So the real question facing companies with stand alone traditional feed reader products–like Feedly, Digg Reader, The Old Reader, Inoreader, Reeder, NewsBlur, Netvibes, Tiny Tiny RSS, WordPress reader–and the cadre of others is:
- What features could/should we add?
- How can we improve?
- How can we gain new users?
- How can we increase our market share?
In short the primary question is:
What should a modern RSS feed reader be capable of doing?
First let’s look at the primary competition of feed readers. Their direct competition is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, and nearly every other social service out there.
Wait. What!? How can this be?
Built into the core and at their very hearts, each of these social silos are primarily feed readers! They’re just feed readers which are proprietary to their own platforms and only allow their users to read feeds from their services to the exclusion of others.
Does anyone think it’s a coincidence that Google Reader, the biggest and most popular feed reader of its day, was shut down at almost the exact time that Google+ was attempting to gain market share in the social space? Google was just trying to imitate their social media competition, not realizing that they had a much more powerful platform for encouraging the use of the open web that could have disrupted the disrupters.
Making matters worse, these social silo readers have typically, if not uniformly, turned off all external access to their own RSS feeds long ago. If you want to read content in Facebook, you have to log in and have an account and participate there directly, you cannot just subscribe to five peoples’ content via RSS and read it anywhere you want. This monopolistic behavior is exactly the reason we call them silos. Content goes in, but doesn’t come back out. Like the early days of AOL, some people now think that Facebook is the internet. Once you’re inside and using their system, they literally do everything they can to keep you from escaping including framing external content within their app so that you can more easily go straight back to their addictive Facebook stream.
But let’s ask ourselves an important question: Where exactly is all this content in Facebook, Twitter, et al. coming from? While a significant portion is coming from individual users whose entire online presence and identities is on these platforms, a relatively large part of it is being pumped into these silos via API or similar access from blogs and other websites in an attempt to increase their reach and interaction.
Just think for a minute about how close the New York Times and other news outlets have come in the past several years to potentially shutting down their own websites to push all of their content delivery into the capable hands of Facebook? [1][2][3][4] Or how many magazine outlets transitioned from other platforms like WordPress and even Tumblr to Medium just before Medium made their recent pivot and let go of a major part of their staff? Can you imagine how troublesome or even catastrophic things would have been or would be if sites like Medium or Facebook went down, got bought out, or disappeared altogether–potentially taking all their data with them? Or what happens weeks, months, or even years later if those social silos change their minds?[5]
So if we go back to our first paragraph and think about what we’ve just covered, we might consider the fact that most traditional feed readers have simply become middle-man software for feeding data into social silos while extracting little, if any data, back out. This is a lopsided bargain and is, in large part, what is inexorably killing the traditional feed readers’ business model.
How can we reverse this model? And even better, how might we do it while simultaneously creating a more free, democratic, and open web?
We need to build for it! And fortunately a bunch of new pieces have been developed and matured in the past several years which can help drastically push the envelope to make this happen.
The Problem in Miniature
As an illustration, let’s look at Twitter. What is it really?
Twitter is a content management system (CMS) for posting short status updates online that has a simple and even beautiful user interface for writing, publishing, and storing content. Further, it also has a built-in reader that allows the user to read the content of others on the system. It essentially boils down to a simple CMS with a reader closely integrated into it. Similarly Facebook, Instagram, and other popular social services all do the same thing, they just specialize in different content types. In some sense they’re 5% posting interface and 95% feed reader.
Aside from the power of the tightly integrated CMS and reader functionalities, their real “secret sauce”, so to speak, is that they make it incredibly easy to interact with others. And it’s here that they win out and own the market. It’s also here where innovation within the blogosphere fell down on the job between 2005-2007 and nearly died out altogether.
I would argue that there are hundreds if not thousands of fantastic and even open source content management systems which, in flexibility and ease of use, could put each and every one of the social silos to shame. Most social networks like Twitter (status updates, links) and Instagram (photos, video) focus on only one or two content types while others Facebook (status updates, photos, video, articles, events, RSVPs, etc.) and Tumblr (articles, photo, video, audio, quotes, links, chat) do multiple content types. Hands down, systems like WordPress and Drupal, just to name two larger, well-developed, flexible, and open source CMSes, can run circles around all of these social silos in terms of the types of content they can not only post, but mashup in far better multi-media experiences. Why should you be limited to 140 characters if you prefer status updates of 280, 500, or even more characters?
But what are these hundreds of content management systems all missing?
You guessed it:
- An integrated reader
- the incredibly easy ability to interact with others
Who can easily and beneficially provide these two simple pieces of the puzzle?
All of the traditional feed readers mentioned above! Even Google Reader could come back from the dead and compete again to win back the piece of the social space that Google invented Google+ to do.
The Feed Reader Solution
These traditional feed readers have already built up the hardest part of the infrastructure that makes it easy for users to subscribe to content (via RSS, Atom, and some even JSON feeds) and read it quickly and easily. Some have even built-in algorithms that help to surface popular content. Even Pocket, a pseudo-reader, uses their aggregated content to recommend popular and interesting content.
But what about the dead-easy ability to interact? Unbeknownst to them, they’ve already got a piece of the functionality already built as most of them have integrations with social platforms for sharing reader content to them directly. Instead of sharing to the social media silos they could and should default in favor of making those posts directly to people’s personal websites and blogs. (And in turn these blogs could share or syndicate to these social silos if desired.)
What about the rest? Aren’t there some missing pieces? And how to build it easily for the hundreds or thousands of platforms out there? (I’ve had answers to all my other increasingly difficult questions, do you suppose this is where I’ll run out? Probably not today…)
The talented and dedicated developers of the Indieweb have already delivered all of the remaining pieces of the puzzle to allow us to recreate the model of the closed source social silos in an open and democratic way.[6]
Allow me to sketch out what they’ve done and how traditional feed readers can clean up the edges to start taking back the engagement and market share. I have a suspicion that after hearing this, Google will dust off its Google Reader and the thousands of Twitter developers who made Twitter clients that were shut down when they got closed out of Twitter’s API by access limits will upgrade them a tad for the forthcoming Cambrian efflorescence of openness and interactivity on the internet.
Webmentions
The ubiquity of the concept of @mentions (or @replies), which was initially popularized by Twitter has spread across the social sphere. On nearly every popular social platform one can mention another user (typically with and @ symbol followed by their username, or some other similar pattern) and know that they will get a notification of the message. This feature is incredibly useful for carrying on conversations and interacting. The primarily problem with these @mentions is that they only work within their own siloed platform. One can’t @mention someone from Twitter and expect their friend will see it on Facebook. Even Medium, a service founded by Ev Williams, a former Chariman and CEO of Twitter, hasn’t enabled the ability for Twitter users to @mention users or reference content on Medium. One would think that using Twitter to comment on Medium articles would be a powerful thing right?! Maybe even a killer app?
The interesting thing is that cross-site @mentions already exist! Thousands of websites are already using the open standard called Webmentions, which is already a W3C recommended specification to do just this. Instead of using a username as the “key” for sending them, Webmentions use permalink URLs to send these simple notifications.
What does this mean? It means that I can write something on my site, and you can write a reply on a totally separate site (even using a different platform/CMS) and if both sites support the Webmention spec, I’ll receive a ping from your server to notify me of your response! I can then choose to display it on my site as a comment in a natural and even beautiful way. It’s all done so naturally that it appears as if people who have replied to my own posts have logged in on my site and written their comments here rather than somewhere else.
There are multitudes of implementations of the Webmention spec across the web already–including simple plugins for CMSes like WordPress and Drupal and some platforms like WithKnown support Webmentions out of the box. For those platforms that don’t already implement the spec, it’s incredibly clear and well written; most programmers could easily implement it within a day or two, even for a custom CMS.
The open Webmention spec isn’t directly related to the feed reader problem, but it does solve the seemingly major issue of allowing websites to intercommunicate with each other quickly and easily on the internet, in just the same way one can use their Facebook account to communicate with any other Facebook user. The major barrier broken down here is that one doesn’t necessarily need to be on the exact same platform as their friends, colleagues, or family to communicate back and forth.
And isn’t this the power of the internet? Imagine how horrible the world would be if your Sprint mobile phone could only talk to other Sprint customers? Or if you had to have Verizon and AT&T accounts to talk to people on those services. Bits are bits and the communication channels should be more open instead of more closed. Given the capabilities on the modern internet, it really is silly that one needs to have a Twitter account to communicate with people on Twitter. At the end of the day it’s just a corporate construct meant to help these corporations own internet communications.
Micropub
The Micropub specification, on the other hand, does get right to the heart of the traditional feed reader piece of the communication problem.
Remember back to the early heady days of Twitter when there seemed to be a new Twitter client on the scene almost every day? Wikipedia has an entire page dedicated to some of the most popular, most of which no longer exist because Twitter drastically limited API access and drove them out of business. There was a huge amount of creativity and work to help people make it easier to read and post to twitter, and you can believe that Twitter took full advantage of all this free labor and creativity while they struggled to keep the service up and working. Once Twitter had these other moving parts sewn up and they had grown tremendously thanks in large part to the work of thousands of others, they shut them out without so much as a pat on the back. (The ultimate moral for most was not to try to build a business on someone else’s closed, proprietary code.)
