729 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
  2. Jan 2024
    1. The goal of Quartz is to make hosting your own public digital garden free and simple. You don’t even need your own website. Quartz does all of that for you and gives your own little corner of the internet. https://github.com/jackyzha0/quartz

      Quartz runs on top of Hugo so all notes are written in Markdown .

    1. https://streetpass.social/

      StreetPass, a browser extension that leverages rel="me" for compiling a list of potential mastodon accounts to follow as you visit websites.

    1. Generally speaking, plaza are public while warrens are private. Plaza are easy to expand, because people can see what is going on in the community and decide whether to join the community. On the contrary, warrens are personalized contents in social network, which makes they scale free. Therefore, communities that have a plaza-like structure are easy to expand, thus suffering more from Evaporative Cooling Effect, while communities having warren-like structure are not very scalable, but more stable. A successful social network should somehow combining those two structures, taking both scalability and stability into account.

      IndieWeb has both a big and expandable plaza space (the wiki and commons spaces) as well as warrens (individual sites interacting with each other separate from the main plaza).

    1. I used to treat my personal website like a content marketer, every post carefully crafted to attract leads that could improve my career or get freelance opportunities. However, it robbed me of a lot of joy. Now, I treat my personal website as my “digital home hub”. I’m much happier as a result.
  3. Dec 2023
    1. https://docsify-this.net/#/

      Instantly Turn Online Markdown Files into Web Pages This open-source web app, built with the magical documentation site generator Docsify, provides a quick way to publish one or more online Markdown files as standalone web pages without needing to set up your own website.

    1. it’s easier to hear the everyday concerns of people and see the patterns of life. Personal websites represent a return to human scale.

      Personal websites as an expression of [[Technologie kleiner dan ons 20050617122905]]. This is how I described social software 2004-5 too, before the onslaught by F an T from 2006 on, and the slow disappearance of various socsoft facets (interoperability, apis but also niche tools like Plazes, Dopplr etc).

  4. Nov 2023
  5. Oct 2023
  6. Sep 2023
  7. Aug 2023
  8. Jul 2023
  9. Jun 2023
    1. Personal Website

      reply to u/GlitteringFee1047 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/147yj2b/personal_website/

      I've got a personal site at https://boffosocko.com which I've had for many years and used in part as a digital commonplace book/pseudo-zettelkasten. I've been an active member of the IndieWeb community for many years as well and happy to answer any questions about those experiences. To bring things closer to the overlap of that and this particular community, folks may appreciate the following related material:

  10. 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.

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

      Publish (on your) Own Site, Spam Everywhere

  12. 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.

  13. 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.

  14. Feb 2023
  15. 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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  16. Jan 2023
  17. 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.

  18. 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.

  19. 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?

  20. 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
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  21. 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.

  22. 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.

  23. 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"?

  24. 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.
    1. Beyond the cards mentioned above, you should also capture any hard-to-classify thoughts, questions, and areas for further inquiry on separate cards. Regularly go through these to make sure that you are covering everything and that you don’t forget something.I consider these insurance cards because they won’t get lost in some notebook or scrap of paper, or email to oneself.

      Julius Reizen in reviewing over Umberto Eco's index card system in How to Write a Thesis, defines his own "insurance card" as one which contains "hard-to-classify thoughts, questions, and areas for further inquiry". These he would keep together so that they don't otherwise get lost in the variety of other locations one might keep them

      These might be akin to Ahrens' "fleeting notes" but are ones which may not easily or even immediately be converted in to "permanent notes" for one's zettelkasten. However, given their mission critical importance, they may be some of the most important cards in one's repository.

      link this to - idea of centralizing one's note taking practice to a single location

      Is this idea in Eco's book and Reizen is the one that gives it a name since some of the other categories have names? (examples: bibliographic index cards, reading index cards (aka literature notes), cards for themes, author index cards, quote index cards, idea index cards, connection cards). Were these "officially" named and categorized by Eco?

      May be worthwhile to create a grid of these naming systems and uses amongst some of the broader note taking methods. Where are they similar, where do they differ?


      Multi-search tools that have full access to multiple trusted data stores (ostensibly personal ones across notebooks, hard drives, social media services, etc.) could potentially solve the problem of needing to remember where you noted something.

      Currently, in the social media space especially, this is not a realized service.

  25. Jun 2022
    1. YouArentGonnaNeedIt (often abbreviated YAGNI, or YagNi on this wiki) is an ExtremeProgramming practice which states: "Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them."

      Only implement features in code when you actually need them. Never implement features that you anticipate needing, because you aren't gonna need it (YAGNI).

