They’ve just opened up the entire conference program with links to all of the sessions and videos for those who’d like to watch them.
You’ll see my presentation video embedded above. If you’d like you can also watch it in the custom player made for the conference, though I notice that it doesn’t replay the live chat.
Due to scheduling issues beyond my control just before the conference, I had to shorten my hour-long workshop down to a 20 minute talk. I intend to do a couple of separate hands-on workshops at upcoming Domain of Our Own meetups so that people can implement the moving pieces I demonstrate into their own websites. Let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll let you know when they’re scheduled.
I’m hoping that when the next conference rolls around at least some of us can participate using our own domains and not need to rely on Twitter’s infrastructure.
I posted a link to the slides last week if you’d like to follow along that way and have links to some of the resources. (You should also have access to some of my notes/rough transcript as well as alt-text for some of the images included.) The slides still have some context and links to portions of the original version that got cut out.
For those unaware of the conference or topics, it was two days of great presentations about the topics of Open Education Resources (OER) and A Domain of One’s Own which is focused on giving teachers and students to websites and underlying technology of their own for daily personal and professional use. Those interested in the IndieWeb may particularly find the Domains track enlightening. Others interested in teaching, pedagogy, and publishing will get a lot out of the OER tracks.
A Twitter of Our Own at OERxDomains 2021 Conference
A Twitter of Our Own at OERxDomains 2021 Conference
A Twitter of Our Own at OERxDomains 2021 Conference
A Twitter of Our Own at OERxDomains 2021 Conference
A Twitter of Our Own at OERxDomains 2021 Conference
I mentioned it as an anecdotal observation in my talk, so I went back and counted the appearances of online identifiers on the 159 re-mixable badges for the OERxDomains 21 Conference. I counted 91 twitter handles, 15 domain names, and 1 Instagram handle.
There were a couple people who used email addresses. A few people listed multiple twitter handles, and one enterprising person (not me!) listed three domain names.
Because the badges were customizable, people (or their animals and a few organizations) had the individual choice of what text to put on their personal badges.
Hopefully we’ll do better on using domain names at the next domains-related conference. 😜
Domain of One’s Own
OERxDomains 2021: A Twitter of Our Own (#)
video (alternate player)
slides
WordPress
WordCamp Riverside 2018
The web is my social network: How I use WordPress to create the social platform I want (and you can too!)
Video
Slides
WordCamp Santa Clarita Valley 2019
Micropub and WordPress: Custom Posting Applications
Video
Slides
WordCamp Riverside 2019
IndieWeb + WordPress: Creating Your Dial Tone on the Internet
Video (link to come in the near future)
Slides
Drupal
DrupalCamp LA 2015
The IndieWeb Movement and Drupal
A Twitter of Our Own at OERxDomains 2021 ConferenceI enjoyed Chris’ presentation on personally breaking away from the silos and building up the technology that enables his home on the web. I have mixed feelings about the level of effort this takes, having just made it to “Level 2” of IndieWebify.Me myself with Webmentions.It’s a lot more involved to create your own independent website and implement microformats, Webmentions, etc. on your own, than to use a silo like Twitter. On the one hand, that’s a great filter. I enjoy reading folks in the IndieWeb community because, just by the nature of having their own website, I know I’m connecting with resourceful and clever individuals who have something to say, and who I can probably learn from. On the other hand, it’s harder to find each other. There’s no central IndieWeb discovery feature, which, I suppose, is part of the point.
Thanks For some additional context, the majority of the people in the audience at that conference (particularly the Domains portion) specifically have some online infrastructure already, and almost all already have domains, most of which have at least a WordPress site. Just having something to start with is one of the bigger hurdles. The missing portion of my presentation, originally scheduled as a workshop, was a hands on walk through of adding those missing pieces. I’m not saying it’s all a piece of cake, but it helps to know what’s currently possible and begin helping people to put those pieces together. I’m hoping to do the rest of the workshop part in the coming weeks to help people realize some of these technologies for themselves.
