I love not feeling bound to any particular social network. This website, my website, is the one true home for all the stuff I’ve felt compelled to write down or point a camera at over the years. When a social network disappears, goes out of fashion or becomes inhospitable, I can happily move on with little anguish.
A very timely post on using If This Then That to automatically post notes from your own site (via RSS) to Twitter and Mastodon.
I’ve set this up for my Mastodon profile.
A wonderful introduction to the indie web—Ana really conveys her sense of excitement!
Some good blogging advice.
Building a blog for the long run? Avoid Medium.
A great introduction to indie web building blocks from Jamie.
A terrific—and fun!—talk from Zach about site deaths, owning your own content, and the indie web.
Oh, and he really did create MySpaceBook for the talk.
Facebook and even Instagram are at odds with the principles of the open web.
Related: Aaron is playing whack-a-mole with Instagram because he provides a servie to let users export their own photographs to their own websites.
I saw Nicholas give this great talk at Paris Web on site deaths, the indie web, and publishing on your own site. That talk was in French, but these slides are (mostly) in English—I was able to follow along surprisingy easily!
Welp! As of today, none of my posts, links, or notes can be syndicated to Facebook:
The
publish_actionspermission 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 requestpublish_actionscan continue to do so until August 1, 2018.
If you’re reading this on Facebook: so long, it’s been good to know ya.
Um …if I’m reading this right, then my IFTTT recipe will also stop working and my Facebook activity will drop to absolute zero.
Oh, well. No skin off my nose. Facebook is a roach motel in more ways than one.
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.
Here’s the talk I gave at Webstock earlier this year all about the indie web:
In these times of centralised services like Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, having your own website is downright disruptive. If you care about the longevity of your online presence, independent publishing is the way to go. But how can you get all the benefits of those third-party services while still owning your own data? By using the building blocks of the Indie Web, that’s how!
A thorough run-down of the whys and wherefores of being part of the indie web, from Chris.
I approve of Dries’s plan!
In trying to decide on his indie web approach, Dries gives an excellent breakdown of the concepts of PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to Own Site) and POSSE (Publish to Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere).
There are some great responses in the comments too, like this one from Chris and this one from Tantek (syndicated from their own sites, obvs).
I had a chat with some people from Name.com while I was in Denver for An Event Apart. Here’s a few minutes of me rambling on about web development and the indie web.
Remy outlines the process he uses for POSSEing to Medium now that they’ve removed their IFTTT integration.
At some point during 2017, Medium decided to pull their IFTTT applets that allows content to be posted into Medium. Which I think is a pretty shitty move since there was no notification that the applet was pulled (I only noticed after Medium just didn’t contain a few of my posts), and it smacks of “Medium should be the original source”…which may be fine for some people, but I’m expecting my own content to outlast the Medium web site.
A nice description of syndication via POSSEing.
(I never thought I’d find myself linking to quality content on Go Daddy.)
Most of my online friends and acquaintances will never understand or participate in the IndieWeb, and so I require a bridge between these worlds. On one side I choose what content to post and how it is stored, and it exists mainly on an island that few visit regularly. On the other side is nearly everyone I know, blissfully ignorant of my real home on the web and unable to see any content shared there without manual intervention or working plugins.
This does not all seem bad, though. Maintaining control will require more attention be placed on managing my content, and this time must come from somewhere. I imagine that I’ll slowly begin using social media less, writing more, and learning more about how to develop solutions to problems that arise within my setup.
Medium, Twitter, Facebook and others are edge services for your content … Your platform is the origin.