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Personally, as a favorite major source, I’ve been reading and keeping up with the IndieWeb community (indieweb.org, their wiki, newsletter, and chat) since about 2014. Their community, while relatively small, is large and diverse enough that I’ve seen and been exposed to a variety of technologies, online movements, and even social movements in the last several years that I’m sure I would have never seen in the mainstream until after the sea changes had already occurred. Without an insignificant amount of attention they also manage to do it all with a flourish of kindness and care.
The secondary issue isn’t just seeing or hearing about it, but also having the bandwidth to delve into it, explore it, make sense of it, or even do something about it. I might posit that IndieWeb is working on something even more powerful and subtle than the Fediverse idea, but that it’s not quite ready for mass consumption (yet).
If I had to choose a single source to optimize for time and attention across a variety of sources and topics, I might recommend following Kevin Marks (also at @KevinMarks) who consistently sees and finds some of the best in technology that’s out there.
On the flip side, I’m sure that there are a variety of your own sources that you consume that may prefigure other changes and shifts. If you throw them over, it’s possible that you’ll missing seeing something else that may have otherwise been more obvious. Again, you have to adjust your time and attention to things which matter most to you.
I love that you’ve come up with another interesting way to handwrite a blog. I’ve documented a few others I’ve found at https://indieweb.org/handwriting. Perhaps some of the ideas there might help?
I particularly love that people are writing their comments out to send back to you.
I hope this all catches on!
—Chris
Hypothes.is has methods for establishing document equivalency which archive.org apparently conforms. I did an academic experiment a few years back with an NYT article about books where you’ll see equivalent annotations on the original, the archived version, and a copy on my own site that has a rel="canonical"
link back to the original as well:
- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/books/obamas-secret-to-surviving-the-white-house-years-books.html
- https://web.archive.org/web/20170119220705/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/books/obamas-secret-to-surviving-the-white-house-years-books.html
- https://boffosocko.com/2017/01/19/obamas-secret-to-surviving-the-white-house-years-books-the-new-york-times/
I don’t recommend doing the rel-canonical trick on your own site frequently as I have noticed a bug, which I don’t think has been fixed.
The careful technologist with one tool or another, will see that I and a couple others have been occasionally delving into the archive and annotating Manfred Kuehn’s work. (I see at least one annotation from 2016, which was probably native on his original site before it was shut down in 2018.) I’ve found some great gems and leads into some historical work from his old site. In particular, he’s got some translations from German texts that I haven’t seen in other places.
I get @TomCritchlow’s sentiment, but… the extra “work” it currently entails for the social part dramatically ups the signal to noise ratio for me compared to Twitter.
You’d definitely want the ability to filter by your social circle, especially on popular sites. In fact this sort of discovery mechanism would be cool if it could be more broadly built into either the web or perhaps into IndieWeb social readers which would know your social graph and could surface related details.
Perhaps expanding a browser extension like Crowdwise to include Twitter support might be a potential solution? I would worry that portions wouldn’t add much other than a lot of likes and bookmark-like data. While some[1], [2] might consider Twitter as an annotation layer (not always directly linked) on the web, the overall quality isn’t necessarily going to be built in there.
It would be cool if Crowdwise also added Hypothes.is’ API to their list of sources.
I’m also reminded of Peter Hagen’s experiments with Hypothes.is seem very similar but with a different UI. His version flips the discovery question on its head.
Piotr Wozniak has some material on creating/designing more concrete cards for spaced repetition that I’ve found generally helpful. I know that Andy Matuschak and Soren Bjornstad have some ideas, experience, and research in the space but I’ve yet to see more deep research on the effectiveness of these more specific practices at scale or beyond the anecdotal.
Alberto Cevolini & Markus Krajewski have relevant research. There are still a few missing puzzle pieces however.
I’m always curious to see other implementations.
Your challenge question is tough, not just for the mere discovery portion, but for the multiple other functions involved, particularly a “submit/reply” portion and a separate “I want to subscribe to something for future updates”.
I can’t think of any sites that do both of these functionalities at the same time. They’re almost always a two step process, and quite often, after the submission part, few people ever revisit the original challenge to see further updates and follow along. The lack of an easy subscribe function is the downfall of the second part. A system that allowed one to do both a cross-site submit/subscribe simultaneously would be ideal UI, but that seems a harder problem, especially as subscribe isn’t well implemented in IndieWeb spaces with a one click and done set up.
Silo based spaces where you’re subscribed to the people who might also participate might drip feed you some responses, but I don’t think that even micro.blog has something that you could use to follow the daily photo challenges by does it?
Other examples
https://daily.ds106.us/ is a good example of a sort of /planet that does regular challenges and has a back end that aggregates responses (usually from Twitter). I imagine that people are subscribed to the main feed of the daily challenges, but I don’t imagine that many are subscribed to the comments feed (is there even one?)
Maxwell’s Sith Lord Challenge is one of the few I’ve seen in the personal site space that has aggregated responses. I don’t think it has an easy way to subscribe to the responses though an h-feed of responses on the page might work in a reader? Maybe he’s got some thoughts about how this worked out?
Ongoing challenges, like a 30 day photography challenge for example, are even harder because they’re an ongoing one that either requires a central repository to collect, curate, and display them (indieweb.xyz, or a similar planet) or require something that can collect one or more of a variety of submitted feeds and then display them or allow a feed(s) of them. I’ve seen something like this before with http://connectedcourses.net/ in the education space using RSS, but it took some time to not only set it up but to get people’s sites to work with it. (It was manual and it definitely hurt as I recall.)
I don’t think of it as a challenge, but I often submit to the IndieWeb sub on indieweb.xyz and I’m also subscribed to its output as well. In this case it works as an example since this is one of its primary functions. It’s not framed as a challenge, though it certainly could be. Here one could suggest that participants tag their posts with a particular hashtag for tracking, but in IndieWeb space they’d be “tagging” their posts with the planet’s particular post URL and either manually or automatically pinging the Webmention endpoint.
Another option that could help implement some fun in the system is to salmention all the prior submissions on each submission as an update mechanism, but one would need to have a way to unsubscribe to this as it could be(come) a spam vector.