Reply | Chris Aldrich

Replied to The IndieWeb and Webmentions by

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a while back I added a nifty feature to posts on this site which displays activity from Twitter and Mastodon (likes, retweets, replies) on each post. In most cases, more responses to my work happen on social media...

Be careful, because Webmention also means you’ll get responses from other websites too! Congratulations and welcome to the new world. I’ve added a link to your article to the IndieWeb Jekyll page which has some other useful resources too.

Read How I did a Twitter giveaway, got 10K+ new followers and discovered you can hack most giveaways to win them (levels.io)

It was almost New Year's Eve and I wanted to do something special on Twitter. I had 69,800 followers and because I admittedly am an imperfect and superficial human addicted to vanity metrics, I wanted to get to 70,000 followers before midnight and it becoming 2020. To celebrate

My friend Marc again to the rescue. He suggested that since there was 10,000+ people RT’ing and following, I could just pick a random follower from my current total follower list (78,000 at this point), then go to their profile to check if they RT’d it and see. If they didn’t, get another random follower and repeat, until you find someone. With 78,000 followers this should take about ~8 tries. ❧

Technically he said it would be random among those who retweeted, but he’s chosen a much smaller subset of people who are BOTH following him and who retweeted it. Oops!
Annotated on January 13, 2020 at 01:10PM

So, based on your write up it sounds like you’re saying that if one retweeted, but wasn’t following you, one had no chance of winning. This means a few thousand people still got lost in the shuffle. Keep in mind that some states have laws regarding lotteries, giveaways, games like this. Hopefully they don’t apply to you or your jurisdiction.

Read Converting Webmentions to Push Notifications by

Jamie Tanna (jvt.me)

Automagically sending push notifications to my mobile phone when I receive a Webmention.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but this seems like a nice real-time feature. Since I have an RSS feed for comments on my website, I’ve just thrown that into IFTTT with workflow that takes new feed items and then sends me a Pushbullet notification.

Replied to a tweet by

curried apotheosis (Twitter)

A frequently recurring product wish I have when interacting with issue trackers: labels that I can add to issues, and only I can see.

They're for my organization and tagging. That's it.

Not going beyond "me" is a *feature*.
— curried apotheosis (@warpfork) January 8, 2020

I do something like this on my own website. Post issues there so I can own the data (and tags) and control the details and notes and syndicate a copy to GitHub. I’ve documented some of it here: Enabling two way communication with WordPress and GitHub for Issues. Others have done it as well: https://indieweb.org/issue. I’m sure there are other ways of doing this, but it works well for me and just for the reasons you describe.

If others want to see my details, the’re available on my site (when I make them public), but they’re primarily for my benefit and not others. The public copy conforms to the silo’s requirements and can be modified by the repo owners, if necessary.

Bookmarked at 2020/01/10 9:51:41 pm

Read We're closing Crosscut's comment section. Here's why — and what's next by Ana Sofia Knauf, Anne Christnovich, Mohammed Kloub (crosscut.com)

With the rise of social platforms and an uptick in threatening comments, the newsroom is taking reader engagement in a different direction.

We analyzed our Disqus data and we found that roughly 17,400 comments were made on our site in 2019, but 45% came from just 13 people. That data tells us that social media, email, phone calls, letters to the editor, our Crosscut events and an occasional visit to the newsroom are far better tools for us to hear about your concerns, story ideas, feedback and support.❧

The Disqus data statistics here are fascinating. It also roughly means that those 13 people were responsible for 600+ comments on average or roughly 2 a day every day for the year. More likely it was a just a handful responsible for the largest portion and the others tailing off.

Sadly missing are their data about social media, email, phone, and letters to the editor which would tell us more about how balanced their decision was. What were the totals for these and who were they? Were they as lopsided as the Disqus numbers?
Annotated on January 08, 2020 at 04:33PM

In the meantime, stay in touch with Crosscut by:
Liking us on Facebook
Following us on Twitter
Following us on Instagram
Chatting with us on Reddit
Signing up for one (or all) of our newsletters ❧

It seems like they’ve chose a solution for their community that boils down to pushing the problem(s) off onto large corporations that have shown no serious efforts at moderation either?

Sweeping the problem under the rug doesn’t seem like a good long term answer. Without aggregating their community’s responses, are they really serving their readers? How is the community to know what it looks like? Where is it reflected? How can the paper better help to shape the community without it?

I wonder what a moderated IndieWeb solution for them might look like?
Annotated on January 08, 2020 at 04:42PM

It would be cool if they considered adding syndication links to their original articles so that when they crosspost them to social media, at least their readers could choose to follow those links and comment there in a relatively continuous thread. This would at least help to aggregate the conversation for them and their community while still off-loading the moderation burden from their staff, which surely is part of their calculus. It looks like their site is built on Drupal. I would suspect that–but I’m not sure if–swentel’s IndieWeb Drupal module has syndication links functionality built into it.

Rather than engaging their community, it almost feels to me like they’re giving up and are allowing a tragedy of their commons when there may be some better experimental answers that just aren’t being tried out.

The worst part of this for me though is that they’ve given up on the power of owning and controlling their own platform. In the recent history of journalism, this seems to be the quickest way of becoming irrelevant and dying out.

Replied to a tweet by

Tournez à gauche | alt-wrong (Twitter)

“So, RSS fans, particularly those who wish google hadn't shuttered reader: what would you pay to have it back as an indieweb project?”

I’d definitely go up to the $75/year range for a solid full-featured reader like Feedly or Inoreader but that included Micropub and Microsub infrastructure. (See also Using Inoreader as an IndieWeb feed reader.)

Looking at the current responses it seems like most respondents don’t have a very solid conceptualization of how to define “indieweb”. Almost none of the products mentioned in your thread are IndieWeb from my perspective. Most of them are corporately owned data silos.

I have to admit that getting me to switch would be pretty hard, it would need to be worth the hassle of switching (losing read status and old articles history, missing apps/integrations), given that I understand feed wrangler to be indieweb. Good luck if you decide to go ahead!

— Jean Hominal (@jhominal) December 30, 2019

To me IndieWeb needs to have a focus on allowing the user to keep and own big portions of their data. Things like read status and old articles history should be owned by the user and not by a third party. Readers that do this are just as bad as Google Reader which took that data down when they closed.

If you’re using the IndieWeb.org definition of a reader, would you be considering building a Microsub server, Microsub client, or both?

Liked a tweet by

Matt Maldre (Twitter)

I love love love Instapaper. I should pay for premium. But I don’t like that all my highlights and notes get locked up in their proprietary system.

Right now, I save all my Instapaper articles to PDF and make my highlights/marginalia in the PDF. I get to keep it.
— Matt Maldre (@mattmaldre) December 30, 2019