    1. I owe a big thank you to Chris Aldrich too. As it was his website I came across that inspired me to bring my website back to what I have always wanted it to be. Hopefully, thanks to the indieweb helper plugins I have installed, Chris may just get notified on his website and post a reply back — from his website over to mine using the webmention protocol.

      :)

    1. In fact, WordPress already does this with Pingbacks.

      Webmentions are the new hotness. I think it should be embraced more. Pingbacks/Webmentions are cool.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G60o31ay_D0

      Maintaining multiple blogs or websites for each topic one is interested in can be exhausting.

      Example: Dan Allosso indicates that he's gotten overwhelmed at keeping things "everywhere" rather than in one place. (~4:40)

  26. May 2022
    1. I tried very hard in that book, when it came to social media, to be platform agnostic, to emphasize that social media sites come and go, and to always invest first and foremost in your own media. (Website, blog, mailing list, etc.)
    1. I like how Dr. Pacheco-Vega outlines some of his research process here.

      Sharing it on Twitter is great, and so is storing a copy on his website. I do worry that it looks like the tweets are embedded via a simple URL method and not done individually, which means that if Twitter goes down or disappears, so does all of his work. Better would be to do a full blockquote embed method, so that if Twitter disappears he's got the text at least. Images would also need to be saved separately.

    1. It's the feedback that's motivating A-list bloggers like Digg founder Kevin Rose to shut down their blogs and redirect traffic to their Google+ profiles. I have found the same to be true.

      This didn't work out too well for them did it?

    1. GWG, Some random thoughts:

      Your challenge question is tough, not just for the mere discovery portion, but for the multiple other functions involved, particularly a "submit/reply" portion and a separate "I want to subscribe to something for future updates".

      I can't think of any sites that do both of these functionalities at the same time. They're almost always a two step process, and quite often, after the submission part, few people ever revisit the original challenge to see further updates and follow along. The lack of an easy subscribe function is the downfall of the second part. A system that allowed one to do both a cross-site submit/subscribe simultaneously would be ideal UI, but that seems a harder problem, especially as subscribe isn't well implemented in IndieWeb spaces with a one click and done set up.

      Silo based spaces where you're subscribed to the people who might also participate might drip feed you some responses, but I don't think that even micro.blog has something that you could use to follow the daily photo challenges by does it?

      Other examples: https://daily.ds106.us/ is a good example of a sort of /planet that does regular challenges and has a back end that aggregates responses (usually from Twitter). I imagine that people are subscribed to the main feed of the daily challenges, but I don't imagine that many are subscribed to the comments feed (is there even one?)

      Maxwell's Sith Lord Challenge is one of the few I've seen in the personal site space that has aggregated responses at https://www.maxwelljoslyn.com/sithlordchallenge. I don't think it has an easy way to subscribe to the responses though an h-feed of responses on the page might work in a reader? Maybe he's got some thoughts about how this worked out.

      Ongoing challenges, like a 30 day photography challenge for example, are even harder because they're an ongoing one that either requires a central repository to collect, curate, and display them (indieweb.xyz, or a similar planet) or require something that can collect one or more of a variety of submitted feeds and then display them or allow a feed(s) of them. I've seen something like this before with http://connectedcourses.net/ in the education space using RSS, but it took some time to not only set it up but to get people's sites to work with it. (It was manual and it definitely hurt as I recall.)

      I don't think of it as a challenge, but I often submit to the IndieWeb sub on indieweb.xyz and I'm also subscribed to its output as well. In this case it works as an example since this is one of its primary functions. It's not framed as a challenge, though it certainly could be. Here one could suggest that participants tag their posts with a particular hashtag for tracking, but in IndieWeb space they'd be "tagging" their posts with the planet's particular post URL and either manually or automatically pinging the Webmention endpoint.

      Another option that could help implement some fun in the system is to salmention all the prior submissions on each submission as an update mechanism, but one would need to have a way to unsubscribe to this as it could be(come) a spam vector.

    1. Villar-Onrubia, Daniel, and Victoria I. Marín. “Independently-Hosted Web Publishing.” Internet Policy Review 11, no. 2 (April 26, 2022). https://doi.org/10.14763/2022.2.1665.

      https://policyreview.info/glossary/independently-hosted-web-publishing

      Fun to see the IndieWeb wiki cited in academic literature.

    2. The term independent is considered more appropriate than self, as in self-hosted, considering the latter can give the wrong impression that it only refers to situations where the owners of a website decided to physically host it on hardware that is physically controlled and managed by them.

      This idea of independently hosted versus self-hosted comes up frequently in IndieWeb chat. The IndieWeb doesn't generally participate in the "purity test" of requiring full self-hosting as a result.

    3. Projects like the Open Journal System, Manifold or Scalar are based on a distributed model that allow anyone to download and deploy the software (Maxwell et al., 2019), offering an alternative to the commercial entities that dominate the scholarly communication ecosystem.

