reply | Chris Aldrich

Replied to a tweet by

Given all the dogged work that the #IndieWeb community has done to advance the cause, it's gratifying to see them get some "ink" in the @NewYorker, but I'm left feeling like I'm reading about an idiosyncratic classic car show, rather than discovering something new and wonderful. https://t.co/yYlNSZ1ZNq
— Chris Messina (@chrismessina) May 20, 2019

I agree with Chris’ summation and wish there would have been some more positive “gee wiz” in the piece.

The likely missed subtext here though is that the author is a computer science professor so avowedly anti-social media that he doesn’t have accounts of his own, and he has actually written a book about digital minimalism. From this perspective, this generally positive review of the IndieWeb in The New Yorker reads as positively scintillating!

It also bears pointing out that Cal Newport, the author of the piece, has both his own domain name and his own website which he uses as his primary identity on the web. He also uses it as the cornerstone of all of his web communication, so he’s as solidly in the IndieWeb camp as one could want from the perspective of the most simplistic definition.

I would love to see a journalist (rather than an essayist) who follows social and Internet culture more closely and intelligently (Taylor Lorenz for example?) who wanted to cover something more positive within the interwebz than the scandal-of-the-day at Instagram, Facebook, add silo-of-your-choice-here to direct a more balanced eye on the topic of how the IndieWeb community is looking to reshape the web. I suppose the benefit and the curse of a decentralized, non-corporate web movement is that it’s got to be heavily reliant on slow, steady growth with only the best of earned media. In some sense it’s nice being the under-the-radar internet version of Coachella circa ’99-’06 rather than the 2019 Coachella where everyone only cares about Beyoncé.

We’re obviously on the right track. Thankfully companies like Micro.blog have got a good start on mainstreaming some of our ideas in an ethical way. Keep up the good fight gang!

I’m still waiting for the thousands of app developers who were burned by Twitter to discover the ideas of Micropub or Microsub and rebuild those clients with it. Or the hundreds of second tier social apps (great unitaskers like SoundCloud as an example) that either just aren’t getting as much traction with Facebook, et al. or are worried about being put out of business by them that could be more IndieWeb friendly and benefit greatly from it.

Replied to a tweet by

Jessica Chretien (Twitter)

I increasingly find myself going to write replies to people on Twitter where I accidentally end up writing an essay, so I just decided to make a quick Wordpress so I can actually be vaguely effective in expressing myself? Anyway, here's a post:https://t.co/vKnEvXC89j
— Jessica Chretien (@infuturereverse) May 19, 2019

Which is kind of vaguely in response to @cathieleblanc's reply to a thread I wrote yesterday?
— Jessica Chretien (@infuturereverse) May 19, 2019

Should I post this in the CPLC moodle? I don't even know my dudes. Not gonna lie, I'm 10000% more comfortable writing this stuff on Twitter bc it feels less formal & therefore doesn't have to be "organized" or "actually good" & can just sometimes end up being surprisingly useful?
— Jessica Chretien (@infuturereverse) May 19, 2019

It’s threads/comments like these that make me think that using Micropub clients like Quill that allow quick and easy posting on one’s own website are so powerful. Sadly, even in a domains-centric world in which people do have their own “thought spaces“, the ease-of-use of tools like Twitter are still winning out. I suspect it’s the result of people not knowing about alternate means of quickly writing out these ideas and syndicating them to services like Twitter for additional distribution while still owning them on spaces they own and control.

I know that Greg McVerry, Aaron Davis, and I (among others) often use our websites/commonplace books for quick posts (and sometimes syndicate them to Twitter for others’ sake). We then later come back to them (and the resultant comments) and turn them into more fully fleshed out thoughts and create longer essays, articles, or blogposts like Jessica Chretien eventually did on her own website.

I wonder if it wasn’t for the nearness of time and the interaction she got from Twitter if Jessica would have otherwise eventually searched her Twitter feed and then later compiled the post she ultimately did? It’s examples like this and the prompts I have from my own website and notifications via Webmention from Twitter through Brid.gy that make me thing even more strongly that scholars really need to own even their “less formal” ideas. It’s oftentimes the small little ideas that later become linked into larger ideas that end up making bigger impacts. Sometimes the problem becomes having easy access to these little ideas.

All this is even more interesting within the frame of Jessica’s discussion of students being actively involved in their own learning. If one can collect/aggregate all their references, reading, bookmarks, comments, replies, less formal ideas, etc. on their own site where they’re easily accessed and searched, then the synthesis of them into something larger makes the learning more directly apparent.

Replied to Dumb Twitter by

Adam Croom (Adam Croom)

Here’s my pitch for a Dumb Twitter app: The app forces you to tweet at the original 140 character tweet length. You can reply. You can’t like or retweet. You most certainly can’t quote tweet. There is no private DMing. Linear tweet stream only.

Adam, as you describe “dumb Twitter”, I can’t help but think about many of the design decisions that Manton Reece has made while more consciously designing and building micro.blog which specifically leaves out reposting, likes, and quote tweets as you’ve indicated. Admittedly micro.blog is still relatively small in scale compared to Twitter, and perhaps that size also helps guard against some of the toxic behaviors seen in Twitter. However, I might also suggest that since people are paying for a product and/or using one that has their personal identity built right into it with their own custom domain name, they are far less likely to proverbially “shout from their front porch” at passerby.

I notice you have a micro site which you were using with a micro.blog account, though I suspect you may have given up experimenting with them? Admittedly there is a bit of a technical hurdle in dovetailing either a WordPress or WithKnown site into the platform, but even tying RSS feeds from these platforms into the system isn’t too difficult.

I suspect that as a proponent of DoOO, you may find it fruitful to take another crack at micro.blog which, to a great extent, is really just a DoOO platform for the broader public. For a small monthly fee it allows users to bring their own domain name and get inexpensive hosting to own their own content including articles, status updates, photos, and podcasts. Otherwise, for free, you can use your own site (as you started to) and interact with the community by syndicating your content into it via RSS instead of crossposting via other means they way you’ve done with Twitter in the past.

I might suggest you try using your WithKnown site with micro.blog instead of WordPress, particularly as Known supports webmention out of the box. As a result, anything you syndicate into the system will automatically provide you notifications of any replies. You could then have just the “dumb Twitter” you wanted along with a solid DoOO solution at the same time. Ultimately you’d be using the micro.blog interface as a feed reader to scroll through content while posting your content from your own site.

If it helps to join the community there I’ve got a post that lists several micro.blog users who are in the education space, many of whom are tinkering around in areas like DoOO and IndieWeb, and a few of whom you may recognize.

I’m happy to help if you need any getting set up or experimenting. There’s a lot more power and value in the hybrid set up that micro.blog provides than it gets credit for.