All these Twitter clients used a simple API to allow them to publish to Twitter. Why not learn from that debacle and have an open spec that allows one to publish to almost any website on the web?
Really–why not?!
This is just what the developers of the Micropub open spec had in mind. Why not create a simple endpoint that any website can support to allow third party applications to publish almost any type of content to any platform on the internet? It shouldn’t matter what content management system you use, there should be a simple and direct method of posting to it. If we open things up in this way, then perhaps all these old Twitter applications could be dusted off to support the Micropub spec and they could be used to publish content of any flavor almost anywhere?
With this capability, enterprising developers could openly compete to build the best applications to publish anywhere. One application could be the best bookmarking service on the planet, while others (perhaps even Medium?) could compete to provide the best article publishing interface. Users wouldn’t be stuck with the one or two publishing interfaces that come pre-packaged with their CMS, they could have the choice of hundreds or thousands.
What traditional feed readers can add
Now let’s put it together to make this all actionable by feed readers.
This is where feed readers can win out by adding just a few lines of code! Along with others, they can then add user interfaces to their products to allow users to interact with the content flowing through them.
Authentication
First users should be able to log into their feed reader accounts with some sort of authentication that allows them to lay claim to their own websites. This will allow the feed reader to publish to the user’s site on their behalf using Micropub. This can be done using a variation of oAuth or perhaps more simply using IndieAuth.
Publishing to Reader’s Sites instead of social silos
Remember back in the day where there were thousands of Twitter clients that could publish to Twitter, or even the current ability of feed readers to delegate publishing to Twitter? This is no different! The only change is that the end target is not a social silo like Twitter, but a user’s own website.
Like a particular article? Why not have a one click button to indicate your intent within the the feed reader? This then uses Micropub to publish the like to the user’s personal website! Combine this with the fact that one’s personal website supports Webmention and suddenly this posted like is turned into a like on the original website! Now the user owns the fact that they liked something (and can keep that even if the original disappears from the web), and the original website can own this same data as well. And guess what, the reader could keep its own copy as well to provide better meta-data to potentially benefit their other users as well. Win, win, win!
There are three general ways that this type of commenting workflow with publishing to the user’s personal site can occur:
Action URLs
A few readers, including Feedly (PRO) already support a version of this type of functionality, one can configure a custom URL to communicate an intent from the feed reader to create a post on one’s own website. Unfortunately this type of functionality is relatively difficult to use and is more dependent on the architecture of one’s own website. In Feedly’s case it only allows configuring one URL this way when many platforms may require 4 or more of these to be available to effectuate multiple different types of post kinds (bookmarks, likes, comments, replies, reposts, etc.) However, many CMSes with bookmarklets can leverage their URL structures to take effective advantage of this type of functionality.
Micropub
Briefly discussed above, this open standard is already in use in many places on the web, from desktop clients, to browser add-ons, and even CMS plugins. If traditional feed readers allow their users to publish content from within the feed reader to their own personal website, there could be simple one click commenting and publishing. From a user interface perspective this would be as easy as clicking on a twitter icon to publish a post to Twitter and is close to what most traditional feed readers already do. A day or two’s worth of engineering work should quickly allow feed readers to quickly and easily publish directly to any CMS/platform that also supports the open Micropub spec.
Indie-config
Indie-config is slightly more complicated and not as broadly supported as the other two methods, but it provides yet another method of allowing a feed reader to interact with the user’s personal website so that they can easily publish from the reader directly to their website. In short indie-config is a method of using protocol handlers and postmessage to setup your website to both notify the browser that it can handle webactions and then do so. It also supports a broad array of post types as we’ll see in an example below.
Examples of Feed Readers and Functionality in the Wild
WordPress Reader
WordPress Reader already has some of these types of functionality built in, unfortunately it doesn’t go quite far enough and some of it is specific only to WordPress sites. I’ll briefly outline portions, but keep in mind that this example only just vaguely scratches the surface of what I’m talking about.
The photo above shows that within the WordPress reader there is the ability to algorithmicly highlight popular posts. We can see there’s a simple link included to follow the author of the suggested post. There’s also the ability to do a one click like of the post using one’s WordPress account, however this like is only displayed on the site with the original post, but isn’t displayed as a like on the user’s personal site. How could the user easily find the post in the future if they wanted to search for it again? What if users wanted to follow others’ likes in a linkblog-esque functionality?
Clicking on the “comment” bubble in the example takes you to the comments section of the original post to make a comment. Far better would be if it opened a small dialogue to let you write your comment and micro-publish it to your personal site as a reply, and then your own website could send a Webmention to the original which then has the option of displaying the comment.
The most robust version of UI that’s close to what I’m talking about is the “share” icon, which when clicked will give you the option to share a snippet of the post to one of any WordPress sites you’ve got registered. This opens up the admin UI of WordPress to allow you to modify any of the contents and publish it. Sites with pingbacks/trackbacks will send a ping to the original’s server to notify them presuming they still support these ancient protocols. Better yet, would be allowing the reader to repost or excerpt the piece and then send a Webmention, a much richer and far more robust version of pingback/trackback, to the original.
The major drawbacks within WordPress Reader are that most of the interactions are sent to the original post rather than being published on the reader’s site which could then ping the original about the interaction. The share functionality is about as close as anything in the traditional feed reader world currently comes to allowing the reader to post something from the reader to a personal site that they own and control, and, let’s be honest, it doesn’t do a good job of this at all.
Woodwind.xyz
Right now, the Indie reader Woodwind.xyz (code available on Github) is the gold standard of what modern feed reader functionality should be. Admittedly it’s missing some niceties that some feed readers have, but what it lacks in some traditional functionalities, it more than makes up for with more modern and forward facing functionality including the ability to send reactions and comments on articles directly to the reader’s personal website and then propagate those reactions to other sites across the open web. I’ll highlight some of these below along with screenshots and examples.
IndieAuth
Some users will be stuck simply logging into this uber-modern feed reader because it has an interesting prerequisite for membership. The user must have their own website with rel=”me” links on their homepage that match the corresponding rel=”me” links from a Twitter, GitHub, or Flicker account. (There are other authentication avenues, but these are the most straightforward for our current purposes.)
After entering their personal website URL, Woodwind relegates sign-in to the IndieAuth site which then parses the user’s homepage to look for links to their social media profiles. It then checks those profiles to see if they link back to the users personal homepage–this can only be the case if the user has physical control of both websites. If they do, then, and only then, IndieAuth will let one of those social silos authenticate by standard oAuth to sign the user into their Woodwind account. Doing this also simultaneously gives Woodwind the ability to publish content (via the Micropub protocol) to the reader’s personal website.
This also means that the reader isn’t just a reader, it’s also a publishing interface! Is this starting to sound like a dis-aggregated social media service? You bet it does.
Settings
The Woodwind reader also has several settings options to allow people to choose which way they would prefer to publish to their personal website, the three ways are enumerated below.
Micropub
Woodwind has a built in Micropub client that allows the user to like, repost, or reply to posts within the reader. One can authenticate their Micropub endpoint with the reader which then stores the publishing credentials and allows the user to react to any posts within the reader with these actions. The reader then posts to the user’s personal website with the intended actions. It’s then up to the user’s personal website to send Webmentions to the original post to notify them of the comment, repost, or like intents, which that site can then choose to display.
Indie-config
Woodwind also supports indie-config to allow a broad array of post types including likes, favorites, replies, reposts, and bookmarks.
Action URLs
If my personal website supports action URLs, I can custom define what those are and the reader will send the URL of the post with which I’m interacting to my website directly via URL. I can then quickly and easily create a specific type of post based on the received URL. The types of posts I’m capable of making are only limited by my own creativity and capabilities of my website. Naturally as always, my site is also responsible for sending the Webmentions to the original post to notify it of the interaction. Many CMSes including WithKnown and WordPress are capable of using these types of structured URLs as a means of creating posts. Most CMSes with JavaScript bookmarklets utilize these URL patterns to create posts this way. (WordPress’s PressThis bookmarklet, is a good example.)
Usage
Now for the practical usage from within the reader. To better illustrate what’s happening, let’s look at a typical view from within the reader.
One will notice that each of the three posts in this reader view, based on the chosen publish settings above, has a variety of buttons underneath. I can choose to reply, like, repost, bookmark, or simply share these posts directly from the reader’s interface. The resulting action will be posted directly to my own website where I’ll own it in perpetuity.
My site will then be responsible for sending a Webmention to the original post and notifying it of my reaction or interaction with it. The original post can then make its own choice to show my comment or interaction with it like a traditional comment.
Summary
By supporting Micropub, indie-config, and/or action URLs, current feed readers can make it far easier for people on the open web to not only read content the way they currently do on siloed social media services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al. Increased ease-of-use to allow these functionalities with beautiful user interface will help to move users out of walled-gardens where they’re trapped into the larger universe of the free and open internet.
Individuals with their own websites can support the acceptance of these posts to save their interactions with what they’ve read, be they comments, likes, bookmarks, or other interactions. They can also close the loop by supporting Webmentions so that their comments can be sent to (and potentially displayed) on others’ websites.
