reply | Chris Aldrich

Replied to thread by

Abide the Twin Damnation (@tindall@cybre.space) (Cybrespace)

communities disappearing from self-hosted forums and even Livejournal to places like Tumblr and Twitter, and to a lesser extent Reddit, was a move from spaces we controlled to spaces designed to control us

of course, this happened for good reasons - accessibility first and foremost. it allowed many new communities to form, too. if we want to have control, we need to ensure access too.

phpBB is terrible but it does what it wants to do. same with Discourse, though some design decisions are... odd. mastodon, on the other hand, does _not_ do what it tries to do - build communities around microblogging

what we need is to build federated forum software with two-way syndication - accessible from the Fediverse, from Twitter, from Tumblr, even from IM platforms.

for example - these posts syndicate to Twitter, but comments don't syndicate back, which means I have to maintain a real presence there.

If you like, you could use Brid.gy to get comments and reactions back from Twitter with Webmention support for your site. I’ve outlined some of it for how I’m doing it on WordPress, but the idea is very adaptable for any website out there, and there’s a growing list of pre-existing code one could leverage.

(Hint: this also works for other common social platforms which Bridgy supports. As examples, I’ve got two-way communication set up between my site and Github and Mastodon just to name a few, so I don’t need to actively visit those sites on a regular basis. I pipe most of the content into a social reader like Monocle or Indigenous and reply directly from there.)

Webmention can be used as some of the community glue for things you’ve mentioned in your thread as well. As an example, I can post on my website and syndicate that content to IndieWeb.xyz (using Webmention) where others can discover it (perhaps by category) and interact with it using their own websites. If they have Webmention support as well we can have a site to site conversation that could potentially all be mirrored on IndieWeb.xyz which acts as a conversation and discovery hub.

This ecosystem is slowly growing and flourishing, but we still need work on making it all easier and more accessible as well as helping to guard against potential abuses and bad actors to make things safer for bigger public communities at scale. (I notice you’ve got a great site, that touches on and covers some of these topics like security and identity.)

Replied to a tweet by Dan York (Twitter)

@ambrwlsn90 - Thanks for writing that post. A question - how does Webmentions deal with spammers trying to add links to your posts? That was historically the big problem we wound up with both pingbacks and before that trackbacks.
— Dan York (@danyork) January 31, 2021

Dan, since you’re in the WordPress space, there are several pieces in place there. Akismet and other anti-spam tools can still be used to filter webmentions just like any other comment/response on your site.

If you moderate your responses on your site, the webmention plugin has an “approve & always allow” function as well as domain allow-listing for people you know and trust.

It also bears saying: there’s also nothing that says you have to display webmentions on your site either, you can use them simply as notifications on your back end.

In my experience, I’ve also seen people strip active links, scripts, etc. out of their received webmentions as a security precaution. I believe that the WordPress suite of IndieWeb plugins does this by default.

If you need/want to go further, you could work on implementing the Vouch extension of Webmention. Any additional ideas or brainstorming you’ve got to help mitigate these sorts of harms is most welcome.

For the record, for Webmention to work as a protocol, it requires a link to your site to actually appear on a public web page–something neither trackback/pingback required and made them even easier/cheaper to game.

Replied to What I want from a GLAM/Cultural Heritage Data Science Network by

Jez Cope (erambler.co.uk)

As I mentioned last year, I was awarded a Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship to pursue the project of setting up a Cultural Heritage/GLAM data science network. Obviously, the global pandemic has forced a re-think of many plans and this is no exception, so I’m coming back to reflect on it and make sure I’m clear about the core goals so that everything else still moves in the right direction.

It warms my heart to see another person in the education/library space using Webmention on their site. Even more so when I think that Jez Cope is doing so while starting to build an online community. Being able to communicate from website-to-website this way while also being able to reach out to people who choose to use Twitter or Mastodon is a very powerful thing to see and is an incredible example within the Education, Domain of One’s Own, and Library Carpentry spaces.

So much of the tone of this piece has not only an IndieWeb feel, but also sounds like it could benefit from some of the organizational structure that I’ve seen the IndieWeb employ, particularly small scale events and collaborations I’ve seen at Homebrew Website Clubs. This may help to

“Organise less-formal learning and sharing events to complement the more formal training already available within organisations and the wider sector, including “show and tell” sessions, panel discussions, code cafés, masterclasses, guest speakers, reading/study groups, co-working sessions, …”

Replied to a tweet by Roam Hacker (Twitter)

I made good progress on my @hypothes_is SmartBlocks. Hoping to start testing soon. Current functionality:

1) Given an article, pull back all your annotations into blocks.
2) Given a date, return all annotations made from that date into blocks.

