Tags: indieweb

Voxxed Thessaloniki 2018 - Opening Keynote - Taking Back The Web - YouTube

Here’s the talk I gave recently about indie web building blocks.

There’s fifteen minutes of Q&A starting around the 35 minute mark. People asked some great questions!

Warp and Weft — Paul Robert Lloyd

Paul was at the Material conference in Iceland too, and we had some good chats. Here, he speaks his brains with Deep Thoughts prompted by the event.

I really get where he’s coming from when he says that “certain websites feel more ‘webby’ than others”, but it sure is tricky to nail down.

Stats: Creating (Phil Gyford’s website)

I quite like Phil’s idea of having charts like this. It might be a fun project for Homebrew Website Club to do something like this for my site.

PushAPI without Notifications | Seblog

Remember when I wrote about using push without notifications? Sebastiaan has written up the details of the experiment he conducted at Indie Web Camp Berlin.

What do you want to do when you grow up, kid? • Robin Rendle

Publishing on the web really is quite marvellous:

…an endless thrill, a sort of everlasting, punk-rock feeling and I hope it will never really go away.

How to get on the #indieweb!

As well as graciously hosting Indie Web Camp Berlin on the weekend at Mozilla’s offices, Yulia has also drawn this super-cute comic.

2018-11-03, 21:54 - sonniesedge.co.uk

Day one of Indie Web Camp Berlin is done, and it was great! Here’s Charlie’s recap of the sessions she attended.

Infovore » Pouring one out for the Boxmakers

This is a rather beautiful piece of writing by Tom (especially the William Gibson bit at the end). This got me right in the feels:

Web 2.0 really, truly, is over. The public APIs, feeds to be consumed in a platform of your choice, services that had value beyond their own walls, mashups that merged content and services into new things… have all been replaced with heavyweight websites to ensure a consistent, single experience, no out-of-context content, and maximising the views of advertising. That’s it: back to single-serving websites for single-serving use cases.

A shame. A thing I had always loved about the internet was its juxtapositions, the way it supported so many use-cases all at once. At its heart, a fundamental one: it was a medium which you could both read and write to. From that flow others: it’s not only work and play that coexisted on it, but the real and the fictional; the useful and the useless; the human and the machine.

The power of self-publishing - HankChizlJaw

This is something I struggle to articulate to friends who are suffering because they feel tied to silos like Facebook and Twitter:

What self-publishing does is provide me a choice, which makes me feel good. I feel like I can step away from platforms at will and I don’t feel as shackled as I have done previously.

Weaknotes 1

I really like Alice’s updates.

I think I’ll do weaknotes. Some collections of notes. Sometimes. Not very well written probably. Generally written with the urgency of someone who is waiting for a baby wake up.

Daring Fireball: Medium Deprecates Custom Domains Service

I know many people love Medium’s editing interface, but I just can’t believe that so many writers and publications have turned toward a single centralized commercial entity as a proposed solution to what ails the publishing industry. There is tremendous strength in independence and decentralization.

Your “thread” should have been a blog post…

I’m telling you this stuff is often too important and worthy to be owned by an algorithm and lost in the stream.

Playing with the Indieweb

A good half-hour presentation by Stephen Rushe on the building blocks of the indie web. You can watch the video or look through the slides.

I’ve recently been exploring the world of the IndieWeb, and owning my own content rather than being reliant on the continued existence of “silos” to maintain it. This has led me to discover the varied eco-system of IndieWeb, such as IndieAuth, Microformats, Micropub, Webmentions, Microsub, POSSE, and PESOS.

Just write.

What you write might help someone understand a concept that you may think has been covered enough before. We each have our own unique perspectives and writing styles.

Yes! This!!

That voice telling you that people are just sitting somewhere watching our every step and judging us based on the popularity of our writing is a big fat pathetic attention-needing liar.

New Facebook Platform Product Changes and Policy Updates - Facebook for Developers

Welp! As of today, none of my posts, links, or notes can be syndicated to Facebook:

The publish_actions permission will be deprecated. This permission granted apps access to publish posts to Facebook as the logged in user. Apps created from today onwards will not have access to this permission. Apps created before today that have been previously approved to request publish_actions can continue to do so until August 1, 2018.

If you’re reading this on Facebook: so long, it’s been good to know ya.

Manton Reece - Anchor on free podcasting

Anchor seems to be going for the YouTube model. They want a huge number of people to use their platform. But the concentration of so much media in one place is one of the problems with today’s web. Massive social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have too much power over writers, photographers, and video creators. We do not want that for podcasts.

A Talk with the Pioneering Internet Art Collective JODI -ARTnews

“It’s almost too easy now, and too unsatisfying that you only can put your work in a community full of advertisements and full of tracking,” she said. “I think there will be this urge, on the one hand, to have a local internet of small communities, and, on the other hand, a decentralized internet again.”

“You can still make websites nowadays,” Heemskerk said. “People think it’s complex, but it isn’t —you just register your domain and make your website and that’s about it.”

Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet · An A List Apart Article

This is a great description by Chris of the problems that webmentions aim to solve.

If you use Twitter, your friend Alice only uses Facebook, your friend Bob only uses his blog on WordPress, and your pal Chuck is over on Medium, it’s impossible for any one of you to @mention another. You’re all on different and competing platforms, none of which interoperate to send these mentions or notifications of them. The only way to communicate in this way is if you all join the same social media platforms, resulting in the average person being signed up to multiple services just to stay in touch with all their friends and acquaintances.

Given the issues of privacy and identity protection, different use cases, the burden of additional usernames and passwords, and the time involved, many people don’t want to do this. Possibly worst of all, your personal identity on the internet can end up fragmented like a Horcrux across multiple websites over which you have little, if any, control.

Laura Kalbag – Insecure

The web can be used to find common connections with folks you find interesting, and who don’t make you feel like so much of a weirdo. It’d be nice to be able to do this in a safe space that is not being surveilled.

Owning your own content, and publishing to a space you own can break through some of these barriers. Sharing your own weird scraps on your own site makes you easier to find by like-minded folks. If you’ve got no tracking on your site (no Google Analytics etc), you are harder to profile. People can’t come to harass you on your own site if you do not offer them the means to do so

You don’t have to live in public

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, etc.) and mailing list.

I still stand by that advice, but if I re-wrote the book now, I would encourage artists to use much more caution when it comes to using social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.