First day of my IndieWeb Challenge for December and it's going to be about Lwa. I think this whole week might be! I've released a "stable" candidate that lets you know what your site needs to work with it. Be sure to try it out and let me know what you think! I've also added a page to let you previe...
After launching support for Mastodon on Micro.blog, I blogged about how Micro.blog is evolving to support 3 types of usernames: normal Micro.blog users, Mastodon users, and IndieWeb-friendly domain names. This last type of username is where I think we can bring more social network-like interactions ...
I followed several new to me feeds today and then decided—why not share? There may be no other way to rediscover the social network that is blogging.
Jeremy, it’s great to see someone else following peoples’ content directly from their own websites! I was surprised (but maybe not really) to see that some of the feeds you had followed were those from the IndieWeb community! Did you happen to catch Tantek’stalk at WordCamp US (▶️) just before the State of the Word?
Coincidentally, I came to your post while playing some feed reading catch up post-WordCamp US and ran across a status update on Helen’s site:
Remember when we used to read each other’s individual blogs? I miss that.
I noticed one other person (you) had “liked” it and clicked myself down the rabbit hole that led me to your post. There are still apparently some interesting old-school discovery methods on the open web.
If you like following interesting sites, I often find Kicks Condor’s HREFHUNT an great regular source for discovery.
And last, but not least, I followed both the IndieNews and This Week in the IndieWeb blogs via the main indieweb.org site as part of an effort to get more familiar with that community and technology.
If you’d like a crash course on IndieWeb, particularly as it’s applied within WordPress, I’m happy to donate some time to get you up to speed on the next few steps beyond what Tantek outlined. If you’d like to follow more, I have a following page which has a large number of IndieWeb-related developers, designers, and sites including an OPML file for following many of them quickly.
In any case, welcome to the IndieWeb! I can’t wait to see how your explorations there turn out; I’d love to hear about your experiences in that space. There are a lot of friendly people around to help you get started or chat if you need it.
And thanks again for tacitly sharing your list of RSS sources. I’d bookmarked Weinberger’s book a short while ago and can’t wait to read it. I’m looking at your other links presently.
I’ve noticed a lot of quiet, but very interesting and heartening feed reader and discovery work going on in the IndieWeb and related communities lately, so I thought I’d highlight it briefly for those who are interested in the topic, but may not have been following as closely:
Inoreader has been working on a beta product that will make following social feeds in Twitter, Micro.blog, the Fediverse, and even IndieWeb sites with h-entry easier and prettier.
Kicks Condor has been iterating and doing some interesting work on the FraidyCat reader over the past few weeks.
Malcolm Blaney has a fantastic little feed reader in his Unicyclic site (not to mention that he’s also got a cool looking IndieWeb as a Service site with i.haza.website that I desperately want to have time to try out).
The volume of different and interesting content going into IndieWeb.xyz as a discovery hub has been increasing lately.
CJ Eller and others have been contributing to Blogging Futures as an extended online conversation in the form of an aggregated blogchain.
And none of this even touches on the excellent continuing work on Microsub readers which continues to astound me. Even with all of this activity, I’m sure I’m missing some fun little gems, so please don’t hesitate to mention them.
Testing out Malcolm Blaney's relatively new Unicyclic feed reader. Very clean and simple! I love that it handles Twitter feeds in a much more natural way than any of the big corporate feed readers out there. Of course the fact that it supports micropub is also a major bonus! IndieWeb tools FTW!
Unicyclic.com is a social feed reader, which means you can subscribe to feeds and then reply to, like, or share what you're reading from the reader.
If you have your own website, you can use it to log in right here usingIndieAuth. If you also support Micropub, all your interactions here will be posted back to your own site.
If you don't have your own website you can also create an account on this site and then log in here. Local accounts will also receive notifications sent from other sites via webmention, including from Twitter via brid.gy.
Unicyclic.com was created by Malcolm Blaney and is powered by a content management system called dobrado. You can also download the software from there and run it on your own server. If you need any help getting started, please use this contact form. If you're interested in following updates to the software please add my blog to your reader. Thanks for visiting!
For a long time I’ve been consuming the majority of my Twitter feed within various feed readers. My most frequent feed reader is Inoreader, though I’ve been experimenting with and using some IndieWeb influenced microsub-based feed readers for quite a while.
Earlier today I thought I’d try out Inoreader’s Twitter integration and subscribe to some of my twitter lists using that instead of importing feeds directly from outside services. (I’ve been a big fan of using Ryan Barrett’s Twitter-Atom and related tools.) One of the things that had always bothered me about third party RSS feeds into most feed readers is that the author of the post is in such tiny text and there is no avatar indicator of who wrote the post. As a result I’m stuck spending a lot more cognitive load trying to discern the author of a tweet before or after reading it. It just boils down to less than optimal user interface.
Fortunately Inoreader seems to have a slightly better method for doing this (since they control the user interface and are presumably using the Twitter API). Within their reader, Tweets look a tad bit more standard with respect to the usual Twitter client and include an avatar and the name of the author in larger font. Sadly, though they have control over the UI, they’re still including a bolded version of the the text of the tweet as a title and thereby needlessly duplicating some of the content. It would be far better for notes, status updates and other content that typically doesn’t have (or need) a title if they would simply just leave it out. They could then use the extra space to have a larger font for reading the short status update. In fact, most of the IndieWeb-based feeds I read in Inoreader have these unnecessary titles included which typically not only look bad from a UI perspective, but they again needlessly duplicate content I don’t need.
Below I’m including screenshots of the two different methods of reading Tweets via Inoreader. I’m also including a screenshot of how Tweets look like in Monocle when fed in via the same Atom feed that was used in the Inoreader case. In Monocle’s version, it’s got a nice larger and easier to discern author name, but it too is missing the author photo (or avatar), in part because the feed doesn’t include it as a default. I suspect that if the feed included it, Monocle would display it properly though the Inoreader version probably wouldn’t. The Monocle version also includes a copy of the photo in the Tweet twice because the feed adds it in a second time as an enclosure.
UI example of a tweet within Inoreader using their native Twitter support.UI example of a tweet within Inoreader imported using a third party RSS-based client.
UI example of a tweet within Monocle imported using a third party RSS-based client.
For completeness, I’m including the text of the Atom feed for this particular tweet so that we can see what is or isn’t being included in the Inoreader and Monocle versions.
<entry>
<author>
<activity:object-type>http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/person</activity:object-type>
<uri>https://twitter.com/BigHistoryPro</uri>
<name>Big History Project</name>
</author>
<activity:object-type>http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/note</activity:object-type>
<id>https://twitter.com/BigHistoryPro/status/1195385992728985600</id>
<title>In an ideal world, you’d have 1-on-1 time with every student to discuss every...</title>
<content type="xhtml">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
In an ideal world, you’d have 1-on-1 time with every student to discuss every aspect of every writing assignment. With BHP score, you come close. <br />
<a href="https://bh-p.co/2N1xopV">bh-p.co/2N1xopV</a>
<p>
<a class="link" href="https://twitter.com/BigHistoryPro/status/1195385992728985600">
<img class="u-photo" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJbdObjXkAQ6QNw.jpg" alt="" />
</a>
</p>
</div>
</content>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://twitter.com/BigHistoryPro/status/1195385992728985600" />
<link rel="ostatus:conversation" href="https://twitter.com/BigHistoryPro/status/1195385992728985600" />
<link rel="ostatus:attention" href="https://bh-p.co/2N1xopV" />
<link rel="mentioned" href="https://bh-p.co/2N1xopV" /> <activity:verb>http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/post</activity:verb>
<published>2019-11-15T17:00:04+00:00</published>
<updated>2019-11-15T17:00:04+00:00</updated>
<link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://twitter.com/BigHistoryPro/status/1195385992728985600" />
<link rel="enclosure" href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJbdObjXkAQ6QNw.jpg" type="image/jpeg" />
</entry>
In sum, I generally like the UI of the Inoreader version, though they could still do with removing the redundant and unnecessary title. The Monocle version is likely the best, but I’d need to find a feed method that also includes the avatar to have a better representation of the original Tweet. Even with these differences, I think I tend to prefer Monocle at the end of the day because it also automatically includes Micropub functionality which means that I can post my reactions (likes, reposts, or comments) directly to my website and syndicate copies directly to Twitter. (This is also in consideration of my previously having set up some separate functionality for forcing Inoreader to allow me to post some of this same sort of data to my website by other means.)