For those who don’t want to build it for themselves, or need something temporary, I’d recommend Micro.blog or perhaps one of the services at https://indieweb.org/Quick_Start. (If nothing else, IndieWeb can’t be said not to offer any options.) Incidentally you can connect your external blog to Micro.blog as a means of finding people.
On the discovery part, you’ll slowly but surely find the crowd. You can find some interesting and useful examples here to start: https://indieweb.org/discovery.
Good luck, and do let us know if we can help. 🙂
A Twitter of Our Own at OERxDomains 2021 ConferenceI enjoyed Chris’ presentation on personally breaking away from the silos and building up the technology that enables his home on the web. I have mixed feelings about the level of effort this takes, having just made it to “Level 2” of IndieWebify.Me myself with Webmentions.It’s a lot more involved to create your own independent website and implement microformats, Webmentions, etc. on your own, than to use a silo like Twitter. On the one hand, that’s a great filter. I enjoy reading folks in the IndieWeb community because, just by the nature of having their own website, I know I’m connecting with resourceful and clever individuals who have something to say, and who I can probably learn from. On the other hand, it’s harder to find each other. There’s no central IndieWeb discovery feature, which, I suppose, is part of the point.2021-05-09 15:38:00 -0400 -0400
6 days ago#links
#indieweb
This Article was mentioned on dianoetic.net
Jeet Heer recently wrote a piece (on Substack) entitled Can We Bring Back Blogging? where he waxed a bit nostalgic for the old blogosphere.
This makes me wonder: did blogging die off because the tools changed?
Everyone had their own space on the internet and the internet itself was the medium which opened up the conversation. I could use WordPress while someone else might have been on Blogger, Moveable Type, Live Journal, TypePad, or something they made in HTML themselves.
Now it’s all siloed off into tinier spaces where content is trapped for eyeballs and engagement and there’s not nearly as much space for expression. Some of the conversation is broken up into 280 character expressions on Twitter, some on Instagram, and now people are aggregating content inside Substack. Substack at least has a feed I can subscribe to and a free form box to add a reply.
I appreciate Jeff’s comment about the “flywheel of social media”. We’re definitely going to need something like that to help power any resurgence of the blogosphere. I also like to think of it in the framing of “thought spaces” where the idea of a blog is to give yourself enough space to form a coherent idea and make an actual argument. Doing that is much harder to do on a microblog where the responses are also similarly limited. It just feels so rude to post 250 words in reply to a sentence or two that probably needed more space to express itself too.
I suspect that if we want a real resurgence of thought and discourse online, we’re going to need some new tools to do it. As Friedrich Nietzsche famously conceded to his friend Heinrich Köselitz “You are right — our writing tools take part in the forming of our thoughts.”
It would help if we could get back to the bare metal of the internet in which to freely operate again. Substack at least feels close to that, though it could be much better.
Can we have a conversational medium that isn’t constrained by a handful of corporate silos that don’t allow conversation across boundaries? Can we improve the problems of context collapse we’re seeing in social media?
I’d like to think that some of the building blocks the IndieWeb movement has built might help guide the way. I love their idea of Webmention notifications that allow one site to mention another regardless of the platforms on which they’re built. Their Micropub posting tools abstract away the writing and posting experience to allow you to pick and choose your favorite editor. They’ve got multiple social reader tools to let you follow the people and content you’re interested in and reply to things directly in the reader. I presented a small proof of concept at a recent education conference, for those who’d like to see what that experience looks like today.
Perhaps if more platforms opened up to these ideas and tools, we might be able to return, but with a lot more freedom and flexibility than we had in the nostalgic blogosphere?
Yet, we’ll still be facing the human work of interacting and working together. There are now several magnitudes of order more people online than there were in the privileged days of the blogosphere. We’re still going to need to solve for that. Perhaps if everyone reads and writes from their own home on the web, they’re less likely to desecrate their neighbor’s blog because it sticks to their own identity?