Any other needs? #roamcult
— RoamHacker ((roam42.com)) (@roamhacker) January 17, 2021

I’m watching this with high hopes something similar would work with @obsdmd. Come to think if it, if such an app were a Micropub client and these platforms all supported publishing via Micropub, then the one application would work across more platforms.

Replied to Bookish, Chapter Type Theme by

cogdog (Reclaim Hosting Community)

I’ve recently rescued the formatted version of my 1986 MS thesis (originally in Mac Word 3.0 files on floppy disks) with plans to publish in my domain. I know most people will just say “do Pressbooks” but I want my own site/theme w/o all that overhead. If anyone has a suggestion for a good clean WP theme for creating content organized into Chapters, let me know. Or maybe I should be doing in some kind of static generator.

Alan,

Did I hear someone whisper “Book SPLOT”?!

There are a few examples of this sort of publishing pattern at https://indieweb.org/academic_samizdat and https://indieweb.org/book that use a variety of technologies.

The easiest method is obviously to publish a .pdf copy and simply link it. If you have a text version of it and want .epub or .mobi files for e-readers I’ve got infrastructure for converting text into those I could put into service for you. I’ve done it in the past for Stommel and Morris’s Urgency of Teachers. (I have a small publishing house on the side and can help you out with ISBN numbers for much cheaper than usual if you like.)

@kfitz has done it a few times during the process of writing and subsequently publishing books, so she may have ideas/opinions. If I’m not mistaken, she used CommentPress, so that may be most comfortable for you from within the WordPress world.

Jeremy Keith has an awesome example at https://resilientwebdesign.com/ and if you pinged him, he may have a flat html file “shell” that you could cut and paste into. (Or you could view source and manually get the same result.)

Amy Guy’s example on Github which she published using Github Pages is nice and could make a fun little project for you as well.

It would be so much nicer if there were a one click install of PressBooks, but I’ve quit holding my breath on that front. (Maybe it’s a future possibility for Reclaim Cloud though???)

Replied to IndieWeb is Too Complicated for It’s Own Good by

Kevin Tracy (Kevin Tracy)

Evan Stoner has an incredibly well written (and very to-the-point) article about IndieWeb up on his site that needs more attention. As I mentioned last year, I’ve been playing around with int…

Kevin, I understand a lot of the complications for attempting to set up an IndieWeb site for a static site generator like Evan. A lot of IndieWeb tech is harder to do with SSG’s since a lot of the functionality is anything but static—yet it still works. Hopefully the small handful of plugins for WordPress are much easier, particularly for someone as adept as you. I’ll admit there’s a microformats issue for dovetailing WordPress themes properly, but that should only get better with time. We could definitely use some developers and designers to help lighten the load to make it easier for everyone. Some platforms like WithKnown have it all out of the box while Drupal and WordPress have either one or a several plugins. Evan’s set up is about as complicated as they could come.

Since you mention some of your problems, a few things you might appreciate for making your own personal use easier for WordPress are the large number of Micropub clients you could be using to post to your website. They’re way easier than dealing with the Classic editor, Gutenberg, or the mobile interface. I really enjoy using Quill and Omnibear (a browser extension) myself, but for food you might enjoy Teacup and for memes there’s Kapowski. If you want a crash-course on micropub for a non-developer, I did a WordCamp session on it a while back. Since most of them are open source, I’d imagine with your experience, if necessary, you could modify them to suit your specific needs without a lot of work.

If you want to go a step further, you could set up a social reader for subscribing to and reading other sites as well as using their built in micropub functionality to reply to posts directly from your reader.

You’re right that the ecosystem does seem overly-complicated on first view, but it’s taken almost a decade of work by hundreds and thousands of people to attempt to make a set of standards that are as simple as possible for building into almost any platform out there. Further work will only serve to make things even easier and more usable over time.

Of course if one wants an easier solution (especially for the completely non-technical person who is looking for a Twitter-like replacement), there are a few IndieWeb as a Service platforms out there. One of the best I’ve seen so far is micro.blog. You can’t beat its clean interface or ease-of-use as a service and it has pretty much everything built in out of the box. As time goes by it’ll be great to see other services like this that offer the interoperability without the heartache that Evan has seen.

If you’ve got ideas about how the WordPress parts could be improved, do pass them along.