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Thread Reader App (Twitter)We have been receiving requests to allow embedding of unrolled threads automatically to blogs and other publications, including @ChrisAldrich's proposal below. Curious, how many folks are interested in this? And if so, what blogging platforms (eg Wordpress?) should be supported? https://t.co/1TozKKjpFY
— Thread Reader App (@threadreaderapp) March 6, 2020
I’ll note, hopefully for ease of implementation, that a Micropub solution will already allow you to post to WordPress, Drupal, WithKnown, Craft, Jekyll, Kirby, Hugo, Blot, Micro.blog and others.
There is also an open source project called Silo.pub that provides a micropub endpoint for services like Tumblr, WordPress.com, Blogger, and Twitter (among others). Aaron Parecki has a public version I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you tried.
Other platforms could quickly allow the functionality and so much more by building their own micropub servers, which would be a major boon to the social media space and the open web.
If you have questions about implementation while building, feel free to pop into the IndieWeb #dev chat (where prior implementers and others) are available for help. (Alternate chat modalities including Slack and IRC are available if you prefer.)
This would be a great way to leverage their existing infrastructure and to allow people to put their own Tweetstorms onto their blog and solve the perennial “Why didn’t you just blog about this” commentary.
Third-party Twitter apps are going to break on August 16th, 2018.
I remember thinking 3,000 public posts on my own website felt impressive. Two years later to the day, and I’m happy to be passing 12,438 and owning even more of my online presence.
Often the IndieWeb is re-creating functionality from traditional media or the social spaces to our own sites. Who is going to innovate and turn the tide in the other direction?
Where is the avant guarde? Who is going to be the next Stan Brakhage, George Antheil, Luis Buñuel, or Walter Murch of the web?
How can we push corporate social media back onto their heels?
I can’t wait for someone to create the next social media craze because it’s something they’re creatively posting on their own website as a media format that social silos don’t allow.
Who is experimenting with quirky multimedia posts on their websites? Who’s going to have the next meme generator/Tik Tok/SnapChat stories/inventive new functionality first? I’m imagining something in the vein of Marty’s Kapowski, Aaron’s emoji avatars, or Jeremy’s Indy maps, but I’m sure we could go crazier and push the envelope even further.
Bonus points if it’s done in the form of a micropub client! 🙂
Brett Kosinski (The “B” Ark)Taking back control of my content, I’m pulling my (modest) book reviews from Goodreads back to my blog. An underrated favourite of mine is Last Chance to See by the astounding Douglas Adams. #indieweb #books #ownyourdata
Congrats! I love the increasing number of people I’ve seen even in the last few days working on this! Are you using IndieBookClub.biz to post to your website?
I’m waiting for people to start documenting examples of owning their knitting on their websites and syndicating to/from Ravelry. #IndieWebKnittingChallenge
The other day Bob Garfield had a good kvetch about dumb comments on newspaper websites on his show, On The Media, and I posted my two cents, but I still don’t feel better. I think that’s because Bob’s partly right: comments do suck sometimes.
So, instead of just poking him for sounding like Grandpa Simpson, I’d like to help fix the problem. Here are ten things newspapers could do, right now, to improve the quality of the comments on their sites. (There are lots more, but you know how newspaper editors can’t resist a top ten list.)
I love this list which I feel is very solid. I also think that newspapers/magazines could do this with an IndieWeb approach to give themselves even more control over aggregating and guiding their conversations.
Instead of moving in the correct direction of taking more ownership, most journalistic outlets (here’s a recent example) seem to be ceding their power and audience away to social media. Sure people will have conversations about pieces out in the world, but why not curate and encourage a better and more substantive discussion where you actually have full control? Twitter reactions may help spread their ideas and give some reach, but at best–from a commentary perspective–Twitter and others can only provide for online graffiti-like reactions for the hard work.
I particularly like the idea of having an editor of the comment desk.
I’d noticed Pine.blog before at a previous IndieWebCamp, but not had time to delve into it very deeply. Seeing some of what Brian Schrader has been working on while following IndieWebCamp Austin remotely this weekend has reminded about the project. As a result, I’ve been spending some time tonight to check out some of the functionality that it’s offering. In part, I’m curious how similar, or not, it is to what Micro.blog is offering specifically with respect to the idea of IndieWeb as a Service which I’ve recently begun documenting. It’s always great to see the growing diversity and plurality of solutions in the space.
My brief prior experience with the platform was simply adding my website to their discovery service. Tonight I’ve found that Pine.blog has got a very pretty little feed reader experience with some fun discovery functionality. You can apparently create multiple timelines to follow content, but one needs a paid account for more than one timeline. It allows both following sites as well as recommending them to others. It also appears that Brian is supporting the rel=”payment” microformat as I see at least one feed that has a “$ Support” button in the Pine.blog interface to allow me to go to the site’s payment page to support it. I think this may be one of the first times I’ve seen this functionality in an app in the wild outside of the Overcast podcast app which added it a couple of years ago.
It has webmention support, so I can “like” things within the reader and notify others. Without a paid account I don’t see the ability to reply to or mention other sites though. It also looks like it allows for import/export of OPML too, though I haven’t tried it out yet–I can only test drive so many feed readers at a time and Indigenous is taking up all of my bandwidth at present.
I do wonder a bit about potentially importing/exporting my content if I were to go all-in on Pine.blog. I’d bet the idea is on the product map, but that’s a huge bit of work to build without a paid user base to support it. I’d personally want at least an export function if I were to change over, though I’m more likely to want to dovetail my own site with it much the way I’m currently doing with Micro.blog.