There’s lots of work to be done certainly, but perhaps we’ll get there by expanding things, opening them up, and giving ourselves some more space to communicate?
Syndicated copies:
I’m happy to help you try to put together an IndieWeb-friendly version with Webmentions which work with multiple platforms including WordPress, Known, Grav, etc.
You might find some interesting examples and pieces on IndieWeb wiki, particularly their Education page. I’d love to see Matt add his example(s) to that page for others’ future reference.
I did a short demonstration of what the current website-to-website space looks like at the recent OERxDomains21 Conference. You can find the short video here on my site.
If you go the older route one of the best planet-like sites I’ve seen was http://connectedcourses.net/, which if I recall correctly was built by Alan Levine. If you poke around a bit or ask @cogdog on Twitter, I think there are some details or a recipe somewhere of how he put it together.
Chances are reasonably good that people in the #DS106 or #DoOO space have some ideas as well.
I love this idea. It’s the dream of many and the reality of a growing group. Some have mentioned that Micro.blog does this out of the box, but I’ll mention that I have some tools that allow me to do it outside of that. I use WordPress for my website, but it dovetails well with social readers like Aperture, Indigenous, and Together. Small standards and building blocks like Microformats, Webmention, Micropub, and Microsub glue it all together.
Here’s an overview of what some of it looks like: A Twitter of Our Own (short video) along with slides. Those with some technical expertise should be able to get this up and running for themselves.
If it’s your dream, I hope you look into the solutions and come join the growing community.
It seems like a good day to highlight this short video presentation I made last year at an academic conference and posted to my own website:
“A Twitter of Our Own” https://boffosocko.com/2021/04/26/a-twitter-of-our-own-at-oerxdomains-2021-conference/
#EdTech #DoOO #GoodbyeTwitter
Syndicated copies:
I like the title. Wonderful.
youtube.com/channel/UCLpsh…
Happy Friday @kfitz! You’re in luck—its not even horizon we’re watching for, but new lands we can walk. There are several options with varying levels of technicality and user interface affordances:
POSSE
There are some well built and not overly complicated pathways that allow syndicating from your WordPress website to a Mastodon instance and getting responses back from them, just as I think you’ve done with Twitter in the past. Most of these can be done with plugins like Syndication Links or Mastodon Autopost or a handful of other similar plugins in conjunction with Brid.gy (which does the work for bringing back responses). Personally, I prefer Syndication Links for this and it particularly dovetails well with other IndieWeb infrastructure like Micropub clients.
Mirroring
There are a small handful of methods for “mirroring” your WordPress site so that it will look like its own (single or multi-user depending on your configuration) instance within the Fediverse running ActivityPub, meaning that those on Mastodon or other related platforms could follow your site directly. Most of them are configured as publishing only, so you won’t have a built in reader interface and would have to rely on other (available) infrastructure for those portions.
Option 1
(More technical, and with a few less features) Brid.gyFed, which has options to do the syndication to a separate instance mentioned above, as well as making it look like your website appear to support ActivityPub.
More details on this here: https://indieweb.org/Bridgy_Fed
Option 2
Our friend Matthias Pfefferle, a genius engineer and longtime opensource advocate and WordPress developer who has also written significant pieces of other IndieWeb code you’re already using on WordPress, has written a handful of plugins which will make it appear as if your WordPress site supports ActivityPub out of the box. You’ll broadly want the following plugins: ActivityPub plugin, WebFinger plugin, NodeInfo(2) plugin.