      Might Hypothes.is also be included with this list? Though it could go a bit further toward packaging and making it more easily available to self-hosters.

    4. For example, Campbell talks about personal cyberinfrastructures when he suggests providing students with hosting space and their own domain as soon as they start their studies: Suppose that when students matriculate, they are assigned their own web servers […] As part of the first-year orientation, each student would pick a domain name […] students would build out their digital presences in an environment made of the medium of the web itself. […] In short, students would build a personal cyberinfrastructure— one they would continue to modify and extend throughout their college career—and beyond. (Campbell, 2013, p. 101–102)

      Giving a student their own cyberinfrastructures, a set of digital tools, is not too dissimilar from encouraging them to bring tools like notebooks, paper, index cards, pens, and paper in the early 20th century or slate and chalk generations earlier.

      Having the best tools for the job and showing them how to use them is paramount in education. Too often we take our tools for thought for granted in the education space. Students aren't actively taught to use their pens and paper, their voices, their memories, or their digital technologies in the ways that they had been in the past. In the past decade we've focused more on digital technologies, in part, because the teachers were learning to use them in tandem with their students, but this isn't the case with note taking methods like commonplacing, card indexes (or zettelkasten). Some of these methods have been taken for granted to such an extent that some of them are no longer commonplace within education.


      I'll quickly note that they don't seem to have a reference to Campbell in their list. (oops!) Presumably they're referencing Gardner Campbell, though his concept here seems to date to 2009 and was mentioned heavily in the ds106 community.

    5. emancipatory communication seeks “to circumvent the politics of enclosure and control enacted by states, regulators, and corporations” (Milan, 2019 , p. 1)
    6. We propose ‘independently-hosted web publishing’ as a term that can appropriately describe “affirmative disruption” (Hall, 2016) in relation to practices enabling a diverse range of individuals, collectives and initiatives to adopt alternatives to centralised modes of sharing content online.

      Is there a need for a word to describe this? Does indieweb have baggage to warrant using 'independently-hosted web publishing'?

      I like the idea of affirmative disruption--it's got a positive connotation and takes back the idea of disruption which has been co-opted by "big social".

    1. https://x28newblog.wordpress.com/2022/05/08/curating-my-blog-archive/

      I like the overall look and effect done here to create a table of contents in WordPress, but it seems like some quirky gymnastics to pull it off. How might this be done in a more straightforward way? Are there any plugins for WordPress that could create a page that keeps the categories and the descriptions? And particularly a page that primarily only shows articles and not other content types?

      Link this to my work on my own index at https://boffosocko.com/about/index/

    1. It's a little hard to tell if "IndieWeb" is in practice just its own community of people who like to talk about #indieweb things. (That's what gets surfaced when I try to learn more, but of course it is.) I like the idea more than most "fediverse" incarnations, though.

      The Logos, Ethos, and Pathos of IndieWeb

      Where is the IndieWeb?

      Logos

      One might consider the IndieWeb's indieweb.org wiki-based website and chat the "logos" of IndieWeb. There is a small group of about a hundred actove tp very active participants who hang out in these spaces on a regular basis, but there are also many who dip in and out over time as they tinker and build, ask advice, get some help, or just to show up and say hello. Because there are concrete places online as well as off (events) for them to congregate, meet, and interact, it's the most obvious place to find these ideas and people.

      Ethos

      Beyond this there is an even larger group of people online who represent the "ethos" of IndieWeb. Some may have heard the word before, some have a passing knowledge of it, but an even larger number have not. They all act and operate in a way that either seemed natural to them because they grew up in the period of the open web, or because they never felt accepted by the thundering herds in the corporate social enclosures. Many are not necessarily easily found or discovered because they're not surfaced or highlighted by the sinister algorithms of corporate social media, but through slow and steady work (much like the in person social space) they find each other and interact in various traditional web spaces. Many of them can be found in spaces like Tilde Club or NeoCities, or through movements like A Domain of One's Own, some can be found through a variety of webrings, via blogrolls, or just following someone's website and slowly seeing the community of people who stop by and comment. Yes, these discovery methods may involve a little more work, but shouldn't health human interactions require work and care?

      Pathos

      The final group of people, and likely the largest within the community, are those that represent the "pathos" of IndieWeb. The word IndieWeb has not registered with any of them and they suffer with grief in the long shadow of corporate social media wishing they had better user interfaces, better features, different interaction, more meaningful interaction, healthier and kinder interaction. Some may have even been so steeped in big social for so long that they don't realize that there is another way of being or knowing.

