In reply to Amanda.

Amanda, thanks for the well thought out reply! Oddly, your comment didn't send a webmention to my site, so I only caught your reply by manually reading your post. I forced my site to pick it up manually though, so I could keep the response and reply. (Perhaps it's the markup in your comments that prevented sending? I'm doing some tweaking to my own to work out some bugs.)

A lot of what you're saying is all too true, but I also think the community is making some significant headway towards making things continually better and easier from a UI perspective. Things are night and day compared to what they even a year ago, much less three. I had dinner earlier this week with Aaron Parecki, who was in LA coming back from IndieWebCamp Austin, and Jonathan LaCour from Dreamhost. We spent a bit of time discussing how to make it easier to import old content from places like Twitter and Facebook into platforms like WordPress to make owning all your content easier.

Another piece that the silos have also done better is in creating "feed readers". Sites like Facebook and Twitter are really 95% well-optimized readers and only 5% posting interface. Most people spend far more time on those platforms reading than they do creating. Even most of the creating is really just reposting and liking, so we're already way ahead on that front.

We've obviously still got a ways to go. The best part though is that we're making steady progress.

Lastly, while your comment might have been a post of its own and not a comment, I actually like the fact that it was a comment. It means that it fits into a larger whole where all of the context of the conversation isn't necessarily lost. Perhaps it lost some readership as the result of the post type, but that's a problem to be solved separately. If anything it's the first time I've ever actually contemplated subscribing to someone's RSS comments feed!