Category: IndieWeb

An IndieWeb Podcast: Episode 2 “IndieAuth”

Episode 2: IndieAuth

Summary: At long last, after about three weeks worth of work, David Shanske (along with help from Aaron Parecki) has added the ability for the IndieAuth plugin for WordPress to provide an IndieAuth endpoint for self-hosted versions of WordPress, but it also has the ability to provision and revoke tokens.

This week, David Shanske and I discuss IndieAuth and the WordPress plugin’s new functionality as well as some related micropub work David has been doing. To some extent, I alternate between acting innocent and serving as devil’s advocate as we try to tease out some of the subtleties of what IndieAuth is and what it means to the average user. As usual, David does an excellent job of navigating what can be some complicated territory.

 
Huffduff this Episode

Show Notes

Related IndieWeb Wiki Pages

Micropub Apps Mentioned in the episode

Closing discussion on IndieWeb Readers and Microsub Pieces

More Resources

If you need more IndieWeb content, guidance, or even help, an embarrassment of riches can be found on the IndieWeb wiki, including the following resources:

👓 Wrapping My Head Around Micro.blog and IndieWeb | Jason Sadler

Read Wrapping My Head Around Micro.blog and IndieWeb by Jason Sadler (sadlerjw.com)
After the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica catastrophe and recent Twitter news (and retraction) about support for 3rd party clients, I found myself wondering about Micro.blog again, after hearing about it on Kickstarter a little over a year ago. On the surface, it’s an indie Twitter-like app, in th...

An IndieWeb Podcast: Episode 1 “Leaving Facebook”

Episode 1 Leaving Facebook
This first half of the episode was originally recorded in March, abruptly ended, and then was not completed until April due to scheduling.

It’s been reported that Cambridge Analytica has improperly taken and used data from Facebook users in an improper manner, an event which has called into question the way that Facebook handles data. David Shanske and I discuss some of the implications from an IndieWeb perspective and where you might go if you decide to leave Facebook.

Show Notes

Articles

The originating articles that kicked off the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica issue:

Related articles and pages

Recent Documented Facebook Quitters

Jonathan LaCour, Eddie Hinkle, Natalie Wolchover, Cher, Tea Leoni, Adam McKay, Leo Laporte,and Jim Carrey

New York Times Profile of multiple quitters: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/technology/users-abandon-facebook.html

IndieWeb Wiki related pages of interest

Potential places to move to when leaving Facebook

You’ve made the decision to leave Facebook? Your next question is likely to be: to move where? Along with the links above, we’ve compiled a short list of IndieWeb-related places that might make solid options.

Today I updated the IndieAuth plugin for WordPress, and I can now use my own website as an IndieAuth authorization endpoint (including provisioning and revoking tokens) for a multitude of things including a huge number of micropub clients.

Special thanks to David Shanske and Aaron Parecki for all their work in getting this to happen!

👓 IndieAuth for WordPress | David Shanske

Read IndieAuth for WordPress by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (David Shanske)
Part of my own project for this week, while taking off for the holiday, was to complete work on an Indieauth endpoint for WordPress.

IndieAuth is layer on top of OAuth 2.0, a standard that grants websites or applications access to their information on other websites but without providing passwords.

OAuth is already being used by a variety of services…Login with Facebook or Login with Google options on sites are usually OAuth based. The difference is that for IndieAuth, users and clients are all represented by URLs.
This is awesome! I can’t wait to use my own website to authenticate myself.

IndieWeb Journalism in the Wild

I noticed a few days ago that professor and writer John Naughton not only has his own website but that he’s posting both his own content to it as well as (excerpted) content he’s writing for other journalistic outlets, lately in his case for The Guardian. This is awesome for so many reasons. The primary reason is that I can follow him via his own site and get not only his personally posted content, which informs his longer pieces, but I don’t need to follow him in multiple locations to get the “firehose” of everything he’s writing and thinking about. While The Guardian and The Observer are great, perhaps I don’t want to filter through multiple hundreds of articles to find his particular content or potentially risk missing it?  What if he was writing for 5 or more other outlets? Then I’d need to delve in deeper still and carry a multitude of subscriptions and their attendant notifications to get something that should rightly emanate from one location–him! While he may not be posting his status updates or Tweets to his own website first–as I do–I’m at least able to get the best and richest of his content in one place. Additionally, the way he’s got things set up, The Guardian and others are still getting the clicks (for advertising sake) while I still get the simple notifications I’d like to have so I’m not missing what he writes.