They don’t have very many configurable options though some may be hiding a bit, so try:
/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=activitypubwill give you options for how your posts appear;/wp-admin/users.php?page=activitypub-followers-listwill show you who is following your site so you can more easily subscribe back via a reader if you like;/wp-admin/profile.phpand look under “Fediverse” where your profile identifier will be found. It is based on your username within WordPress.The documentation for these plugins are scant and I’ve got the intention to write up something explaining the subtleties and a few quirks, but it will have to wait until the holidays I’m afraid. In the interim, they’re not as complete as they could be, but the following two blogposts have some useful details and hints, though its obvious to me that they’re much newer in the space:
https://odd.blog/2022/11/06/how-to-add-your-blog-to-mastodon/
https://g13g.blog/2021/03/16/get-your-blog-posts-on-mastodon/
There are one or two quirks still pending for how things display if you’re using the IndieWeb-based Post Kinds Plugin, but the developers are generally aware of most of them and will hopefully get them ironed our shortly.
As a result, mostly of these plugins, WordPress is already the fifth largest number of instances in the Fediverse with an (under-)estimated 878 as of this morning.
I’m practicing both the POSSE option as well as Option 2 above on my own site, which can be followed at @chrisaldrich, as an example. Matthias’s example can be found at @pfefferle.
Help & Questions
This is a lot to consume and potentially implement, so, as ever, I’m happy to help guide and lay out the sub-branching options or even hop on a call to walk through bits with folks who have questions. David Shanske and I have been thinking about doing some group sessions and some training videos to walk people through some of this within the next few weeks. There’s also the IndieWeb chat which welcomes questions and conversation which is sure to give you some additional perspective: https://chat.indieweb.org/wordpress/.
For the social reader portions I briefly mentioned, I outline some of those options last year at OERxDomains in A Twitter of Our Own.
HCommons
Separately, congratulations to HCommons having stood up a Mastodon server so quickly!
It looks like it’s running Hometown, which has local only (unfederated) posting, though I’m not sure how many are aware of that useful feature (hiding on the link in the posting interface) which is sadly missing from most Mastodon instances, particularly for smaller communities. It might be something useful to add to the welcome email? I think this could be a great feature for Universities to allow more private class-based social networking while providing some safer spaces that don’t reach the broader internet and which might comply with FERPA. Obviously it would need some testing and some of the barriers for standing up and maintaining these servers to come down a bit.
There’s a lot of messaging and potential education to be had to roll it out well, but it could be interesting to see the WordPress offerings from hcommons.org include some of these IndieWeb and Fediverse tools as well.
Syndicated copies:
@martha I’m hearing a lot of similar experiences across the web like this. Thanks for your thoughts on it.
Kathleen Fitzgerald recently asked about crossposting to Mastodon from her WordPress site and getting replies back. She’s documented some parts recently, and I’ve outlined a few pieces preliminarily including ways you can make your WordPress site look like it’s a Mastodon instance with a few plugins. I suspect Kathleen will have some further thoughts soon after she spends some time tinkering. If you had previously set up to syndicate to Twitter and get responses by via the Brid.gy service, that same sort of workflow will definitely work with Mastodon if you like. (Though it bears mentioning that some of the updates to Mastodon 4.0 this past week or so have introduced some bugs depending on which instance you’re on. I’m sure they’ll be sorted shortly.)
If you’ve not puzzled it out yet, the adding of the requisite
rel="me"class to your Mastodon URL link on your website (in the header, footer, via plugin, via menu item, other) is broadly described here (including some details for the classic editor): https://g13g.blog/2022/11/09/how-to-verify-your-wordpress-site-on-mastodon/. I’m personally using the IndieWeb Plugin to accomplish this and have added the URL for my mastodon instance into a field which gets added to my WordPress Profile at/wp-admin/profile.php. I’m happy to help if you need other ideas about how to do it as there are maybe too many potential options—it was all the different options and ways of doing it that confused me when I did it.In addition to the broader Domain of One’s Own ideas that the “Twitter migration” is spurring, I’m always glad to see more people exploring ways we can have “A Twitter of our Own“.
Also in reply to syndicated copy at: https://mastodon.social/@mburtis/109435099778560251
Syndicated copies: