campfires | Chris Aldrich

Kevin Cunningham (kevincunningham.co.uk)

Over in the garden, I’ve started a section on webmentions - including how Lauro (@laurosilvacom) and I got them up and running on our Gatsby blogs. We streamed that and I’ll link to the video when it’s available. Equally, I’ve linked to some excellent examples and posts over there.

I want these posts to be part of a conversation rather than a one-sided proclamation from the roof-tops. Using webmentions to poll for replies on Twitter and other blogs seems like a good start.

What other ways can we stop ourselves standing in dark rooms and shouting into the void? How can we light campfires and create spaces for conversation that are welcoming and mutually beneficial?

Kevin, I like your ideas here and there are many of us who have been discussing it in various nooks of the internet over the past couple of years. It’s a movement and a discussion that has been slowly brewing, but seems to be coming to a boil.

While some of these ideas sound romantic at present with minimal penetration and implementation, we’ll definitely need to be cognizant of how they grow and building tools to mitigate abuses in the future as they become more common. No one wants Webmention to become a vector for spam and harassment the way it’s poorly designed and implemented predecessors like Pingback or Trackbacks were.

While the IndieWeb seems to be the largest hub of this conversation so far, especially for the technical portions, it’s also been distributed across multiple platforms and personal websites and wikis. If you haven’t come across the IndieWeb you may appreciate their wiki and bridged chat channels.

Lately I’ve noticed a big spillover into the wiki space primarily by way of Tom Critchlow, Kicks Condor, some from TiddlyWiki and the Roam Research spaces, and many of your colleagues at egghead.io. I’m personally looking forward to the convergence of the website, blog, personal wiki, commonplace book, etc. in a single platform.

As I notice that you’re in Brighton, if you haven’t been before, you might consider joining in one of the local Homebrew Website clubs either there, in other parts of the UK, or across the world. I see events for Nottingham and London coming up on the schedule, but I’m sure Jeremy Keith or other organizers will do another in Brighton soon.

In any case, you’re on the web, and we can “see” and “hear” you. Thanks for drawing up a campfire to create a discussion.