All of these pieces combined make for a more open and democratic web. Ideally the increased competition will prod current social silos to open up and compete on a more even playing field in which they’re supporting these open protocols as well. Then anyone with a web presence can use it to communicate from one website to another (or one permalink URL to any other permalink URL) on the internet, in a way that’s as simple and easy as any of the methods that’s currently available in the closed social spectrum.
Editor’s Note:
As of December 2017, the AltPlatform.org site which originally published this article has shut down. I’ve smartly kept a private archived copy of the original of this post here on my personal site and manually syndicated a copy of it to AltPlatform for just such a possibility. (Hooray for PASTA (Publish Anywhere, Save to (Private) Archive)!) As a result of the shutdown, I’m making the original public here.
If you wish, you can also read a copy of the original as it appeared on AltPlatform on the Internet Archive.
Thanks for the mention, Chris!
@wordpressdotcom @Pocket I wrote this for you: Feed Reader Revolution http://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/
@feedly @Inoreader @TheOldReader @reederapp @digg @NewsBlur @netvibes I wrote this for you: Feed Reader Revolution http://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/
For the syndicated portfolio, you might want to take a peek at the PressForward plugin for WordPress [http://pressforward.org/%5D. While it is a stand-alone feed reader under the hood and could be used for creating an editorial flow, it will let you use a simple bookmarklet on your work published on another site to make a quick and complete copy of the post on your own site. Within the plugin settings you can set a “time to forward” (I use one second) such that people who visit that particular post will be automatically forwarded to the original (and canonical URL) on the commissioning outlet’s site.
As an example, compare:http://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/%F0%9F%94%96-feed-reader-revolution-its-time-to-embrace-open-disrupt-social-media/ (which is a bookmark with some commentary pointing to my post)
tohttp://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/ (which is an exact copy of my post, which only I can see on my backend, that redirects the viewer to the original on AltPlatform).
This is beneficial as you can syndicate (POSSE) the post with your own URL to Facebook, Twitter, et al. and folks who click to read will be sent to your site for a moment before being forwarded on to the original. Thus you get a ping and the original outlet also gets a ping (as well as the advertising revenue for it.) And if, for any reason, the original outlet goes out of business, gets sold, or disappears, you’ve got a word-for-word copy of your original and can simply un-forward it so that it can appear on your site as it was originally published. Naturally if you prefer and the outlet doesn’t stipulate otherwise, you could publish the original to your site and not forward it (or even forward it for an exclusivity window of time pre-agreed with the original publisher.)
Additionally, if you’re using Brid.gy for backfeed, anyone who comments on your POSSE copies will have their commentary sent to your site. While others won’t necessarily be able to see the commentary (if you’re forwarding the URL to the publisher’s original), at least you’ll be aware of it and can reply to it and get your own replies in return. I suspect that in the future brid.gy may be able to scrape commentary based on the syndicated URL so that your personal version aggregates commentary from the publisher’s original as well as mentions of it on Facebook, Twitter, et al.
There are still some missing pieces I’d like to see in such a workflow for journalists, but it’s slowly and surely getting somewhere.
(I’ve written about other parts of PressForward before at http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/31/pressforward-as-an-indieweb-wordpress-based-rss-feed-reader-pocketinstapaper-replacement/ as I also have an off-label use-case to replace read it later apps like Pocket and InstaPaper.)
For me there are various post types that essentially all boil down to being bookmarks, but the sub-category adds a slightly different shade of intent to it. As an example I’ve got a “read” post type on my primary site. It takes the bookmark concept (“I want to read this”) and adds the additional piece of semantic information that I physically spent some time to actually read it. To an audience, this gives that read-post some additional value over a simple bookmark. Even further, did I bother to make a comment or highlight a piece of material from it? Did I go another step and write a reply to it? Each of these things indicates a higher level of engagement on my part which signals to an audience reading my site, what value I may have placed on a thing.
When it comes to a reader, it would be awesome to have the ability to filter through some of these increasing types within a value chain. People are sharing or bookmarking lots of crap, but what are they spending the time to actually read rather than sharing after only reading a headline? What did they bother to really react to? What motivated them to not only read a piece, but write a 10 paragraph response to? When it comes to finding things in my feeds that are really valuable from friends, family, and colleagues, it’s these articles that are usually the most valuable.
You’re definitely right that readers are the next big piece. I can’t wait for some more competition in the space: http://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/
Aggregating the Decentralized Social Web by Jason Green (þoht-hord)
Some brief thoughts:
I might submit that posting is possibly the easiest of the three and that the reader problem is the most difficult. This is based on the tremendous number of platforms and CMSs on which one can post, but the dearth of feed readers in existence.
Something akin to a following list could help this. Or a modified version of OPML subscription lists could work. They just need to be opened up a tad. Some are working on the idea of an open microsub spec which could be transformative as well: https://indieweb.org/Microsub-spec
You’ve already got a huge headstart in doing this with your own website. Why bother to have thousands of accounts (trust me when I say this) when you could have one? Then, as you suggest, password protected RSS (or other) feeds out to others could allow you to control which audiences get to see which content on your own site.
WordPress has lots of ways to syndicate content too. Ideally if everyone had their own website as a central hub, the idea of syndication would ultimately die out altogether. At best syndication is really just a stopgap until that point.
I’ve written some thoughts about how feed readers could continue to evolve for the open web here: http://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/
Having a variety of ways to chop and dice up content are really required. We need more means of filtering content, not less. I know many who have given up on chronological feed reading. While it can be nice, there are many other useful means as well.
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Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
View all posts by Chris Aldrich
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I’ve used news feeds and feed readers for as long as I can remember. But Chris’s recent post got me thinking about the RSS tools I have used over the years and I remembered that for me it all really started with NetNewsWire. I have not used it for years and I had assumed it was dead. I am happy to learn that NetNewsWire is alive. I downloaded the trial version for macOS and iOS. I’ll use it for a few days and compare to my experience with Reeder. Just because of … “nostalgia”.
Montgomery Township, New Jersey, United States of America
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@cleverdevil This is almost exactly what I was hoping for (and more) when I wrote “Feed reader revolution” over the summerhttp://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/
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What Was Known by Jim Groom (bavatuesdays)
Interestingly, Known had a lot of these features hidden in code under the hood. Sadly they weren’t all built out. It in fact, did have much of a reader (something which Ben indicated they were going to take out of the v1.0 release to slim down the code since it wasn’t being used). It also had a follow/following block of code (and even a bookmarklet at /account/settings/following) so you could follow specific sites and easily add them to your reader. Also unbeknownst to most was a built-in notifications UI which could have been found at /account/notifications.
It’s a shame that they put many of these half-built features on hold in their pivot to focus on the education market and creating a viable cash flow based company as this is the half that most CMSs lack. (If you think about what makes Twitter and Facebook both popular and really simple, I think it is that they’re 95% excellent feed readers with 5% built-in posting interfaces.)
I’ve managed to replace some of that missing functionality with Woodwind, a reader at http://woodwind.xyz, which one could connect with Known to do the reading and then integrate the posting, commenting, and replies to complete the loop. I do have a few very serious developer friends who are endeavoring to make this specific feed reader portion of the equation much easier to implement (and even self-host) to make the hurdle of this problem far lower, but I suspect it’ll be another 3-6 months before a usable product comes out of the process. For those looking to get more social into their feed readers, I often recommend Ryan Barrett’s appspot tools including https://twitter-atom.appspot.com/ which has instructions for extracting content from Twitter via Atom/RSS. It includes links at the bottom of the page for doing similar things with Facebook, Instagram and Google+ as well.
Interestingly there are now enough moving pieces (plugins) in the WordPress community to recreate all of the functionality Known has, one just needs to install them all separately and there are even a few different options for various portions depending on one’s needs. This includes adding reply contexts for social media as well as both the ability to syndicate posts to multiple social sites for interaction as well as getting the comments, etc. backfeed from those social sites back into the comments section of your post the way Known did. Sadly, the feed reader problem still exists, but it may soon be greatly improved.
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Replied to What Was Known by Jim Groom (bavatuesdays)
Interestingly, Known had a lot of these features hidden in code under the hood. Sadly they weren’t all built out. It in fact, did have much of a reader (something which Ben indicated they were going to take out of the v1.0 release to slim down the code since it wasn’t being used). It also had a follow/following block of code (and even a bookmarklet at /account/settings/following) so you could follow specific sites and easily add them to your reader. Also unbeknownst to most was a built-in notifications UI which could have been found at /account/notifications.
It’s a shame that they put many of these half-built features on hold in their pivot to focus on the education market and creating a viable cash flow based company as this is the half that most CMSs lack. (If you think about what makes Twitter and Facebook both popular and really simple, I think it is that they’re 95% excellent feed readers with 5% built-in posting interfaces.)
I’ve managed to replace some of that missing functionality with Woodwind, a reader at http://woodwind.xyz, which one could connect with Known to do the reading and then integrate the posting, commenting, and replies to complete the loop. I do have a few very serious developer friends who are endeavoring to make this specific feed reader portion of the equation much easier to implement (and even self-host) to make the hurdle of this problem far lower, but I suspect it’ll be another 3-6 months before a usable product comes out of the process. For those looking to get more social into their feed readers, I often recommend Ryan Barrett’s appspot tools including https://twitter-atom.appspot.com/ which has instructions for extracting content from Twitter via Atom/RSS. It includes links at the bottom of the page for doing similar things with Facebook, Instagram and Google+ as well.
