look at the power structures imposed by them. Instead, we should use our privilege to lift others up, something that commercial silos, by design, are incapable of doing.