It looks like it should be able to post to my website, but I’m finding the “publish” and “preview” buttons don’t work–perhaps I need a paid account for this functionality? Of course, I only see UI to provide pine.blog with my URL and my account name, but it hasn’t authenticated using a password or other method, so perhaps that portion isn’t finished? I’ll circle back around to it later when I do a free trial. I do notice that Brian, the developer of the project, has an account on pine.blog which is mirrored on one of his subdomains running WordPress. Quirkily I’ve noticed that the header on his main website changes to alternately serve the pine.blog version and the WordPress version!
More to come as I continue exploring… Later on I’ll take a look at some of their paid functionality, but for now, it’s a pretty compelling set of features and some well-laid out user interface to start. I look forward to seeing how it continues to evolve.
The session highlights one of the communities’ ongoing struggles is to help to define itself simply to a tremendously large group of people from different backgrounds and wealths of experiences. The community has build a massive Wiki of resources, tools, ideas, definitions, and brainstorming that can at times seem impenetrable to the newcomer. Simplifying and breaking things down into smaller constituent parts may be a helpful exercise.
Toward that end, as another potential entry-point to the community, I’ve created a page called IndieWeb Questions that aggregates and attempts to quickly answer the common Who, What, Why, How, When, Where questions about the IndieWeb and provide a range of low-level jumping off points to highlight further information, before attempting to provide more specific technical information.
I’d like to invite those who participated in the session yesterday, others in the community, and especially those who may be new to the community to contribute to the page or point out parts that they may find difficult to understand or confusing. If you can’t log into the wiki to do so (yet), feel free to join the chat and add your commentary there or post on your site of choice.
I’d also specifically challenge people to write essays (preferably on their own sites) about what the IndieWeb is to them, how they define it personally, and what they’d like to see in the future and post it in the Articles section of this new page. A diversity of perspectives here may be helpful in welcoming the broadest diversity of people into the community in the future.
As ever, I expect the idea of IndieWeb to mean something slightly different to everyone the same way that they’ll approach it with different technical abilities and personal preferences. Hopefully in the end, the playing field will level out for everyone and we’ll all just think of it as “using and being on the web”.
What if local newspapers/magazines or other traditional local publishers ran/operated/maintained IndieWeb platforms or hubs (similar to micro.blog, Multi-site WordPress installs, or Mastodon instances) to not only publish, aggregate, curate, and disseminate their local area news, but also provided that social media service for their customers?
Reasonable mass hosting can be done for about $2/month which could be bundled in with regular subscription prices of newspapers. This would solve some of the problems that people face with social media presences on services like Facebook and Twitter while simultaneously solving the problem of newspapers and journalistic enterprises owning and managing their own distribution. It would also give a tighter coupling between journalistic enterprises and the communities they serve.
The decentralization of the process here could also serve to prevent the much larger attack surfaces that global systems like Twitter and Facebook represent from being disinformation targets for hostile governments or hate groups. Tighter community involvement could be a side benefit for local discovery, aggregation, and interaction.
Many journalistic groups are already building and/or maintaining their own websites, why not go a half-step further. Additionally many large newspaper conglomerates have recently been building their own custom CMS platforms not only for their own work, but also to sell to other smaller news organizations that may not have the time or technical expertise to manage them.
A similar idea is that of local government doing this sort of building/hosting and Greg McVerry and I have discussed this being done by local libraries. While this is a laudable idea, I think that the alignment of benefits between customers and newspapers as well as the potential competition put into place could be a bigger beneficial benefit to all sides.
Featured photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash
To put the cherry on top of the dessert, I’ve created a PESOS workflow that uses my Untappd RSS feed to import future posts into my site automatically using webhooks to my Micropub endpoint. I still need to do a bit of testing and see if I can figure out if there is an mf2 prefix I should be adding to tell Post Kinds that the post is a “drink”. I suspect there isn’t since they don’t really have a microformat associated with them.
Maybe off in the future I’ll tweak the presentation of my drink posts to differentiate between coffee/tea, cocktails, beer, and other generic drinks so that I can have custom per-type icons that match up with the drink types. Maybe I can do it the same sort of way that the Post Kinds plugin has the ability to differentiate Read posts with small differences to indicate “want to read”, “reading”, and “finished”? Though honestly that type of data differentiation may be more trouble than it’s worth, particularly since I’m reading much more often than I drink.
I’ll also want to take a closer look at the IndieWeb wiki for both Untappd and drink/food posts and some other examples before deciding on anything too specific.
Featured image from page 75 of “The human body and health : an elementary text-book of essential anatomy, applied physiology and practical hygiene for schools” (1908) flickr photo by Internet Archive Book Images shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons)
Stop giving away your work to people who don't care about it. Host it yourself. Distribute it via methods you control. Build your audience deliberately and on your own terms.
Be in charge of the relationship with your audience.
Deliver value and then ask for money. Avoid unnecessary middlemen.
Reminds me a bit of Kevin Marks’ experiment Decaying Silos as Dead Malls, though I’ll have to see if this site went to the extremes that Kevin did.
Makes me think I should do something similar when I syndicate my content to social silos? Hmmm….
I’m hoping now that I’ve cut the cord, I’ll be able to use my various feed readers to watch and stream more video content.
It’s amazing how many inactive channels I was following.
Special thanks to Martijn van der Ven who had done some great research on YouTube Atom feeds and OPML and created documentation on the IndieWeb wiki YouTube page.
