Replied to Microblogging with Mastodon: Posting Automatically to My WordPress Site by Dr. Scott SchopierayDr. Scott Schopieray (schopie1.commons.msu.edu)
When the Humanities Commons team started to spin up hcommons.social I started to wonder if this platform would be a way to conduct my microblogging activities in a space that might have a better distribution network, allowing my work to be more visible.
OMG! There is so much to love here about these processes and to see people in the wild experimenting with them and figuring them out.

Scott (@schopie1), you are not alone! There are lots of us out here doing these things, not only with WordPress but a huge variety of other platforms. There are many ways to syndicate your content depending on where it starts its life.

In addition to Jim Groom and a huge group of others’ work within A Domain of One’s Own, there’s also a broader coalition of designers, developers, professionals, hobbyists, and people of all stripes working on these problems under the name of IndieWeb.

For some of their specific work you might appreciate the following:

Incidentally, I wrote this for our friend Kathleen Fitzpatrick last week and I can’t wait to see what she’s come up with over the weekend and in the coming weeks. Within the IndieWeb community you’ll find people like Ben Werdmuller who founded both WithKnown (aka Known) and Elgg and Aram Zucker-Scharff who helped to create PressForward.

I’m thrilled to see the work and huge strides that Humanities Commons is making to ensure some of these practices come to fruition.

If you’re game, perhaps we ought to plan an upcoming education-related popup event as an IndieWebCamp event to invite more people into this broader conversation?

If you have questions or need any help in these areas, I’m around, but so are hundreds of friends in the IndieWeb chat: https://chat.indieweb.org.

I hope we can bring more of these technologies to the masses in better and easier-to-use manners to lower the technical hurdles.

Replied to Is this thing on? (Also: Twitter, Mastodon, and the Fundamentals of DoOO) by Martha Burtis (wrapping.marthaburtis.net)
It’s been. . .a while. It would take too long to review everything that’s happened since I posted last, so let’s start with a recent turn of events: the absolute implosion of Twitter. I’ve been on that site for about fifteen years, and for portions of that time, I barely looked at it. At others times it’s been a critical part of my professional work. Given my on-again, off-again relationship with the space, it feels weird to say that the recent events are terribly significant to me, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I feel at a bit of a loss as I watch my community over there fracture.
@martha I’m hearing a lot of similar experiences across the web like this. Thanks for your thoughts on it.

Kathleen Fitzgerald recently asked about crossposting to Mastodon from her WordPress site and getting replies back. She’s documented some parts recently, and I’ve outlined a few pieces preliminarily including ways you can make your WordPress site look like it’s a Mastodon instance with a few plugins. I suspect Kathleen will have some further thoughts soon after she spends some time tinkering. If you had previously set up to syndicate to Twitter and get responses by via the Brid.gy service, that same sort of workflow will definitely work with Mastodon if you like. (Though it bears mentioning that some of the updates to Mastodon 4.0 this past week or so have introduced some bugs depending on which instance you’re on. I’m sure they’ll be sorted shortly.)

If you’ve not puzzled it out yet, the adding of the requisite rel="me" class to your Mastodon URL link on your website (in the header, footer, via plugin, via menu item, other) is broadly described here (including some details for the classic editor): https://g13g.blog/2022/11/09/how-to-verify-your-wordpress-site-on-mastodon/. I’m personally using the IndieWeb Plugin to accomplish this and have added the URL for my mastodon instance into a field which gets added to my WordPress Profile at /wp-admin/profile.php. I’m happy to help if you need other ideas about how to do it as there are maybe too many potential options—it was all the different options and ways of doing it that confused me when I did it.

In addition to the broader Domain of One’s Own ideas that the “Twitter migration” is spurring, I’m always glad to see more people exploring ways we can have “A Twitter of our Own“.


Also in reply to syndicated copy at: https://mastodon.social/@mburtis/109435099778560251

Replied to a post by Chris Baca (@cdbaca@indieweb.social)Chris Baca (@cdbaca@indieweb.social) (Indieweb.Social)
One of the things I don't see often talked about in the #indieweb sphere is how "meta" it is. E.g., I enjoy reading about how devs think about FOSS, but I don't want those to be the only indie people I read. Are there folks out there that are self-hosted but are writing about philosophy or literature, doing journalism, or thinking about other interesting things? Who should I throw in my feed reader? (A favorite of mine is Alan Jacobs @ blog.ayjay.org)
They are definitely out there. Micro.blog is an entire community of diverse people with this practice (admittedly with some technophiles scattered about). You can easily set up an account and pipe a feed of your content into that network and participate from your own site (for free). If you’re into education and related topics, you’ll find people like Maha Bali who are part of the Domain of One’s Own space which is similar to . Perhaps I’ll list some more for ?
Reposted a tweet by Matthew KirschenbaumMatthew Kirschenbaum (Twitter)
This thread is one of the reasons the academics I’ve seen in the Domain of One’s Own Space have so much more freedom and flexibility in online spaces.