His site certainly provides an interesting example of either POSSE or PESOS in the wild, particularly from an IndieWeb for Journalism or even an IndieWeb for Education perspective. I suspect his article posts occur on the particular outlet first and he’s excerpting them with a link to that “original”. (Example: A post on his site with a link to a copy on The Guardian.) I’m not sure whether he’s (ideally) physically archiving the full post there on his site (and hiding it privately as both a personal and professional portfolio of sorts) or if they’re all there on the respective pages, but just hidden behind the “read more” button he’s providing. I will note that his WordPress install is giving a rel=”canonical“ link to itself rather than the version at The Guardian, which also has a rel=”canonical” link on it. I’m curious to take a look at how Google indexes and ranks the two pages as a result.

In any case, this is a generally brilliant set up for any researcher, professor, journalist, or other stripe of writer for providing online content, particularly when they may be writing for a multitude of outlets.

I’ll also note that I appreciate the ways in which it seems he’s using his website almost as a commonplace book. This provides further depth into his ideas and thoughts to see what sources are informing and underlying his other writing.

Alas, if only the rest of the world used the web this way…

👓 Indigenous for Android | realize.be

Read a post by swentelswentel (realize.be)
Introducing Indigenous for Android, supporting micropub and microsub - sign up for testing if you're interested! https://realize.be/blog/indigenous-android #indigenous #indieweb #drupal #android

👓 All my Instagrams are MINE | Spitot Design

Read All my Instagrams are MINE by Bryan Hoffman (Spigot Design)
There was a time in the early days of social media that I signed up for every service that came out. The username @spigot is mine across most services you can find. By the time Instagram started, I’d started to grow weary and standoffish to new services. I’m sure you know what I mean. So I held ...

👓 Apps of a Feather

Read Apps of a Feather …Stick Together (Apps of a Feather)
Third-party Twitter apps are going to break on June 19th, 2018.

After June 19th, 2018, “streaming services” at Twitter will be removed. This means two things for third-party apps:
  1. Push notifications will no longer arrive
  2. Timelines won’t refresh automatically
If you use an app like Talon, Tweetbot, Tweetings, or Twitterrific, there is no way for its developer to fix these issues.

We are incredibly eager to update our apps. However, despite many requests for clarification and guidance, Twitter has not provided a way for us to recreate the lost functionality. We've been waiting for more than a year.
Twitter seems to finally be closing off the remainder of their open API that allowed full-fledged Twitter clients to still exist. This certainly creates a chilling effect in the future on developers spending any time or resources on projects like it that aren’t completely open. This also makes it much harder to build competing services to Twitter which have a similar financial model. I remember the heady days when there were dozens of awesome Twitter clients to chose from and interesting new things were happening in the social space.

If I was sitting on a huge pile of Twitter related code with a full set of Twitter related reading/posting functionality, I think I’d head toward some of the new open protocols coming out of the IndieWeb to build a new user base. By supporting feeds like RSS, ATOM, JSON feed, and even h-feed (possibly via Microsub) for the feed reader portion and building in the open Micropub spec, one could rejuvenate old Twitter apps to work with a myriad of microblog-like (and even traditional blog) functionality on platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Craft, WithKnown, Jekyll, Kirby, Hugo, micro.blog, and a myriad of others in the future. Suddenly all those old Twitter apps could rise from the ashes and invigorate a new, more open community. Given the open “architecture” of the community, it would give developers much more direct control of both their software and futures than Twitter has ever given them as well as a deeper sense of impact while simultaneously eating a nice portion of Twitter’s lunch. With less than a week’s worth of work, I suspect that many of these old apps could have new and more fruitful lives than the scraps they were getting before.

If the bird site doesn’t heed their cries, I hope they’ll all re-purpose their code and support the open web so that their hard work and efforts aren’t completely lost.

🎧 This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition March 24th – 30th, 2018

Listened to This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition • March 24th - 30th, 2018 by Marty McGuireMarty McGuire from martymcgui.re
Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for March 24th - 30th, 2018.

You can find all of my audio editions and subscribe with your favorite podcast app here: martymcgui.re/podcasts/indieweb/.

Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 85 - Suit, Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11



The phrase "free as in facebook", may be making a comeback. Coined by Enrico Zini on his blog in 2015 to describe a captive wifi portal that requested personal information before giving access to the internet, it can be generalized to describe any service offered without charge in exchange for behavioral tracking, ongoing surveillance, or other monitoring, along with sale of any such information to third parties.

Angèle Christin, an assistant professor of communication at Stanford, published a study in The American Journal of Sociology exploring how real-time analytics such as click tracking affected journalists in two newsrooms, one in the U.S. and one in France. Christin explains that focusing on "clicks" certainly leads to clickbait stories about cats and celebrities, but notes that different journalists have different reasons for adapting their writing to increase clicks. [1]

Add Twitter mentions of #DoOO to one of IndieWeb chat channels

Filed an Issue Loqi (GitHub)
Loqi is a friendly IRC bot https://indieweb.org/Loqi
The #DoOO (Domain of One’s Own) hashtag on Twitter is essentially an equivalent of the #IndieWeb hashtag, but more often used by the education segment of the community. While used by educators and researchers, particularly in higher education, their content typically isn’t restricted to that sub-segment and thus are broadly applicable to our overall principles. Many using the hashtag are administrators, developers, and evangelists overseeing large installations to help Gen2+ people join the IndieWeb at scale.

