👓 Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? | The New Yorker

Read Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? by Cal Newport (The New Yorker)
Alongside these official responses, a loose collective of developers and techno-utopians that calls itself the IndieWeb has been creating another alternative. The movement’s affiliates are developing their own social-media platforms, which they say will preserve what’s good about social media while jettisoning what’s bad. They hope to rebuild social media according to principles that are less corporate and more humane.
Excited to see that the IndieWeb “hobby” I’ve been spending a lot of my time on for the past few years has made it into The New Yorker!

Published by

Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, 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.

45 thoughts on “👓 Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? | The New Yorker”

    1. What’s it going to take to get you in Joseph? The cover of The Atlantic?

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      1. Oh, I’m using Indi web. Just not as effectively as you @ChrisAldrich. A big part of my limited usage is finishing my WP theme in progress. As of late I’ve been focusing on Accessibility and Web Sustainably research.

  1. This post is (hopefullly) an IndieWeb answer to https://boffosocko.com/2019/05/18/can-indie-social-media-save-us-new-yorker

    Since I knew about #IndieWeb I have been investigating but still got confused, maybe because of it´s amazing simplicity.

    When I read this article https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/can-indie-social-media-save-us where it´s mentioned the micro.blog platform I don´t know if just because I installed the IndieWeb plugins on this very same blog, my own (comunicacionabierta.net), I´m using micro.blog or not.

    Also it would be just great to know how have you make on your blog this possible:

    1. Daniel, your English is excellent though a bit unclear in places. I’ll try a response but let me know if I’m not answering your questions.

      You have your own website and domain name, which makes you a part of the IndieWeb. I see you’ve also got Webmention set up, you your post sent me a notification and I’ve obviously received it. Since the Webmention Plugin handles sending the notifications, you do not need to manually put your URL into my site’s response box and click “Ping me”. I’ll look into the error you reported seeing on Twitter.

      Having an IndieWeb site doesn’t automatically mean you’re part of the micro.blog community. Since you’ve already got a domain name and hosting set up, you can sign up for a free micro.blog account and set it up to syndicate your content into it via RSS (or other means). Once set up, you can use micro.blog as a feed reader as well as to interact with others on the service. Since you’ve got Webmentions set up on your site, any replies to your content that happen on micro.blog will be sent to your website automatically.

      Finally in relation to your question about the link menu on my homepage, most of the links are created as archives by the Post Kinds Plugin though some are created from WordPress core’s Post Formats. I actually created the menu by manually writing out the HTML including the links and wrapping them with some CSS so they display on my site. Here’s a gist of the HTML and the CSS code I used. I’ll mention that the Post Kinds plugin now has a widget that does something relatively similar, an example of which is presently in my sidebar.

      If you find it helpful, I’ve got a bunch of WordPress specific articles on IndieWeb (only in English): https://boffosocko.com/research/indieweb/.

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    1. When possible, I always write on my own site first and then syndicate to the other service. I think that for services like Swarm and Instagram it’s there first and then my site, but for Twitter it’s my site first, then Twitter.

      1. And how do you make it to have a different text on Twitter?
        It was written: “I got your webmention; I’ll look into the error you reported seeing.
        Here’s the answer to some of your other questions:Traducir Tweet” and that´s not written on your post, or I´m missing something?

        1. Since it’s my own site, I can write as much as I wish, but often for Twitter which has character limits, I’ll manually syndicate a shorter version with a link to the original.

          You might appreciate these two prior posts which cover at least some of the workflow: Threaded Replies and Comments with Webmentions in WordPress and Threaded conversations between WordPress and Twitter.

          There are potentially hundreds of ways of handling it all, but since I own and control my own site, I can pick and choose how to do it. To my knowledge, no one has automated a way of doing replies within traditional “Comments” sections on WordPress to Twitter, so I do it manually, though I suspect that one could use Brid.gy to do it.

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