Read | Chris Aldrich

👓 Farewell Social Media | James Shelley

James Shelley (jamesshelley.com)

I recently purged the data from my Facebook account. This effort was shockingly labour intensive: it took a browser script all weekend to crunch, and still many aspects of the process required manual execution. Torching years and years of old Facebook activity felt so liberating that I found another...

A short, but solid piece on why James has left social media and consciously moved to his own blog and feed reader. I’m curious what his thoughts are a bit on into his experience. He’s definitely worth a follow.

Read Why You Should Never Pay For Podcast Hosting by

Nir Zicherman (Medium)

Thanks to modern cloud services, the cost of storing and serving content on the internet is incredibly cheap in 2018. With a podcasting platform like Anchor, there is no need for podcasters to pay anymore. So why are traditional podcast companies still charging creators to host files like it’s 2008?

He’s definitely got a major business behind this pitch, and he’s pitching people awfully hard to get them to give away all of their data for a “free” product. There’s the old adage though, “when the product is free, you’re the product.”

I’ve had friends online who’ve noted that this is at least the third time that Anchor.fm has “pivoted”, always seemingly to a larger and larger audience. I find myself wondering when the company is going to finally eat itself? Given that their product seems to change every six months or so, I also wonder if they last another 6 months?

Apparently he’s so bought into the idea of not owning your own data, that at least he’s posting this on one of the worst social silos out there. Just give it all away.

👓 Feeds and Gardens | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Read Feeds and Gardens by

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)

My last post, Connections, gathered a fair bit of response — enough that you can see a good example of Webmentions in action below it. There’s a little back-and-forth discussion there that mostly took place on Twitter, as well as a lot of likes and mentions that came from there as well.

👓 You’re Not Cool Enough For Micro.blog | Greg Morris

Read You’re Not Cool Enough For Micro.blog by Greg Morris (Greg Morris)

It’s become a bit of a running joke amongst my tech friends. A personal meme that I keep repeating the same sort of phase when questioned about a whole range of topics. Anything from GDPR to Social Media harassment my answer – micro.blog. Many people don’t understand. I’ve tried and failed t...

Micro.blog can certainly be many things to many people–possibly too many. In large part, what it is depends on what tools you’re bringing into it and how you’d like to use it.

It can be:

a web host
a Twitter replacement
a Twitter client that allows you to own your own data
a Instagram replacement
a microcasting platform
a full blogging platform
a new, well-curated community with a strong code of conduct
a customized feed reader for a new community
a syndication platform for one’s personal blog
a low barrier entryway to having your own IndieWeb-capable blog on your own domain.
a first class IndieWeb citizen with support for multiple types of posts, IndieAuth, Webmention, Micropub, and Microsub.

Because I already have my own domain, my own hosting, and my own website, I personally use it to syndicate my content into an interesting community of individuals which I’d like to engage. I use the main interface as a feed reader to see what others are up to and to communicate with them directly. My site supports Webmention so comments to my posts on micro.blog come right back to my site and provide me notifications there.

Perhaps micro.blog ought to make a chart for a variety of potential users to indicate what they would potentially be bringing with them and then have an indicator what they might use it for with those particular tools? Because of the arrays of technologies that micro.blog supports, it’s far from a simple marketing problem, particularly to a non-technical crowd. You certainly can’t say it’s “just” a Twitter replacement because Twitter only supports a small fraction of what micro.blog is capable.

👓 Giving Up On IndieWeb | Glenn 2.0

Read Giving Up On IndieWeb by

Glenn Dixon (glenn.thedixons.net)

(Further update: webmentions are working!!!) (UPDATE: It’s now been a year since I first posted this. Just today I discovered a year-old blog post which mentioned this one, and an ensuing discussion. Of course I knew nothing of this because – well, I couldn’t get webmentions to work! I have ...

👓 Why I Needed to Pull Back From Twitter | Maggie Haberman

Read Why I Needed to Pull Back From Twitter by Maggie Haberman (nytimes.com)

The viciousness, toxic partisan anger and intellectual dishonesty are at all-time highs.

👓 Connections | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Replied to Connections by Kathleen Fitzpatrick (kfitz.info)

There are still some wrinkles to be ironed out in getting the various platforms we use today to play well with Webmentions, but it’s a real step toward the goal of that decentralized, distributed, interconnected future for scholarly communication. ❧

...the upshot is that this relatively new web standard allows for round-tripped connections among discrete domains, enabling the conversation about an individual post to be represented on that post, wherever it might actually take place. ❧

The fun, secret part is that Kathleen hasn’t (yet?) discovered IndieAuth so that she can authenticate/authorize micropub clients like Quill to publish content to her own site from various clients by means of a potential micropub endpoint.

I’ll suspect she’ll be even more impressed when she realizes that there’s a forthcoming wave of feed readers^1,2 that will allow her to read others’ content in a reader which has an integrated micropub client in it so that she can reply to posts directly in her feed reader, then the responses get posted directly to her own website which then, in turn, send webmentions to the sites she’s responding to so that the conversational loop can be completely closed.

She and Lee will also be glad to know that work has already started on private posts and conversations and posting to limited audiences as well. Eventually there will be no functionality that a social web site/silo can do that a distributed set of independent sites can’t. There’s certainly work to be done to round off the edges, but we’re getting closer and closer every day.

I know how it all works, but even I’m (still) impressed at the apparent magic that allows round-trip conversations between her website and Twitter and Micro.blog. And she hasn’t really delved into website to website conversations yet. I suppose we’ll have to help IndieWebify some of her colleague’s web presences to make that portion easier. Suddenly “academic Twitter” will be the “academic blogosphere” she misses from not too many years ago. 🙂

If there are academics out thee who are interested in what Kathleen has done, but may need a little technical help, I’m happy to set up some tools for them to get them started. (We’re also hosing occasional Homebrew Website Clubs, including a virtual one this coming week, which people are welcome to join.)

References

Aldrich C. Feed reader revolution: it’s time to embrace open & disrupt social media. BoffoSocko. https://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/. Published June 9, 2017. Accessed July 20, 2018.

Parecki A. Building an IndieWeb Reader. Aaron Parecki. https://aaronparecki.com/2018/03/12/17/building-an-indieweb-reader. Published March 21, 2018. Accessed July 20, 2018.