Adding tweets to one of the channels (#indieweb or ) could certainly make sense for the community and be a welcoming addition to those joining us from the education related communities, many of whom have attended past IWCs or are actively participating already.

Current hashtag frequency is roughly 1-3 tweets per day, though for related conferences, their velocity can go higher on a particular day. Higher velocity days likely only occur 1-3 days per year.

🔖 Génération IndieWeb 4 et domaines hébergés | xtof

Bookmarked Génération IndieWeb 4 et domaines hébergés by xtof (xtof.micro.blog)
Why join us on Micro.blog?
Because there is too little French on the indieweb! And that Micro.blog is a great way to get started easily on the IndieWeb regardless of your generation.

Français

Une jolie traduction en français de la post IndieWeb génération 4 et des domaines hébergés de Manton Reece avec quelques réflexions supplémentaires sur l’utilisation de micro.blog en tant que plateforme alimentée par IndieWeb.

Si vous parlez français, rejoignez Christophe Ducamp (micro.blog) et d’autres dans la communauté IndieWeb et sur micro.blog.

English

A nice French translation of Manton Reece’s post IndieWeb generation 4 and hosted domains followed by some additional thoughts on using micro.blog as an IndieWeb powered platform.

If you speak French, do join Christophe Ducamp (micro.blog) and others in the IndieWeb community and on micro.blog.​​​​​​​​

🔖 IndieWeb Module for Drupal

Bookmarked IndieWeb Module for Drupal by Kristof De Jaeger (Drupal.org)
Integrates the philosophy of Indieweb in your Drupal website.
For more information about indieweb, see https://indieweb.org/.

Current functionality:
  • Receive webmentions and pingbacks via Webmention.io
  • Publish content etc via bridg.y, store syndications
  • Microformats for content and images
  • IndieAuth and Authentication API
  • Micropub for creating content etc
  • Creating comments from 'in-reply-to'
  • Microsub link exposing
This is only the tip of the iceberg and much more functionality will be added.
More extensive documentation is in the README file and on the configuration screens.

To install
  • composer require indieweb/mention-client in the root of your Drupal installation.
  • go to admin/modules and toggle 'Indieweb' to enable the module.
  • go to admin/config/services/indieweb and start configuring.
Currently development is happening on Github at https://github.com/swentel/indieweb and is synced back for bug fixes and releases. Create issues on Github.
This looks like a tremendous step forward for folks who want to join the IndieWeb via Drupal. Kudos to Kristof De Jaeger for some fantastic looking work.​​​​​​​​
Replied to a tweet by Heather SearsHeather Sears (Twitter)
4. I signed up for a pilot account immediately. There were a host of apps to experiment with. I was particularly delighted to hear that I’d finally have institutional space and easy to use WordPress to run #10DoT https://10daysoftwitter.wordpress.com/ #pressedconf18
I’ve done something similar to #10DoT for independent authors before to promote their books, but it could also be an interesting model for helping people to set up #IndieWeb or #DoOO websites as well.

The underlying idea is also reminiscent of some strong advice to a beginner I saw in the IndieWeb chat last week: “Start small, then make incremental steps. Don’t eat the whale all at once.” – Scott Merrill

And then, just as I’m about to make this post and syndicate it out, I notice that Taylor Jaydin is doing something similar as an in-person laboratory for their project:

This Open Domains Lab sounds very similar in nature to the long-running Homebrew Website Club concept.  It makes me wonder if we couldn’t help to better dovetail some of the IndieWeb and DoOO communities’ efforts? Perhaps we could utilize pieces of the IndieWeb wiki like IndieWeb for Education, DoOO, or similar pages. Perhaps the IndieWeb community might consider sucking the hashtag into the chat there as well? If Taylor is open to it, perhaps it’s worth listing their Open Domains Lab on the IndieWeb wiki’s schedule of upcoming events? They might also use the IndieWeb chat functionality for the virtual portion of their program to increase interaction. I’d certainly welcome them to have interested parties stop by on either the wiki or via the simple-to-use webchat 24/7 if they need help, resources, or motivation of any kind.

Incidentally, I’ll note that Taylor very naturally POSSEd a copy of the post from his own website to https://knight.domains/thinkdeeper/open-domains-lab/ as well.

📺 Zeynep Tufekci: We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | TED

Watched We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads by Zeynep TufekciZeynep Tufekci from ted.com

We're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us -- and what we can do in response.