Interestingly there are now enough moving pieces (plugins) in the WordPress community to recreate all of the functionality Known has, one just needs to install them all separately and there are even a few different options for various portions depending on one’s needs. This includes adding reply contexts for social media as well as both the ability to syndicate posts to multiple social sites for interaction as well as getting the comments, etc. backfeed from those social sites back into the comments section of your post the way Known did. Sadly, the feed reader problem still exists, but it may soon be greatly improved.
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inessential on Twitter (Twitter)
Brent, I think you’ve hit the nail directly on the head. I’m glad someone working on a feed reader has these ideals. It may be a bit pedantic for you, but since you mention it in the close, here’s a reasonable primer which may help: http://boffosocko.com/2017/07/28/an-introduction-to-the-indieweb/
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Getting back in the swing of things, working on Monocle, looking forward to IndieWebCamp Baltimore!
Timetable Episode 92
Together
Monocle
Yarns Indie Reader by Jack Jamieson (jackjamieson.net)
I’m hoping this is another great example of the types of feed readers we need in the world.
Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
View all posts by Chris Aldrich
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Bookmarked Yarns Indie Reader by Jack Jamieson (jackjamieson.net)
I’m hoping this is another great example of the types of feed readers we need in the world.
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Just as I was getting sick last week, Colin Walker wrote “There has to be a better way to subscribe to sites.” He’s definitely hit the nail right on the head. The process is currently painful and disorganized, it’s also working on technology that’s almost two decades old and difficult for newcomers at best.
I’ve always posited that one of the reasons that social media silos have been so successful is that they’ve built some fantastic readers. Sure their UI is cleaner and just dead simple, but to a great extent 95% of their product is an evolved feed reader while the other 5% is a simple posting interface that makes it easy to interact. To compare, most CMSes are almost completely about posting interface, and spend very little time, if any, worrying about providing a reading experience.
The IndieWeb has been making some serious strides on making cross-site interactions easier with the Webmention and Micropub protocols, but the holy grail is still out there: allowing people to have an integrated feed reader built into their website (or alternately a standalone feed reader that’s tightly integrated with their site via Micropub or other means).
For those watching the space with as much interest as I have, there are a couple of interesting tools in the space and a few on the immediate horizon that are sure to make the process a whole lot easier and create a new renaissance in the open web.
SubToMe: a Universal Subscribe Button
First, for a relatively simple one-size-fits-all subscribe button, I recommend people take a look at SubToMe which touts itself as a “Universal Follow button” because it “makes it easy for people to follow web sites,because browsers don’t do it.” The button is fairly straightforward and has an awful lot of flexibility built in. In the simplest sense it has some solid feed detection so it finds available feeds on a web page and then provides a handful of recommended major readers to the user. With two clicks, one can pretty quickly and almost immediately subscribe to almost any feed in their reader of choice.
For publishers, one can quickly install a simple button on their site. They can further provide a list of specific feeds they want to advertise, and they can even recommend a particular feed reader if they choose.
For consumers, the service provides a simple browser bookmarklet so that if a site doesn’t have a button, they can click a subscribe button in their browser. Then click on a provider. Done. One can also choose a preferred provider to shorten the process.
Almost all the major feed readers are supported out of the box and the process of adding new ones is relatively simple.
Microsub
Since last June there’s been a quietly growing new web spec called Microsub that will assuredly shake up the subscription and reader spaces. In short it provides a standardized way for clients to consume and interact with feeds collected by a server.
While it gets pretty deep pretty quickly, the spec is meant to help decouple some of the heavy architecture of building a feed reader. In some way it’s analogous to the separation of content and display that HTML and CSS allows, but applied to the mechanics of feed readers and how readers display their content.
There are already a few interesting projects by the names of Together and Indigenous that are taking advantage of the architecture
I can’t wait to see how it all dovetails together to make a more integrated reading and posting interface as well as the potential it has for individual CMSs to potentially leverage the idea to include integrated interfaces into their products. I can’t wait for the day when my own personal website is compatible with Microsub, so that I can use any Microsub client to read my timeline and follow people.
I’m also sure that decoupling the idea of displaying posts from actually fetching remote feeds will make it easier to build a reader clients in general. I hope this has a Cambrian explosion-type of effect on the state of the art of feed readers.
I’d recommend those interested in a high level discussion to have a listen to the following thee short episodes of Aaron Parecki’s Percolator microcast.
Episode 3: FollowingIf possible, click to play, otherwise your browser may be unable to play this audio file.
Episode 10: Microsub for ReadersIf possible, click to play, otherwise your browser may be unable to play this audio file.
Episode 17: It’s 2018!If possible, click to play, otherwise your browser may be unable to play this audio file.
Featured photo credit: Flock of sheep flickr photo by Jo@net shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
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Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
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Are you familiar with Reading.am by Jon Mitchell (Everything is ablaze!)
I like the general idea behind what you’re talking about here Jon, though I may be missing part of the conversation as I came across it via a GitHub issue and it’s taken some time to find even a portion of the conversation on micro.blog, though I suspect I’m missing what I’m sure might be a fragmented conversation.
I too love the idea of indicating what I’ve been reading online. The problem I see is that very few platforms, social or otherwise are focusing on what people are actually reading. Reading.am is the only one I’m aware of. Pocket and Instapaper let people bookmark things they want to read, but typically don’t present feeds of things after they’ve been checked off as having been read.
Most others are systems meant for a specific purpose that are being bent to various other purposes and it’s rarely ever explicit so that everyone knows their intention. As an example, I know people who star, like, favorite or do something else on various platforms to indicate what they’re reading. Some also use these to indicate bookmarks. As a personal example, on Twitter, I sometimes “star” a tweet to indicate I “like” it or it’s a “favorite” while most other times I’m really using the functionality to quickly bookmark an article and use an IFTTT.com recipe to automatically add the URLs of these starred posts to my Pocket account for later reading.
The overarching issue with these is that the general concept is painfully spread out and the meaning isn’t always concrete or explicit. Wouldn’t it be better if it were vastly more specific? In an attempt to do just this, I use my own website, in linkblog-like fashion, to indicate what I’m physically reading. It has an RSS feed that others could subscribe to if they wish to read it elsewhere. I also “syndicate” copies to places like Reading.am or occasionally to Twitter, Facebook, etc. for those who prefer to follow in those locations. Incidentally on Twitter, mine often look a lot like your Twitter feed with visual icons to indicate specific intents.
For something like Evergreen, or any reader really, I’d much prefer if there was UI and functionality to allow me to directly interact with the content I’m reading and post that interaction to my own website (and own it) in a relatively frictionless way. This would be far better than using things like stars to do something that others may not grasp.
In the reading case, it would be cool if I could physically mark something explicitly as “read” in Evergreen, and the reader would post to my website that I’ve actually read the thing. While there are many ways to do this (including RSS), perhaps one of the most interesting currently is the open web standard called Micropub. So my WordPress site has a micropub endpoint (via a plugin) and apps that support it could post to my site on my behalf. If the reader could post to my site via micropub, I could use it to collect and create a feed of everything I’m reading. Similarly readers could also do similar things to explicitly indicate that I mean to bookmark something, or I could use the reader to compose a reply directly in the reader and post that reply to my website (which incidentally could send webmentions to the original website to publish those replies as comments on their site.)
As an example we’re all familiar with, micro.blog has micropub support, so I can use micro.blog’s app to post and micro.blog uses micropub to send the post to my own website.
With the proper micropub support, a reader could allow me to post explicit bookmarks, likes, favorites, replies, reads, etc. to my own website. All of these could then have individual feeds from my site back out. Thus people could subscribe to any (or all) of them as they choose. Want to know what I’m reading? Easy. Want to know what I’m bookmarking or liking? Which events I’ve RSVP’d to? Shazam!
My homepage has a full list of post types I’m currently supporting, and each one of them can be subscribed to individually by adding /feed/ onto the end of the URL.
In summary, let’s try not to impute too much meaning onto a simple star’s functionality when we can be imminently more specific about it. Of course, for completeness, for most readers, we’d also need to change the meaning of the traditional “mark as read” which in reality means, “mark as done” or “don’t show me this anymore”.
For more detail on how this could work in an advanced reader-based world I’ve written a more explicit set of details here: Feed Reader Revolution
And to quote Brent back:
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Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
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Microsub bridge by Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)
This article brings such warmth to my heart. It’s even beyond what I had originally envisioned in Feed Reader Revolution.
I’m salivating what this portends for the web and my ability to read it better in the future!
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Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
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Aldrich outlines some of the current problems associated with social media. This includes reducing external access (see Medium) in an effort to control the content. For at the end of the day, they are simply content management systems. What is needed though is an integrated reader that allows for the ability to easily interact. Enter the #IndieWeb and the missing pieces to the puzzle, such as webmentions and micropub.
In a different post, Aldrich extends this discussion by breaking down his workflow. He explains how he uses of Inoreader to sort through content and then saves content to his site. He also uses Calibre and Kindle to manage documents.
Adding to this discussion, Aaron Parecki has released an IndieWeb Reader which builds on these pieces and processes for an integrated solution. I think that the challenge moving forward is the simplicity of such solutions for Generation 3 and 4.
