Tags: indieweb

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.

“I Was Devastated”: Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets | Vanity Fair

Are we headed toward an Orwellian future where a handful of corporations monitor and control our lives? Or are we on the verge of creating a better version of society online, one where the free flow of ideas and information helps cure disease, expose corruption, reverse injustices?

It’s hard to believe that anyone—even Zuckerberg—wants the 1984 version. He didn’t found Facebook to manipulate elections; Jack Dorsey and the other Twitter founders didn’t intend to give Donald Trump a digital bullhorn. And this is what makes Berners-Lee believe that this battle over our digital future can be won. As public outrage grows over the centralization of the Web, and as enlarging numbers of coders join the effort to decentralize it, he has visions of the rest of us rising up and joining him.

Sending your First Webmention from Scratch • Aaron Parecki

A nice little tutorial from Aaron.

Keynote: The Building Blocks Of The Indie Web - YouTube

Here’s the video of the talk I gave at Design4Drupal last week in Boston. There’s a good half an hour of questions at the end.

Blake Watson | An ode to web pages

Before social media monoliths made us into little mechanical turks for advertising platforms, we had organic homes on the web. We had pages that were ours. And they could look however you wanted. And you could write whatever you wanted on there.

There weren’t comments if you didn’t want them. There were no photo dimensions to adhere to. No 140-character limits. No BS. Or lots of BS. Either way, the choice was yours because you owned your site and you could do whatever you wanted.

Yay Computers • Robin Rendle

If you’re thinking of writing something that explains a weird thing you struggled with on the Internet, do it! Don’t worry about the views and likes and Internet hugs. If you’ve struggled with figuring out this thing then be sure to jot it down, even if it’s unedited and it uses too many commas and you don’t like the tone of it.

Brendan Dawes - Holding the Door Open for Others

I continue to write stuff down on my little corner of the Web (does it have corners?) and I encourage you to do the same, as all these little bits of flotsam and jetsam become something a lot lot bigger.

What you’re proud of

I wish there was a place where I could read the story of a person. Everybody’s journey is so different and beautiful; each one leads to who we are. It would be the anti-LinkedIn. And because you wouldn’t “engage with brands”, it would be the anti-Facebook, too. Instead, it would be a record of the beauty and diversity of humanity, and a thing to point to when someone asks, “who are you?”