      These people may be found searching for the IndieWeb promised land on silo platforms like Blogger, Tumblr or Medium where they have the shadow on the wall of a home on the web where they can place their identities and thoughts. Here they're a bit more safe from the acceleration of algorithmically fed content and ills of mainstream social. Others are trapped within massive content farms run by multi-billion dollar extractive companies who quietly but steadily exploit their interactions with friends and family.

      The Conversation

      All three of these parts of the IndieWeb, the logos, the ethos, and the pathos comprise the community of humanity. They are the sum of the real conversation online.

      Venture capital backed corporate social media has cleverly inserted themselves between us and our interactions with each other. They privilege some voices not only over others, but often at the expense of others and only to their benefit. We have been developing a new vocabulary for these actions with phrases like "surveillance capitalism", "data mining", and analogizing human data as the new "oil" of the 21st century. The IndieWeb is attempting to remove these barriers, many of them complicated, but not insurmountable, technical ones, so that we can have a healthier set of direct interactions with one another that more closely mirrors our in person interactions. By having choice and the ability to move between a larger number of service providers there is an increasing pressure to provide service rather than the growing levels of continued abuse and monopoly we've become accustomed to.

      None of these subdivisions---logos, ethos, or pathos---is better or worse than the others, they just are. There is no hierarchy between or among them just as there should be no hierarchy between fellow humans. But by existing, I think one could argue that through their humanity they are all slowly, but surely making the web a healthier, happier, fun, and more humanized and humanizing place to be.

    1. We’ve updated the default Tumblr Official blog theme to be compatible with Microformats 2, which allows blogs using the Official theme to be parsed more easily as part of the IndieWeb. Follow the ongoing work on this here!

      Huzzah! Kevin Marks for the win!

  27. Apr 2022
    1. using rome as a almost a tool to convey information to your future self

      One's note taking is not only a conversation with the text or even the original author, it is also a conversation you're having with your future self. This feature is accelerated when one cross links ideas within their note box with each other and revisits them at regular intervals.


      Example of someone who uses Roam Research and talks about the prevalence of using it as a "conversation with your future self."


      This is very similar to the same patterns that can be seen in the commonplace book tradition, and even in the blogosphere (Cory Doctorow comes to mind), or IndieWeb which often recommends writing on your own website to document how you did things for your future self.

    1. But amid our slender repertoire of agency are the labels we choose for our labors of love — the works of thought and tenderness we make with the whole of who we are.

      —Maria Popova, on choosing a new name for her website.

    1. three steps required to solve the all-importantcorrespondence problem. Step one, according to Shenkar: specify one’s ownproblem and identify an analogous problem that has been solved successfully.Step two: rigorously analyze why the solution is successful. Jobs and hisengineers at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, immediately got towork deconstructing the marvels they’d seen at the Xerox facility. Soon theywere on to the third and most challenging step: identify how one’s owncircumstances differ, then figure out how to adapt the original solution to thenew setting.

      Oded Shenkar's three step process for effective problem solving using imitation: - Step 1. Specify your problem and identify an analogous problem that has been successfully solved. - Step 2. Analyze why the solution was successful. - Step 3. Identify how your problem and circumstances differ from the example problem and figure out how to best and most appropriately adapt the original solution to the new context.

      The last step may be the most difficult.


      The IndieWeb broadly uses the idea of imitation to work on and solve a variety of different web design problems. By focusing on imitation they dramatically decrease the work and effort involved in building a website. The work involved in creating new innovative solutions even in their space has been much harder, but there, they imitate others in breaking the problems down into the smallest constituent parts and getting things working there.


      Link this to the idea of "leading by example".

      Link to "reinventing the wheel" -- the difficulty of innovation can be more clearly seen in the process of people reinventing the wheel for themselves when they might have simply imitated a more refined idea. Searching the state space of potential solutions can be an arduous task.

      Link to "paving cow paths", which is a part of formalizing or crystalizing pre-tested solutions.

    1. Tools like Hypothes.is are designed as silos to ensure that its social features work.

      As open source as Hypothes.is is, I do wish that it had some additional open IndieWeb building blocks to keep it from being a silo.

      Sadly, I've never had the time, nor the technical expertise and facility with their code to implement the pieces, but I have outlined a bit of what might be done to make the platform a bit less silo-like: https://boffosocko.com/2019/04/08/ideas-for-indieweb-ifying-hypothes-is/

      Fortunately it is open enough for me in other respects that I can bend portions of it to my will and needs beyond what it offers a la carte.

  28. Mar 2022
    1. Gall’s Law, which states that a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. Contrast this with a complex system designed from scratch, which never works and cannot be patched up to make it work.

      Gall's Law: Working complex systems invariably evolve from simple systems which actually worked.

      It is rare to find working complex systems designed from scratch. They rarely work and are incredibly difficult to patch to make them work.