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.
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?”
A thorough run-down of the whys and wherefores of being part of the indie web, from Chris.
This is so great! I don’t just mean the Kickstarter project itself, but this write-up of the origins of pitas.com—it’s a fascinating, heartfelt, genuine piece of web history.
The whole point behind Pitas was, and is, being a simple way to blog. You just open the site, type something into the entry box, and click POST.
And now it’s coming back …if this project gets funded.
I guess if the site gets infested by Nazis we’ll probably not do anything about it for 10 years, then make a bunch of wimpy statements, do nothing, maybe finally request free help from the community and still do nothing about it.
Just kidding, their asses will be kicked off immediately.
I approve of Dries’s plan!
On moving from silos to your own website:
Over the last year, especially, it has seemed much more like “blog to write, tweet to fight.” Moreover, the way that our writing and personal data has been used by social media companies has become more obviously problematic—not that it wasn’t problematic to begin with.
Which is why it’s once again a good time to blog, especially on one’s own domain.
But on the other hand…
It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site.
That’s true …which is why brid.gy is such an incredibly powerful service for, well, bridging the gap between your own personal site and the silos, allowing for that feeling of ambient humanity.
Anil documents the steady decline of empowering features from web browsers: view source; in-situ authoring; transclusion, but finishes with the greatest loss of all: your own website at your own address.
There are no technical barriers for why we couldn’t share our photos to our own sites instead of to Instagram, or why we couldn’t post stupid memes to our own web address instead of on Facebook or Reddit. There are social barriers, of course — if we stubbornly used our own websites right now, none of our family or friends would see our stuff. Yet there’s been a dogged community of web nerds working on that problem for a decade or two, trying to see if they can get the ease or convenience of sharing on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram to work across a distributed network where everyone has their own websites.
(Although it’s a bit of shame that Anil posted this on Ev’s blog instead of his own.)
Congratulations, Jason—twenty years of kottke.org is a hell of an achievement!
I’ve been reading back through the early archives (which I wouldn’t recommend), and it feels like excavating down through layers of sediment, tracing the growth & evolution of the web, a media format, and most of all, a person.
Maybe I’m weird, but it just feels good. It feels good to reclaim my turf. It feels good to have a spot to think out loud in public where people aren’t spitting and shitting all over the place.
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).
The past, present and future of RSS.
If I had to choose my Twitter account over my RSS setup I wouldn’t hesitate for a second — I’d throw Twitter right into the ocean.
Paul weighs up the pros and cons of using silos (like Twitter and Facebook) and using the Indie Web. This bit made me want to stand on my desk and cry, “Oh captain, my captain!”:
“The market has proven that consumers want freely available social networks that are easy to use, and used by everyone else. Only centralised services can provide this, not familiarity with a command line and a succession of acronyms and protocols”, says my not entirely fictional naysayer.
I’m not sure this argument follows. While the human desire to connect and communicate easily with each other has been proven many times over, it’s becoming clear that all-encompassing centralised networks are not the solution. That way lies algorithmically-skewed streams of consciousness, layered upon sordid business models and Californian ideology. Fuck that.
The web is agreement, but that doesn’t mean we agree to use the same websites.
Dunstan is back, blogging again. Hurrah!
The world-wide-web always scared the hell out of those who want to control what people consume and what their career is. The web was the equaliser.
A heartfelt missive by Christian on the eve of the US potentially losing net neutrality. I agree with every single word he’s written.
I hope that people still care that the web flows, no matter for whom or what the stream carries. The web did me a lot of good, and it can do so for many others. But it can’t do that if it turns into Cable TV. I’ve always seen the web as my media to control. To pick what I want to consume and question it by comparing it. A channel for me to publish and be scrutinised by others. A read-write medium. The only one we have. Let’s do more of the write part.
This homepage is media-querytastic. It’s so refreshing to see this kind of fun experimentation on a personal site—have fun resizing your browser window!
Congratulations on a decade of publishing on your own site—you’re a blogging wizard, Harry!
Having this website changed and shaped my career. If you don’t have a blog, I urge you, start working on one this weekend. Your own blog, with your own content, at your own domain. It might just change your life.
Paul Ford marks two decades of publishing on his own site.
Some days I want to erase this whole thing—much of the writing is sloppy and immature, and I was, too. But why bother to hit the red button? The path of the Internet has seen fit to do that for me.
Dave has redesigned his site. Now it’s extra Dave-y.
Rob has redesigned his site and it’s looking lovely. Here’s the first part of a three-part series on the rationale behind the relaunch:
I don’t pretend everything I do or say online is worthy of preservation. But while I’m still breathing, I want to be the one who decides what gets preserved and what doesn’t. And I want it all to be available in one place. Owning and operating my own site is the only way.
Hell, yeah!
Here’s Zach’s style guide. But the real reason I’m linking to this is his lovely description of having a personal website that grows over time:
As my own little corner of the web unceremoniously turned ten years old this year, it’s really starting to feel more like a garden than a piece of software. I certainly enjoy tending to it. I can plant what I like and with proper care it can grow into something useful.