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@feedly @edwk Probably better that I help you all out with some needed functionality first. Try this out: http://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/
You should keep your eyes glued to the evolving #Micropub spec as well. #ReadOn!
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@paxtonjohn I hope you didn’t think I was still using Digg Reader. 😉 I think @feedly is excellent and @inoreader is awesome too, particularly with OPML subscription functionality. But I’m looking for even more: http://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/
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It’s Time For an RSS Revival by Brian Barrett (WIRED)
This article, which I’ve seen shared almost too widely on the internet since it came out, could almost have been written any time in the past decade really. They did do a somewhat better job of getting quotes from some of the big feed readers’ leaders to help to differentiate their philosophical differences, but there wasn’t much else here. Admittedly they did have a short snippet about Dave Winer’s new feedbase product, which I suspect, in combination with the recent spate of articles about Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, motivated the article. (By the way, I love OPML as much as anyone could, but feedbase doesn’t even accept the OPML feeds out of my core WordPress install though most feed readers do, which makes me wonder how successful feedbase might be in the long run without better legacy spec support.)
So what was missing from Wired’s coverage? More details on what has changed in the space in the past several years. There’s been a big movement afoot in the IndieWeb community which has been espousing a simpler and more DRY (don’t repeat yourself) version of feeds using simple semantic microformats markup like h-feed. There’s also been the emergence of JSON feed in the past year which many of the major feed readers already support.
On the front of people leaving Facebook (and their black box algorithmic monster that determines what you read rather than you making an implicit choice), they might have mentioned people who are looking for readers through which they can also use their own domains and websites where they own and maintain their own data for interaction. I’ve written about this in more depth last year: Feed reader revolution.
One of the more bleeding edge developments which I think is going to drastically change the landscape in the coming years for developers, feed readers, and the internet consumption space is the evolving Microsub spec which is being spearheaded by a group of projects known as the Aperture microsub server and the Together and Indigenous clients which already use it. Microsub is going to abstract away many of the technical hurdles that make it far more difficult to build a full-fledged feed reader. I have a feeling it’s going to level a lot of the playing field to allow a Cambrian explosion of readers and social related software to better leverage more easily reading content on the web without relying on third party black box services which people have been learning they cannot fully trust anymore. Aaron Parecki has done an excellent job of laying out some parts of it in Building an IndieWeb Reader as well as in recent episodes of his Percolator microcast. This lower hurdle is going to result in fewer people needing to rely solely on the biggest feed readers like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for both consuming content and posting their own content. The easier it becomes for people to use other readers to consume content from almost anywhere on the web, the less a monopoly the social networks will have on our lives.
I truly hope Wired circles around and gives some of these ideas additional follow up coverage in the coming months. They owe it to their readership to expand their coverage from what we all knew five years ago. If they want to go a step or two further, they might compare the web we had 15 years ago to some of the new and emerging open web technologies that are starting to take hold today.
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Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
View all posts by Chris Aldrich
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Read It’s Time For an RSS Revival (WIRED)
This article, which I’ve seen shared almost too widely on the internet since it came out, could almost have been written any time in the past decade really. They did do a somewhat better job of getting quotes from some of the big feed readers’ leaders to help to differentiate their philosophical differences, but there wasn’t much else here. Admittedly they did have a short snippet about Dave Winer’s new feedbase product, which I suspect, in combination with the recent spate of articles about Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, motivated the article. (By the way, I love OPML as much as anyone could, but feedbase doesn’t even accept the OPML feeds out of my core WordPress install though most feed readers do, which makes me wonder how successful feedbase might be in the long run without better legacy spec support.)
So what was missing from Wired’s coverage? More details on what has changed in the space in the past several years. There’s been a big movement afoot in the IndieWeb community which has been espousing a simpler and more DRY (don’t repeat yourself) version of feeds using simple semantic microformats markup like h-feed. There’s also been the emergence of JSON feed in the past year which many of the major feed readers already support.
On the front of people leaving Facebook (and their black box algorithmic monster that determines what you read rather than you making an implicit choice), they might have mentioned people who are looking for readers through which they can also use their own domains and websites where they own and maintain their own data for interaction. I’ve written about this in more depth last year: Feed reader revolution.
One of the more bleeding edge developments which I think is going to drastically change the landscape in the coming years for developers, feed readers, and the internet consumption space is the evolving Microsub spec which is being spearheaded by a group of projects known as the Aperture microsub server and the Together and Indigenous clients which already use it. Microsub is going to abstract away many of the technical hurdles that make it far more difficult to build a full-fledged feed reader. I have a feeling it’s going to level a lot of the playing field to allow a Cambrian explosion of readers and social related software to better leverage more easily reading content on the web without relying on third party black box services which people have been learning they cannot fully trust anymore. Aaron Parecki has done an excellent job of laying out some parts of it in Building an IndieWeb Reader as well as in recent episodes of his Percolator microcast. This lower hurdle is going to result in fewer people needing to rely solely on the biggest feed readers like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for both consuming content and posting their own content. The easier it becomes for people to use other readers to consume content from almost anywhere on the web, the less a monopoly the social networks will have on our lives.
I truly hope Wired circles around and gives some of these ideas additional follow up coverage in the coming months. They owe it to their readership to expand their coverage from what we all knew five years ago. If they want to go a step or two further, they might compare the web we had 15 years ago to some of the new and emerging open web technologies that are starting to take hold today.
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Schon fast ein Jahr alt, aber kann man ja noch einmal lesen, wenn jetzt eine RSS-Renaissance ausgerufen wird. – Feed reader revolution: it’s time to embrace open & disrupt social media – boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how… #rss #IndieWeb altplatform.org/2017/06/09/fee…
Feed reader revolution: it’s time to embrace open & disrupt social media boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how…
@vlucas Here’s an article I wrote a year ago that outlines a version of a reader that’s somewhat similar to @aaronpk‘s and discusses a tiny bit of what commercial ones have that approach the functionality. We have a long way to go still.
https://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/
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Last week was the 8th annual IndieWeb Summit held in Portland, Oregon. While IndieWeb Camps and Summits have traditionally been held on weekends during people’s free time, this one held in the middle of the week was a roaring success. With well over 50 people in attendance, this was almost certainly the largest attendance I’ve seen to date. I suspect since people who flew in for the event had really committed, the attendance on the second day was much higher than usual as well. It was great to see so many people hacking on their personal websites and tools to make their personal online experiences richer.
The year of the Indie Reader
Last year I wrote the post Feed Reader Revolution in response to an increasingly growing need I’ve seen in the social space for a new sort of functionality in feed readers. While there have been a few interesting attempts like Woodwind which have shown a proof-of-concept, not much work had been done until some initial work by Aaron Parecki and a session at last year’s IndieWeb Summit entitled Putting it all Together.
Over the past year I’ve been closely watching Aaron Parecki; Grant Richmond and Jonathan LaCour; Eddie Hinkle; and Kristof De Jaeger’s collective progress on the microsub specification as well as their respective projects Aperture/Monocle; Together; Indigenous/Indigenous for iOS; and Indigenous for Android. As a result in early May I was overjoyed to suggest a keynote session on readers and was stupefied this week as many of them have officially launched and are open to general registration as relatively solid beta web services.
I spent a few minutes in a session at the end of Tuesday and managed to log into Aperture and create an account (#16, though I suspect I may be one of the first to use it besides the initial group of five developers). I also managed to quickly and easily add a microsub endpoint to my website as well. Sadly I’ve got some tweaks to make to my own installation to properly log into any of the reader app front ends. Based on several of the demos I’ve seen over the past months, the functionality involved is not only impressive, but it’s a properly large step ahead of some of the basic user interface provided by the now-shuttered Woodwind.xyz service (though the code is still available for self-hosting.)
Several people have committed to make attempts at creating a microsub server including Jack Jamieson who has announced an attempt at creating one for WordPress after having recently built the Yarns reader for WordPress from scratch this past year. I suspect within the coming year we’ll see one or two additional servers as well as some additional reading front ends. In fact, Ryan Barrett spent the day on Wednesday hacking away at leveraging the News Blur API and leveraging it to make News Blur a front end for Aperture’s server functionality. I’m hoping others may do the same for other popular readers like Feedly or Inoreader to expand on the plurality of offerings. Increased competition for new reader offerings can only improve the entire space.
Even more reading related support
Just before the Summit, gRegor Morrill unveiled the beta version of his micropub client Indiebookclub.biz which allows one to log in with their own website and use it to post reading updates to their own website. For those who don’t yet support micropub, the service saves the data for eventual export. His work on it continued through the summit to continue to improve an already impressive product. It’s the fist micropub client of its kind amidst a growing field of websites (including WordPress and WithKnown which both have plugins) that offer reading post support. Micro.blog has recently updated its code to allow users of the platform the ability to post reads with indiebookclub.biz as well. As a result of this spurt of reading related support there’s now a draft proposal to add
read-ofandread-statussupport as new Microformats. Perhaps reads will be included in future updates of the post-type-discovery algorithm as well?Given the growth of reading post support and a new micropub read client, I suspect it won’t take long before some of the new microsub-related readers begin supporting read post micropub functionality as well.