Independently-hosted web publishing

Bookmarked Independently-hosted web publishing by Daniel Villar-Onrubia & Victoria I. MarínDaniel Villar-Onrubia & Victoria I. Marín (Internet Policy Review Volume 11, Issue 2 DOI: 10.14763/2022.2.1665)
The term independently-hosted is used here to describe online publishing practices that utilise the World Wide Web (hereafter the Web) as a decentralised socio-technical system, where individuals and communities operate as the owners or controllers of the online infrastructures they use in order to share content. Such practices may be adopted as an alternative of, or as a complement to, the use of centralised content-sharing systems that belong to and are entirely operated by third parties. The term “publishing” is used here in a rather inclusive way and refers to the act of making content available online, rather than being restricted to the editorial processes that characterise, for instance, academic publishing.
DOI: 10.14763/2022.2.1665
Great to see IndieWeb.org cited in the academic literature.
Is anyone in the or space using @tinysubversionsHometown fork of to create small “local only” posting spaces for their classes? Are there any inexpensive hosts that have one click installs/setups for this? Screen capture of paragraph that reads: "In August 2018, Kazemi created his own Mastodon server (an “instance”) called Friend Camp. But he didn’t want it to be a popular instance — he wanted to run a small social network, with under 100 users. The goal was to foster community-related discussion and attain a sense of “group cohesion.” The following year, based on his experience of running Friend Camp, Kazemi forked Mastodon into a new software package he called Hometown. One of its main features is “local only posting,” which gives users the option of not federating their posts." The last line is highlighted in yellow.
Bookmarked Sheet-posting (sheet-posting.me)
Turn a Google Sheets spreadsheet into a blog page and RSS feed
This reminds me of the sort of thing that @JohnStewartPhD or someone from the space might do: Turn a Google Sheet into a website.

Kevin Marks in #indieweb 2021-09-06 ()

Bookmarked Tending the Digital Commons by Alan JacobsAlan Jacobs (The Hedgehog Review | Spring 2018: The Human and the Digital)
The complexities of social media ought to prompt deep reflection on what we all owe to the future, and how we might discharge this debt.
This fantastic essay touches on so many things related to IndieWeb and A Domain of One’s Own. We often talk about the “why” of these movements, but Alan Jacobs provides some underlying ethics as well.

For those who don’t have a subscription, Alan has kindly and pleasantly provided a samizdat version on his site in .pdf format.

Replied to a tweet by Maggie AppletonMaggie Appleton (Twitter)
A great question to be sure.

Define “ours“. “Tweetspace” is only Twitter? Perhaps not all of those at once…

The education space definitely. Many are still in the “old” blogosphere. They use phrases/hashtags like “Domain of One’s Own” (#​DoOO), personal learning networks (#​pln), #​EdTech, #​EthicalEdTech, etc.

Maybe a dash of #OpenScience, along with maybe @LibCarpentry and @theCarpentries?

#​IndieWeb is platform interoperability, along with a smattering of the others but you already knew of that overlap.

Replied to a thread by @tjoosten and @grandeped (Twitter)
I’m happy to help you try to put together an IndieWeb-friendly version with Webmentions which work with multiple platforms including WordPress, Known, Grav, etc.

You might find some interesting examples and pieces on IndieWeb wiki, particularly their Education page. I’d love to see Matt add his example(s) to that page for others’ future reference.

I did a short demonstration of what the current website-to-website space looks like at the recent OERxDomains21 Conference. You can find the short video here on my site.

If you go the older route one of the best planet-like sites I’ve seen was http://connectedcourses.net/, which if I recall correctly was built by Alan Levine. If you poke around a bit or ask @cogdog on Twitter, I think there are some details or a recipe somewhere of how he put it together.

Chances are reasonably good that people in the or space have some ideas as well.

Bookmarked Whiki by Whitney TrettienWhitney Trettien (whitneyannetrettien.com)
This is an online commonplace book for Whitney Trettien. You're welcome to use these notes and reading lists to guide you in your own studies.
This has to be one of the baddest-ass things I’ve seen in months. I wish more people had public-facing commonplace books like this!

Bonus points that Whitney calls it a Whiki! 🙂

Domains at Domains

I mentioned it as an anecdotal observation in my talk, so I went back and counted the appearances of online identifiers on the 159 re-mixable badges for the OERxDomains 21 Conference. I counted 91 twitter handles, 15 domain names, and 1 Instagram handle.

There were a couple people who used email addresses. A few people listed multiple twitter handles, and one enterprising person (not me!) listed three domain names.

Because the badges were customizable, people (or their animals and a few organizations) had the individual choice of what text to put on their personal badges.

Hopefully we’ll do better on using domain names at the next domains-related conference. 😜

A Twitter of Our Own at OERxDomains 2021 Conference

The Association of Learning Technology and Reclaim Hosting hosted the OERxDomains 2021 Conference last week.

They’ve just opened up the entire conference program with links to all of the sessions and videos for those who’d like to watch them.

You’ll see my presentation video embedded above. If you’d like you can also watch it in the custom player made for the conference, though I notice that it doesn’t replay the live chat.

Due to scheduling issues beyond my control just before the conference, I had to shorten my hour-long workshop down to a 20 minute talk. I intend to do a couple of separate hands-on workshops at upcoming Domain of Our Own meetups so that people can implement the moving pieces I demonstrate into their own websites. Let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll let you know when they’re scheduled.

I’m hoping that when the next conference rolls around at least some of us can participate using our own domains and not need to rely on Twitter’s infrastructure.

I posted a link to the slides last week if you’d like to follow along that way and have links to some of the resources. (You should also have access to some of my notes/rough transcript as well as alt-text for some of the images included.) The slides still have some context and links to portions of the original version that got cut out.

For those unaware of the conference or topics, it was two days of great presentations about the topics of Open Education Resources (OER) and A Domain of One’s Own which is focused on giving teachers and students to websites and underlying technology of their own for daily personal and professional use. Those interested in the IndieWeb may particularly find the Domains track enlightening. Others interested in teaching, pedagogy, and publishing will get a lot out of the OER tracks.

Slides for A Twitter of Our Own from OERxDomains 2021

As promised at the conference, you can find the slides with convenient links and other resources for my talk A Twitter of Our Own at OERxDomains21 on Google Slides.

They are also embedded below: