Tag: IndieWeb

Read Writing on the web by Khaled Abou Alfa (kaa.bz)
While going through my Twitter archive, I realised several things which are going to greatly inform the way I write on the web in the future: While linklogging is fun, easy and in many ways the fabric that makes up the internet, it’s existence is fleeting. Maybe that link will remain valid for 10 ...
A lot of this resonates with me. On links, it is often the reason I was interested in it in the first place that’s the most important.

The nostalgia factor is very valuable to me, but it also means you need an easy means for not only looking back, but regular reminders to do so.

Owning your stuff: hopefully my stance on this is obvious.

I’m not sure I agree so much with the taxonomy stance. I find it helpful to have it for search and review, the tougher part is doing it consistently with terms that are important to you.

ᔥ jacky in #indieweb 2021-04-02 ()

Replied to a thread by joanne mcneil, Anil Dash, Andy Baio (Twitter)
I used to miss the reading/social aspects of GR until I switched to using my own website in combination with social readers like Aperture and Indigenous. (Aaron Parecki has a good overview of what it looks like; the space has grown quite a bit since his original post in 2018.)

I heartily agree with @waxpancake that the open web needs some better discovery options.

Replied to Micropub Tweetstorm Builder by Boris Boris (Fission Talk)

Description

People write tweetstorms because they’re “easier” than whatever their blog setup is. And the constraints of 280 characters at a time makes for both careful sentence construction and flow.

But - then you’ve got this lovely writing that is trapped on Twitter. At best, you come back and copy / paste the tweets back into a blog post.

The idea is a Micropub enabled tweetstorm builder. You log into it with your Twitter account and with Indieauth so that posts end up as one big blog post on your own site, but are sent to Twitter as a tweetstorm / collection.

User Impact

Who would want to use this and why?

Anyone that wants to compose tweetstorms in a richer environment while also having it post to their own site.

Features

PWA

Twitter login

Create a Twitter collection — I actually don’t know what all the features of collections are. Tweetbot supports this.

IndieAuth / Micropub support

Choose timing of tweets — all at once or pace them out by X minutes

Boris, I love this idea of this and how it could work.

If you haven’t come across it, ThreadReaderApp does something similar to this but in a reverse syndication instead of the method you’re describing. It allows one to publish a thread on Twitter and then use ThreadReaderApp to roll the thread up and post a copy of it to one’s website that supports Micropub. I’ve written a bit about how it works here: boffosocko.com/2020/05/28/threadreaderapp-micropub-to-blog/

I’d love to see something more like what you’re describing.

Another interesting option for this that has a lot of the functionality you’re looking for is Kevin Marks’ Noter Live. I know he’s considered adding Micropub functionality to it. I suspect he’d be very open to anyone who’d like to add that or other refinements via pull request to GitHub – kevinmarks/noterlive: A tool for indieweb live noting (aka live tweeting/live blogging). It does post live threads to twitter and currently gives the output as raw HTML that one could cut/paste into their site.

Read on February 17, 2021 at 09:54PM

Replied to thread by Abide the Twin Damnation (@tindall@cybre.space)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.)

Read Webmention Analytics by Max BöckMax Böck (Max Böck)
I built a tool to analyze incoming webmentions. This new side project generates monthly reports to see how and where content is mentioned.
This may be the first version of someone specifically doing analytics of Webmention on their own website. Very cool!
Replied to a post by Ian Betteridge Ian Betteridge (microblog.ianbetteridge.com)
Something that I haven’t seen anywhere on the Indieweb: is there a simple guide for services which let you replace Twitter, Facebook, Insta, etc etc with more open alternatives? Preferably written with non-technical users in mind?

Micro.blog is one of the best IndieWeb friendly services out there to replace some of these platforms with a user friendly set up. https://indieweb.org/Quick_Start delineates some other services like i.haza.website, Pine.blog, and Typlog which have some great features too depending on what you’re looking for. If you’ve got someone with some modest technical chops to run a small service for you and some friends, Known can be an awesome option too.

 

Watched Social Media is OVER: You NEED a Website and Email List by Roberto BlakeRoberto Blake from YouTube

You Need a Website and Email List, you can't rely on social media algorithms or policies can change. So you need to build a website or blog and start email marketing and growing an email list to keep access to your audience. Don't rely on social media. Rely on yourself. Email Marketing and Website Building are not something most social media influences and content creators want to do, because social media is free and comes with traffic. But you never know when you will lose access to your audience and that is why you need your own website and email list to keep that access to the audience you built long term.

He’s focusing on using the internet for business, but Roberto Blake has a great overview of why one should be thinking about and practicing IndieWeb principles. His advice is absolutely necessary if you’re running a business, but it applies equally well for your personal web presence as well.

Listened to You Missed a Spot from On the Media | WNYC Studios

Revealing Zello's role in last week's riot, making a case for deplatforming, and exploring the idea of responsible social media. 

Evidence shows that insurrectionists used the walkie-talkie app Zello to help organize the riot at the capitol. On this week’s On the Media, a look at how the platform has resisted oversight, despite warnings that it was enabling right-wing extremism. Plus, how to sniff out the real corporate boycotts from the PR facades. And, how to build social media that doesn't exploit users for profit.

1. OTM reporter Micah Loewinger [@MicahLoewinger] on Zello's role in last week's insurrection, and what the app is finally doing about its militia members. Listen.

2. Casey Newton [@CaseyNewton], writer for Platformer, on why this wave of social media scrubbing might not be such a bad thing. Listen.

3. Siva Vaidhyanathan [@sivavaid], professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, and Americus Reed II [@amreed2], professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business, on the true costs of corporate boycotts. Listen.

4. Eli Pariser [@elipariser], co-director of Civic Signals, on how to build digital spaces that do not monetize our social activity or spy on us for profit. Listen.

Music from the show:
Fallen Leaves — Marcos Ciscar
The Hammer of Loss — John Zorn — A Vision in Blakelight
Hard Times — Nashville Sessions — Songs of the Civil War
What’s that Sound? — Michael Andrews
In the Bath — Randy Newman
Boy Moves the Sun — Michael Andrews
Ain’t Misbehavin’ — Hank Jones

Replied to a tweet by Dan York (Twitter)

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.

Liked Goodbye @macgenie, hello @jean by Jean MacDonaldJean MacDonald (micro.welltempered.net)
I’ve been using “macgenie” as my internet name since I first signed up for Digg (Wikipedia article) in March 2007. A friend asked me to “digg” his news story, and I said I would try to do it quickly, but that I often suffered from decision paralysis when it came to choosing a user name. He...

I resemble this remark!

Replied to a tweet by Roam Hacker (Twitter)

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 a post by Victoria DrakeVictoria Drake (victoria.dev)
Help me discover more awesome indie webmasters! @ me if you or your favorite blog supports webmentions!

Mine does. I also keep a list of people who have IndieWeb sites and most (though not all) will support Webmentions: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/

Most under the IndieWeb and some under the IndieWeb for Education and Blogger headings will support webmentions.

You can find others by browsing through Brid.gy users, the vast majority of whom will support it as will users of Micro.blog. Another good source of discovery is the IndieWeb webring: https://🕸💍.ws.

If you’d like, you can add a Webmention button to your site to visually indicate that you support it.

Update: Also, if you want to meet some “in person”, I’d welcome you to join one of our virtual meetups coming up: https://events.indieweb.org/

Liked a tweet by Dr. Tamar R. Marvin (Twitter)