IndieAuth Servers
In addition to David Shanske’s recent valiant update to the IndieAuth plugin for WordPress, Manton Reece managed to finish up coding work to unveil another implementation of IndieAuth at the Summit. His version is for the micro.blog platform which is a significant addition to the community and will add several hundred additional users who will have broader access to a wide assortment of functionality as a result.
The Future
While work continues apace on a broad variety of fronts, I was happy to see that my proposal for a session on IndieAlgorithms was accepted (despite my leading another topic earlier in the day). It was well attended and sparked some interesting discussion about how individuals might also be able to exert greater control over what they’re presented to consume. With the rise of Indie feed readers this year, the ability to better control and filter one’s incoming content is going to take on a greater importance in the very near future. With an increasing number of readers to choose from, more people will hopefully be able to free themselves from the vagaries of the blackbox algorithms that drive content distribution and presentation in products like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others. Based on the architecture of servers like Aperture, perhaps we might be able to modify some of the microsub spec to allow more freedom and flexibility in what will assuredly be the next step in the evolution of the IndieWeb?
Diversity
While there are miles and miles to go before we sleep, I was happy to have seen a session on diversity pop up at the Summit. I hope we can all take the general topic to heart to be more inclusive and actively invite friends into our fold. Thanks to Jean for suggesting and guiding the conversation and everyone else for continuing it throughout the rest of the summit and beyond.
Other Highlights
Naturally, the above are just a few of the bigger highlights as I perceive them. I’m sure others will appear in the IndieNews feed or other blogposts about the summit. The IndieWeb is something subtly different to each person, so I hope everyone takes a moment to share (on your own sites naturally) what you got out of all the sessions and discussions. There was a tremendous amount of discussion, debate, and advancement of the state of the art of the continually growing IndieWeb. Fortunately almost all of it was captured in the IndieWeb chat, on Twitter, and on video available through either the IndieWeb wiki pages for the summit or directly from the IndieWeb YouTube channel.
I suspect David Shanske and I will have more to say in what is sure to be a recap episode in our next podcast.
Photos
Finally, below I’m including a bunch of photos I took over the course of my trip. I’m far from a professional photographer, but hopefully they’ll give a small representation of some of the fun we all had at camp.
Flight from LAX to SFO en route to PDX Pre-Summit meetup at Pine Street Market social meetup at Pine Street Market A view onto Portland from the Hotel deLuxe The Eliot Center where IndieWeb Summit 2018 will take place. The entrance of the Eliot Center The Eliot Center provided a fantastic location for this year’s Summit Aaron Parecki kicks off the 2018 IndieWeb Summit A packed room for the start of the summit Everyone held in rapt attention. Tantek provides a solid overview of the State of the Indieweb Manton Reece and Jean MacDonald present a keynote on the Micro.blog Community and Progress Manton discusses some of the philosophy behind Micro.blog Jean MacDonald of Micro.blog talks about community William Hertling, author of Kill Process, imagines the future of the IndieWeb in his keynote The conversation on How can we encourage diversity on the IndieWeb? The diversity conversation continues Microsub: how to build servers and clients Microsub: how to build servers and clients The Microsub conversation continues The session grid for day one of the Summit My home away from home during the summit: the Hotel deLuxe Manton Reece chats with Aaron Parecki at the Micro.blog meetup at Von Ebert Brewing. Conversations begin over breakfast at the beginning of day two. Hack day on day two of the summit is about to begin. Early morning sessions for hack day are announced. Thanks GoDaddy for sponsoring the caffeine to keep us all going. It’s a beautiful day at the Eliot Center for the Hack Day at IndieWeb Summit 2018. I finally take my name tag off as I depart the conference on the way back home to Los Angeles. Thanks everyone!
Final Thanks
People
While I’m thinking about it, I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who came to the summit. You all really made it a fantastic event!
I’d particularly like to thank Aaron Parecki, Tantek Çelik, gRegor Morrill, Marty McGuire, and David Shanske who did a lot of the organizing and volunteer work to help make the summit happen as well as to capture it so well for others to participate remotely or even view major portions of it after-the-fact. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank Martijn van der Ven for some herculean efforts on IRC/Chat in documenting things in real time as well as for some serious wiki gardening along the way. As always, there are a huge crew of others whose contributions large and small help to make up the rich fabric of the community and we wouldn’t be who we are without your help. Thank you all! (Or as I might say in chat: community++).
And finally, a special personal thanks to Greg McVerry for kindly letting me join him at the Hotel deLuxe for some late night discussions on the intersection of IndieWeb and Domain of One’s Own philosophies as they dovetail with the education sector. With growing interest and a wealth of ideas in this area, I’m confident it’s going to be a rapidly growing one over the coming years.
Sponsors
I’d also like to take a moment to say thanks to all the sponsors who helped to make the event a success including Name.com, GoDaddy, Okta, Mozilla, DreamHost, and likely a few others who I’m missing at the moment.
I’d also like to thank the Eliot Center for letting us hosting the event at their fabulous facility.
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It feels like there has been a bit of resurgence when it comes to RSS lately. I wrote about it last year, Alan Levine has been doing alchemy, Aral Balkan has been reclaiming it, Tom Woodward has been doing jujitsu and Chris Aldrich has created his own feeds.
My takeaways have been:
Store your feed somewhere else. I store mine in WordPress and also sign up to some of Chris Aldrich’s feeds.
Use a reader that allows users to subscribe to an external OPML (I use Inoreader)
Create custom feeds based on tags and categories (or Post Kinds)
Another post that might be worth diving into is Chris Aldrich’s Feed Reader Revolution.
Replied to Flogging the Dead Horse of RSS by Dean Shareski (Ideas and Thoughts)
Dean, I can completely appreciate where you’re coming from. I too am still addicted to RSS (as well as a plethora of other feed types including Atom, JSON, and h-feeds). I didn’t come across your article by feed however, but instead by Aaron Davis’ response to your post which he posted on his own website and then pinged my site with his repsonse using a web specification called Webmention. We’re both members of a growing group of researchers, educators, and others who are using our own websites to act as our social media presences and using new technologies like Webmention to send notifications from website to website to carry on conversations.
While many of us are also relying on RSS, there are a variety of new emerging technologies that are making consuming and replying to content online easier while also allowing people to own all of their associated data. In addition to my article about The Feed Reader Revolution which Aaron mentioned in his reply, Aaron Pareck has recently written about Building an IndieWeb Reader. I suspect that some of these ideas encapsulate a lot of what you’d like to see on the web.
Most of us are doing this work and experimentation under the banner known as the IndieWeb. Since you know some of the web’s prior history, you might appreciate this table that will give you some idea of what the group has been working on. In particular I suspect you may appreciate some of the resources we’re compiling for IndieWeb for Education. If it’s something you find interest in, I hope you might join in our experimentations. You can find many of us in the group’s online chat.
I would have replied in your comments section, but unfortunately through a variety of quirks Disqus marks everything I publish to it immediately as spam. Thus my commentary is invariably lost. Instead, I’m posting it to a location I do have stricter control over–my own website. I’ll send you a tweet to provide you the notification of the post. I will cross-post my reply to Disqus if you want to dig into your spam folder to unspam it for display. In the meanwhile, I’m following you and subscribing to your RSS feed.
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Chris Aldrich provides an introduction to webmentions. This includes unpacking the specification, the notion of mentions, the idea of kinds and way in which sites are potentially able to connect two-ways. This continues Aldrich’s efforts to document the IndieWeb, which has included a thorough overview of the IndieWeb and the future of feed readers. This introduction is different to Aaron Parecki’s guide to sending your first webmentions or breakdown of the oAuth standard.
Replied to Connections by Kathleen Fitzpatrick (kfitz.info)
The fun, secret part is that Kathleen hasn’t (yet?) discovered IndieAuth so that she can authenticate/authorize micropub clients like Quill to publish content to her own site from various clients by means of a potential micropub endpoint.
I’ll suspect she’ll be even more impressed when she realizes that there’s a forthcoming wave of feed readers1,2 that will allow her to read others’ content in a reader which has an integrated micropub client in it so that she can reply to posts directly in her feed reader, then the responses get posted directly to her own website which then, in turn, send webmentions to the sites she’s responding to so that the conversational loop can be completely closed.
She and Lee will also be glad to know that work has already started on private posts and conversations and posting to limited audiences as well. Eventually there will be no functionality that a social web site/silo can do that a distributed set of independent sites can’t. There’s certainly work to be done to round off the edges, but we’re getting closer and closer every day.
I know how it all works, but even I’m (still) impressed at the apparent magic that allows round-trip conversations between her website and Twitter and Micro.blog. And she hasn’t really delved into website to website conversations yet. I suppose we’ll have to help IndieWebify some of her colleague’s web presences to make that portion easier. Suddenly “academic Twitter” will be the “academic blogosphere” she misses from not too many years ago. 🙂
If there are academics out thee who are interested in what Kathleen has done, but may need a little technical help, I’m happy to set up some tools for them to get them started. (We’re also hosing occasional Homebrew Website Clubs, including a virtual one this coming week, which people are welcome to join.)
References
1.
Aldrich C. Feed reader revolution: it’s time to embrace open & disrupt social media. BoffoSocko. https://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/. Published June 9, 2017. Accessed July 20, 2018.