Has anyone found better/prettier or more useful ways of consuming Twitter in third party means while allowing one to own their data?
I was already partway there, but following on Ryan Barrett’s excellent suggestion, I spent a few minutes today and added several of my favorite Twitter lists to my feed reader. I spend less and less time in Twitter because all the notifications come to me via my own site and webmentions. I’m not unfollowing people to completely clean out the timeline just yet since there are a few people who have private accounts and I’d need to refollow or do something unique to cover them.
I do wish someone had a simple method of following the one or two people who have blocked me (I’m presuming they did so accidentally or I’ve been rolled up in a larger block list and they weren’t aware.) I was half-hoping that some API and list workarounds would work, but I’m stuck with creating another account and following separately or manually revisiting their feeds at scheduled intervals. I don’t need to interact with them so much as I have to read their excellent work. If anyone has ideas to fix this, I’m open to suggestions.
The best part of using RSS is that you see all the news, unfiltered and sorted exactly chronologically without a smart “AI” messing with your data and deciding what to feed you.
It is, however, useful sometimes to have the power to sort through thousands of articles and see the most interesting ...
A few days ago, I unfollowed everyone on Twitter, added them all to a list, and I now read that list instead. It’s shockingly better. Only their own tweets and retweets, in order. No ads, no "liked by," no "people you may know," no engagement hacking crap. It’s glorious.
Even better, when I inevitably end up in the home timeline anyway, it only has my own tweets and ads, nothing interesting. No dopamine outrage bullshit cycle to get caught up in.
Shh, don’t tell, I’m afraid some low level product manager at Twitter will discover this and "fix" lists like they "fixed" the home timeline a while back.
There are a couple drawbacks. I lost a few people I followed whose accounts are protected; I need to find and re-follow them. Also this evidently makes it harder for people to DM me, somehow. Not sure how, I don’t use Twitter DM much.
Still. Glorious.
This is pretty inspiring. Thinking about doing it myself, though I’ll have to be careful about private accounts so I don’t unfollow them. I do also wish that feed readers had a better way to display Tweets.
Kicks, far from a dumb project. I remember seeing a version of your personal copy in one of your videos ages ago and thinking, “I want that!!!” Of course it may take some more development on your part or some serious coding study on mine to get this up and running for myself.
I can’t wait to see where this goes! Keep up the awesome work!
Facebook News (or, rather, a Facebook News tab), is rolling out in the USA, and there are valid concerns about this already, for various reasons.
Whether you’re in the USA, or not, you don’t need (and may not want to rely on) Facebook News to keep up with the news. Instead, there is a tried, tested, and widely available alternative that you can configure to suit your preferences right now: feed readers.
Facebook News (or, rather, a Facebook News tab), is rolling out in the USA, and there are valid concerns about this already, for various reasons.
Whether you’re in the USA, or not, you don’t need (and may not want to rely on) Facebook News to keep up with the news. Instead, there is a tried, tes...
This is going to be a long one, so the short version is summed up in this screenshot:
That's from the top of this page: unicyclic.com/indieweb, which is a feed combined from different sources, commonly referred to as a planet. Up until now I've been adding new feeds to that page as people join th...
This may be the first time I’ve heard this, though it’s possible that Kicks Condor or Bran Enslen has mentioned something along these lines:
Kevin Smokler (Kevin Smokler)
Jeremy Felt (jeremyfelt.com)
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)
Paul Jacobson (Paul Jacobson)
Malcolm Blaney (unicyclic.com)