Mastodon | Chris Aldrich

Read The 2010s and alternative Social Media: A decade full of work, hope, and disappointment by Dennis Schubert (schub.wtf)

Looking back at the decade of 2010 and developments in the internet, in Social Media, and inside alternative Social Media projects.

It feels a lot like the reason we are unable to offer real alternative social networks is not that we cannot do so. It is because most people with the abilities to do so spend their time working on things that only work for the tiny audience that is the tech sector, while happily ignoring the needs of all those billions of non-technical humans out there. This is something that frustrates me more than I want to admit. ❧

Annotated on May 06, 2020 at 08:17AM

He’s definitely got some interesting and insightful ideas here on why alternative social media efforts may not have the desired effect. I’ve also heard some of his technical issues with Activity Pub by other developers (and implementers). Many find it not only difficult to implement, but find it difficult to actually federate properly.

Bookmarked Easily share WordPress posts on Mastodon. (GitHub)

Bookmarked WordPress by Jan Bozzez (janboddez.tech)

Through the years, I’ve created a few (child) themes and plugins for WordPress. Some of them are described below, and more will surely follow.

Jan has some awesome IndieWeb-esqe plugins for WordPress, how have I not seen these before?! If David Shanske hasn’t seen them yet, he definitely should be aware of them.

We should definitely add some of these to the IndieWeb wiki as necessary.

Jan if you’d like to join a group of us helping to improve the web standards and IndieWeb-friendliness of WordPress, do reach out.

Spent a few minute to finally set up my website with Brid.gy so that it’s now pulling responses back from Mastodon. It’s so nice to see all the interactions that were once “lost” to me coming back to live with their proper contexts on my website.

For those looking to tinker with their websites as it relates to interacting with Mastodon, the IndieWeb has a reasonable number of potential options in addition to your ability to roll your own.

Read The escape from Instagram by Jeremy Felt (jeremyfelt.com)

I’ve been thinking through how to leave Facebook’s Instagram service since June, when I finally deleted my central Facebook account. This should be easy, because I don’t post that much on Instagram, but it always seems hard because it’s the best user experience (IMO) on mobile for writing a ...

An interesting method of leaving Instagram. I still read content there, but I had used dsgnwrks-instagram-importer by Justin Sternberg to rescue all of my Instagram posts back into my WordPress site since it gave me a huge amount of control over porting over the metadata as well. I’m noticing that the repository lists it with a warning “This plugin has been closed as of August 10, 2019 and is not available for download. Reason: Licensing/Trademark Violation.” though I can’t imagine what that would have been for unless Instagram is trying to nudge Justin out. (There’s a copy of the plugin on Github for those who may still want it.) Other than a small issue I’d seen with some emoji in Instagram, the plugin always worked like a charm for me.

Prior to that I’d always been a big fan of Aaron Parecki’s OwnYourGram, though I understand that Instagram was limiting his crawler, so the service may not be taking new accounts.

While I know some of the people behind Pixelfed and generally trust them, I don’t think I would use it as a solution unless I was standing up my own instance of the service. Far too many Mastodon instances have gone down for me to trust a particular sites’ admins. Apparently Mastodon has made it easier to move from one instance to another, but I’m not sure how this may or may not apply to Pixelfed.

Presently, my money is on Matthias Pfefferle’s ActivityPub plugin which adds support to a WordPress site to act as a stand-alone member of the Fediverse. While it’s beta software, it works fairly well and is evolving impressively over the past year or so. I suspect that photo support will improve to put it on par with solutions like Pixelfed, particularly when combined with the ease of use of some of the Micropub photo posting applications that are out there.

I’d feel remiss if I didn’t mention that another option for exiting Instagram (or at least backing it up to your own site even if you don’t leave completely) is to try Beau Lebens’ Keyring Social Importers plugin. I know a few who have used and liked it for its Instagram and other social silo support.

I’m sure there are other methods out there as well and many might be found on the IndiwWeb wiki pages for “Instagram” or “photo”.

❤️ Berg Builds Community Portal

Bookmarked Berg Builds Community Portal (community.bergbuilds.domains)

A collection of Domain of One's Own Projects at Muhlenberg College

It would be cool to have a site like this of IndieWeb web sites. This reminds me a bit of Kevin Marks’ Unmung Mastoview tool. Perhaps pulling from IndieMap’s list of sites would make building such a thing easier? Would certainly make an interesting discovery tool–almost like a centralized webring or a directory of sorts.

Hat tip:

So much gratitude to @floatingtim who has built a community portal to for "presenting the best of what we're up to" @Muhlenberg with #DoOO. Check it out at https://t.co/lPKOaEmpqG Presenting the work now at #Domains19

— ltaub (@ltaub) June 10, 2019

An IndieWeb Podcast: Episode 14 A loose collective of developers and techno-utopians

Episode 14: A loose collective of developers and techno-utopians

Running time: 1h 19m 57s | Download (37.5MB) | Subscribe by RSS |

Huffduff

Summary: Our first episode since January. David Shanske and Chris Aldrich get caught up on some recent IndieWebCamps, an article about IndieWeb in The New Yorker, changes within WordPress, and upcoming events.

Recorded: May 19, 2019

Shownotes

6 camps later…
Austin
Online
New Haven
Berlin
Düsseldorf
Utrecht

National Duckpin Bowling Congress
Duck Tours
Streaming rigs for remote participation at IndieWeb Camps
Ad hoc sessions (🎧 00:11:28)

Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? (The New Yorker) by Cal Newport (🎧 00:13:50)

Swarm Account deletions and posting limits
New Checkin icon within the Post Kinds Plugin: example https://david.shanske.com/kind/checkin/
Weather now has microformats mark up in WordPress
Fatwigoo problems with icons
IndieWeb Bingo

Webmention Project

Project of updating Matthias Pfefferle‘s Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks plugins (🎧 00:26:10)

Readers & Yarns

Readers & Yarns update (🎧 00:40:50)
X-Ray
Indigenous Replacement: Final Indigenous Log: The Future of the App

Post Kinds Plugin

Post Kinds and new exclude functionality (🎧 00:48:15)

widgets
titleless posts
On this day

David’s list of 24 IndieWebCamps he’s attended
Looking back at past IndieWebCamp sessions and wiki pages for interesting ideas and new itches
Date and time stamps on webmentions
Call for tickets in WordPress
Subscribing to h-cards with WebSub
Is Mastodon IndieWeb?
Fixing IndieAuth
Improving scoping, particularly for multi-user sites

Coming up within the community

IndieWeb Book Club

IndieWeb Book Club is coming up featuring Mike Monteiro’s book Ruined by Design(🎧 01:13:04)

IndieWeb Summit 2019

9th annual IndieWeb Summit (Portland) is coming up in June. RSVP now.

Questions?

Feel free to send us your questions or topic suggestions for upcoming episodes. (Use the comments below or your own site using Webmention).
Perhaps a future episode on Micro.blog?

Replied to a tweet by

Chris Messina (Twitter)

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.