2.
Parecki A. Building an IndieWeb Reader. Aaron Parecki. https://aaronparecki.com/2018/03/12/17/building-an-indieweb-reader. Published March 21, 2018. Accessed July 20, 2018.
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My Month of July
LinkedIn recently reminded me that it has been two years in my current position. I was shocked, time has flown. As I touched on recently, it has been a whirlwind of an experience as is the nature I imagine of working within a transformational project. The biggest lesson learnt is that in a lean environment (or at least an attempt at a lean environment) you sometimes get stuck doing what needs to be done, rather than what you may prefer to be doing, which in my case is working with teachers and schools. I am currently working on refining a scale-able implementation process associated with student reporting.
At home, the common cold came back, again. I swear we had overcome it for this season, but no. Also, new term and new song for my daughter’s school. So I think I am up to 20+ listens of Try Everything from Zootopia. Another great growth mindset anthem. Might also say something about the algorithms at play.
I am learning through practice that the easiest way to learn something is to watch and copy somebody else. Scary how quickly our youngest picks everything up. Understanding Mal Lee and Roger Broadie’s point about the young being digitally proficient by the age of three.
I attended DigiCon18. Although I went to some interesting sessions and sparktalks, what was great were the conversations in-between. This included discussing the Ultranet with Rachel Crellin, the pedagogy associated to ongoing reporting with Chris Harte, connected learning with Jenny Ashby, parenting and partnerships with Lucas Johnson, implementing the Digital Technologies curriculum with Darrel Branson, purpose and leadership with Riss Leung and direct instruction with Richard Olsen.
In other areas, I have been listening to Amy Shark, Florence and the Machine, DJ Shadow, The National and Guy Pearce. I started reading Adam Greenfield’s Radical Technologies. I also updated my site, moving back to ZenPress and adding in a new series of header images developed by JustLego101.
In regards to my writing, here was my month in posts:
Here then are some of the thoughts that have also left me thinking …
Learning and Teaching
Teaching Game Design with Bill Cohen (TER Podcast): Cameron Malcher interviews Bill Cohen about game-design through play-based learning. Cohen goes beyond the usual coding and computer-aided approaches to focusing on ‘low-tech’ games. This included engaging with board games and outdoor games. This play-based approach focuses on developing clear metalanguage, feedback for mastery and working with an iterative design process. This reminds me in part of Amy Burvall’s notion of ‘rigorous whimsy‘ and BreakoutEDU. Some resources Cohen shared include Boardgame Geek and Lady Blackbird, while in a seperate post, Clare Rafferty shared a list of games associated with History. For a different take on games, in a recent episode of the IRL Podcast, Veronica Belmont and Ashley Carman take a look at gamification in everyday life. Some examples of this include notifications on smartphones, likes and retweets on Twitter or the endorsements on Linkedin.
Encountering harmful discourses in the classroom: Ian O’Byrne discusses the challenges of engaging in harmful discourses. He provides some ways to responding, as well as a number of ways to be proactive. This touches on what danah boyd describes as the weaponisation of worldviews.
How well do we ‘face up to’ racism?: Anna Del Conte provides some take-aways from a course on racism. Some of the activities included what racism is, a timeline of diversity in Australia and listening to stories. Another resource I am reminded of is Dan Haesler’s interview with Stan Grant. In part this stemmed from Grant’s speech addressing racism.
Can Reading Make You Happier?: Ceridewn Dovey takes a look at bibliotherapy and the act of reading as a cure. Some argue that readers are more empathetic, while others suggest that it provides pleasure, whatever the particular outcome maybe, reading has shown to provide many health benefits. As Kin Lane suggests, when in doubt, read a book. Zat Rana suggests that this reading is not about being right or wrong, but rather about being open new ideas and lessons.
Historic Tale Construction Kit – Bayeux: This site allows users to recreate the Bayeux Tapestry. Clearly this is a great resource for history students, but it is also an interesting approach to storytelling.
Edtech
Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet: Chris Aldrich provides an introduction to webmentions. This includes unpacking the specification, the notion of mentions, the idea of kinds and way in which sites are potentially able to connect two-ways. This continues Aldrich’s efforts to document the IndieWeb, which has included a thorough overview of the IndieWeb, the future of feed readers and reimagining academic research. This introduction is different to Aaron Parecki’s guide to sending your first webmentions or breakdown of the oAuth standard.
Twenty Years of Edtech: Martin Weller looks back at twenty years of EdTech, highlighting the various moments that have stood out across the journey. This brings together many of the pieces that he has written for his 25 years of EdTech series that he has written to celebrate 25 years of ALT. As he points out in his introduction, we are not very good at looking back. This post then offers an opportunity to stop and do so in a structured manner. Another interesting take on history is Ben Francis’ post on the Firefox OS.
Learning To Code By Writing Code Poems: Murat Kemaldar discusses the connections between coding and poetry. He re-imagines the various rules and constructs in a more human form. This continues a conversation started between Darrel Branson, Tony Richards and Ian Guest on Episode 234 of the Ed Tech Team Podcast about whether everyone should learn poetry and coding. This is also something Royan Lee shares.
18 best practices for working with data in Google Sheets: Ben Collins provides a guide for working with data in Google Sheets. Some of the useful steps that stood out were documenting the steps you take, adding an index column for sorting and referencing, creating named ranges for your datasets and telling the story of one row to check the data. This is all in preparation for his new course on data analysis. Another tip I picked up from Jay Atwood has been to import data, if moving from Excel to Sheets, rather than simply copying and pasting.
Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags: Cory Doctorow provides a commentary on the current state of affairs involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Rather than blame the citizens of the web, he argues that the fault exists with the mechanics in the garage and the corruption that they have engaged with. The question that seems to remain is if this is so and we still want our car fixed, where do we go? Doctorow has also recorded a reading of the article.
How the Blog Broke the Web: Amy Hoy reflects on the early days of publishing on the web, where people would handcraft pages and connect them using a contents page. This was superseded by Moveable Type and the chronological blog, subsequently killing off the non-diariest. I was not really engaged in the web back then so it is hard to comment as Jeremey Keith, Duncan Stephen and Kicks Condor have, but it does remind me of the current debates around blogging. I think that all these spaces are forever changing and developing. Sometimes this is based on wholesale changes, but usually people have their own particular reason. Maybe some people will drop off with Gutenberg, but then again sometimes these things have their day.
Are We Listening?: Jose Picardo argues that the question about whether we should have more or less technology in schools misses the point. What matters is how it is used. For example, those who argue for more knowledge often fail to put the effort into actually understanding how technology is used in education. This comes back to the importance of why and having a framework to guide you. For a different perspective on technology in the classroom, read David Perry’s thread.
Storytelling and Reflection
Throwing Our Own Ideas Under the Bus: Ross Cooper discusses the idea of putting your worst foot forward taken from Adam Grant’s book Originals. This involves trusting the idea at hand and starting with reasons why it might fail. Cooper suggests that this can be useful as it disarms the audience, critique involves effort, helps to build trust and leaves audience with a more favourable assessment. He also looks at this alongside Simon Sinek’s concept of ‘start with why’, highlighting the reason why and the challenges that might be faced. I wonder if the challenge in focusing on the why and why not is about finding balance? This reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s discussion of Generous Orthodoxy.
The future will be dockless: could a city really run on ‘floating transport’?: Alex Hern discusses the rise of floating transport, something that I touched on recently with the demise of oBike in Melbourne. Hern captures a number of stories from around the world of hope for efficiency, but also issues associated with shared spaces. I am taken by Hern’s closing remarks concerning reliability over flexibility. This leaves me thinking that sometimes what is required is community and sometimes that involves patience. What is the cost to the public/private transport industry when everyone relies on private personal transport models like Bird or Uber?
i am sorry: Pernille Ripe reflects on life as a connected educator. She discusses the stress, anxieties and perceived responsibilities that come with being an educelebrity. Although we often talk about the technicalities associated with being (digitally) literate, what is sometimes overlooked are the social consequences. This is something that Austin Kleon also recently reflected upon.
Facebook’s Push for Facial Recognition Prompts Privacy Alarms: Natasha Singer discusses Facebook’s continual push for facial recognition. She traces some of the history associated with Facebook’s push into this area, including various roadblocks such as GDPR. She also looks at some of the patent applications. This made me wonder how many patents actually come to fruition and how many are a form of indirect marketing? Elsewhere, Doug Levin explains why facial recognition has no place in schools, especially the way Curtin University is using it.
The anti-cottonwool schools where kids stare down risk in favour of nature play: This article from the ABC discusses a couple of schools in Western Australia that have reduced the rules on outdoor play. This reminds me of Narissa Leung’s use of old bricks and Adrian Camm’s use of odd material to engage with play.
The Dangers of Distracted Parenting: Erika Christakis discusses the challenges of parenting in a digital age. This all comes down to distractions and as I have touched on before, this is not always digital. I really like danah boyd’s strategy for dealing with this, that is to say why you are using a device. This openness offers a useful point of reflection. I think that the conclusion to this article says it all though, “put down your damned phone.”
FOCUS ON … SPACE
I was recently challenged on the place of space in regards to learning. I recorded a microcast on the topic, but I haven’t had the chance to put all my thoughts together. In the interim, I have collected together a number of posts on the topic. If you have any others to add to the mix, I would love to read them.
Imagining Different Learning Spaces: Jon Corripo provided his suggestions for redesigning a classroom space which again sparked my imagination.
Flexible Seating: What’s the Point?: Chris Wejr reflects on his experiences in reviewing flexible learning spaces. This includes the reasons to re-design, as well as a series of thoughts associated with the process of re-imagining.
Why I Hate Classroom Themes: Emily Fintelman reflects on classroom themes and wonders what impact they are really having on learning. She suggests that our focus should be on how spaces are structured and strategies that can be used to give students more voice.
Flexible Classrooms: Research Is Scarce, But Promising: What is interesting about this report is that rather than discussing furniture in isolation, it is considered as a part of a wider conversation about learning and environment. The impact of flexible spaces though can be almost incidental at times, as is with the case of Maths. This speaks of agency as much as it does of the chairs in the classroom.
Adding the Learning Back to Space: A reflection on an outdoor learning space and the potential of technology to increase learning and engagement.
Benefits of Flexible Learning Spaces #1 Teaching in Teams: Stephen Rowe explains that teachers working in teams is a significant benefit that arises from teaching in an open learning space.
Designing Learning Spaces – putting the cart before the horse: June Wall and Jonathon Mascorella define learning environments as a set of physical and digital locations, context and cultures in which students learn.
Learning Space Design Inspiration: Steve Brophy collects together a number of ideas and inspirations associated with learning spaces.
Beanbags in Space: Matt Esterman suggests that what most teachers want is a more shiny version of what they have, because they are not trained as designers (usually) and are so often hemmed in by the expectations of current reality.
Inquiry, noticing and the changing seasons… A tribute to the late Frank Ryan: Kath Murdoch reflects on the potential of the environment associated with inquiry.
Coalescent Spaces: Dave White considers the impact of digital technologies on the creation of coalescent learning spaces.
Seeing Spaces: Bret Victor reimagines the makerspace built around tinkering and argues that it is in ‘seeing’ that we are able to make this a science.
Communities, Networks and Connected Learning with Google: Technology enables us to easily develop digital communities and networks inside and outside of the classroom. The reality though is that connected learning is as much about creating spaces for learning and building on that.
READ WRITE RESPOND #031
So that is July for me, how about you? As always, interested to hear.
Also, feel free to forward this on to others if you found anything of interest, maybe you want to subscribe or buy me a coffee? Archives can be found here.
Cover image via JustLego101.
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I like the idea of writing notes within the application and publishing these. I feel that this is what is trying to be achieved with the micropub feed reader revolution. Personally, I have taken to this with my second blog designed to replace social bookmarking, such as Diigo. Although it is not as simply as Tiny, I like the ability to craft each post. I also like the nuance of Post Kinds.
Originally posted at Read Write Collect
In the summer of 2013, I learned about the IndieWeb, ironically, via a comment, posted at Scripting.com, Dave Winer’s website.
Over the past 25 years, Dave has created, collaborated on, and evangelized about multiple open web technologies, but he’s a bit prickly about some IndieWeb concepts, especially h-feed. That’s okay. The IndieWeb continues to move forward.
In the fall of 2013, I added the ability to receive Webmentions on one of my websites. It was more of a test to see how it worked, and I thought that it was fascinating. In 2018, I still consider the Webmention to be the best technology feature, created by the IndieWeb group.
This is my favorite concept of the IndieWeb:
That’s all that is needed to support the IndieWeb. A website owner does not need to support any of the “advanced” IndieWeb tech ideas, such as Micropub, Microsub, Webmention, etc., for the site to be considered a part of the IndieWeb. It’s mainly about NOT posting all web content on other platforms (silos).
The IndieWeb encourages “old” bloggers to revisit their old, abandoned websites, and the IndieWeb encourages people who have never bought a domain name to consider the idea of hosting most of their public web content on their own websites.
Since 2013, I’ve created several web publishing systems, mainly to learn new technologies and programming techniques. In the spring of 2016, I created my web-based static site generator called Wren, which I use to manage the content here at sawv.org. Initially, the only IndieWeb concepts supported by Wren consisted of some Microformats and receiving Webmentions.
In the summer of 2017, I read Chris Aldrich’s post titled Feed reader revolution. After reading that excellent post, I added more IndieWeb tech support to my Wren app, including sending Webmentions, logging into my site via IndieAuth, supporting Micropub on the server, using brid.gy to interact with my test Twitter account, and more usage of Microformats.
Here’s my Jul 6, 2017 post titled IndieWeb Testing where I ran my Wren web pub app through several IndieWeb-related tests. At that time, I was hosting content at boghop.com, but that content has been moved here. I should re-run the tests again.
My main reason for implementing some of the IndieWeb tech in my web apps was to learn more about how it worked. It does not mean that in the future, I will continue to accept Webmentions at sawv.org and syndicate some content to my test Twitter account.
I don’t “use” social media, and I don’t engage with others on the web outside of my own small message board toledotalk.com that I started in January 2003. I choose to learn how to program some IndieWeb tech in case needs arise in future projects for work and for hobby. I could see adding support for Webmentions and Micropub in other projects.
In the summer of 2017, I created a web app called Warbler that is a different take on the message board. All thread starter posts and comments are Webmentions.
kleete.com relies on Warbler. The domain name means nothing. I’m not planning to use nor promote kleete as a community site. It’s simply something to play with.
Technically, toledotalk.com is a silo, I think. I wondered how a message board could function without being a silo. The best idea that I could invent was Warbler.
To reduce spam with my Warbler app at kleete.com, I could require each poster to log into kleete.com via IndieAuth, which would mean kleete.com would not accept Webmentions programmatically. Currently, I have throttling in place at kleete.com where a new thread post can only be created after at least five minutes have passed, since the previous thread starter post. And the same website or domain name can post a comment only once every 60 seconds.
The concept of accepting comments or user-contributed content is not a problem. The problem is that web site owners don’t work hard enough to encourage better comments by erecting barriers. It took me a long time to find the right combination of “barriers to entry” that worked well at toledotalk.com. Plus, a community site admin must be willing to enforce posting guidelines and weed out the abusers. A site that proclaims to be wide open and “free speech” friendly is a site that will probably fall into ruin.
Over the past few years, toledotalk.com has slowly faded activity-wise, mainly by design, since I have had new user sign-ups disabled for most of the time over the past few years. toledotalk.com is over 15-years-old, and I have lost interest in the site in recent years. And because of the IndieWeb influence, I think that it’s more important for people to post on their own websites.
In the aught years, the Toledo area had an active blogging scene. Maybe it still does, I don’t know. Last decade, Toledo Talk referenced some of those bloggers and their content, and some of those bloggers posted at Toledo Talk. Symbiotic.
I think that social media dominates in the Toledo area, like most places. It would be nice if a small group of us began posting content on our own domain names in addition to using social media (optionally).
That doesn’t mean that the people should use IndieWeb tech to interact with social media, at least not at the start. Baby steps. Step one is encouraging people to post content on their own domain names. Step two is building a network around the personal websites.
My wife uses Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and who-knows-what-else. Back in the winter, I bought her a domain name, then I built her a simple blog setup, and I posted some content on her site as an example. But I have been unable to encourage her to use her personal website on a regular basis.
If I struggle to get a close family member to use the web in a slightly more open manner, then I imagine it will be difficult to get others in the Toledo area to own their content. But it doesn’t hurt to try.
A few times each week, I view the IndieWeb IRC chat logs. I enjoy their discussions and passion. With each passing year, more new people join the conversaion and experiment with IndieWeb principles and tech. The beauty is that no corporation owns the IndieWeb/Open Web.
created Jul 25, 2018
Read How to decentralize social media—a brief sketch by Larry Sanger (larrysanger.org)
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
This is an intriguing idea. In particular, it would be cool if I could input my OPML file of people I’m following and have a plugin like this work with other social readers.
February 20, 2019 at 12:29PM
As I look at this, I can’t help think about my desire to want to be able to link to a wiki in a post and have a Webmention added to that post’s “See Also” or reference section. With the link automatically added to the wiki’s page like this, future readers and editors could have access to my original and could potentially synopsize and include details from my post into the wiki’s article.
February 20, 2019 at 12:41PM
Larry, I caught your Twitter conversation with Aaron Parecki earlier about IndieWeb. I’ve added a lot of the open specs he referenced to my own WordPress website with a handful of plugins and would be happy to help you do the same if you like. I think that with some of the IndieWeb tools, it’s always even more impressive if you can see them in action using something you’re already regularly using.
If nothing else, it’ll give you some direct experience with how the decentralized nature of how these things work. I’m posting my reply to you own my own site and manually syndicating the reply (since you don’t yet support webmention, one of the protocols) which will give at least some idea of how it all works.
If you’re curious about how you could apply it to your own WordPress site, I’ve collected some research, articles and experiments specific to my experience here: https://boffosocko.com/research/indieweb/
February 20, 2019 at 12:46PM
I’ve outlined a bit about how feed readers could be slighly modified to do some of this in the past: https://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/
February 20, 2019 at 12:47PM
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Read “Feed reader revolution: it’s time to embrace open & disrupt social media”
by Chris Aldrich
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