Replied to Thinking about Planets and Challenges by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (david.shanske.com)
Earlier today, at the special Transatlantic Bonus Homebrew Website Club, we continued a discussion on trying a community challenge to create content, similar to some of what micro.blog does with their photo challenges.  One of the stumbling blocks was discovery on this, being distributed, how you can...
GWG, Some random thoughts:
Your challenge question is tough, not just for the mere discovery portion, but for the multiple other functions involved, particularly a “submit/reply” portion and a separate “I want to subscribe to something for future updates”.
I can’t think of any sites that do both of these functionalities at the same time. They’re almost always a two step process, and quite often, after the submission part, few people ever revisit the original challenge to see further updates and follow along. The lack of an easy subscribe function is the downfall of the second part. A system that allowed one to do both a cross-site submit/subscribe simultaneously would be ideal UI, but that seems a harder problem, especially as subscribe isn’t well implemented in IndieWeb spaces with a one click and done set up.
Silo based spaces where you’re subscribed to the people who might also participate might drip feed you some responses, but I don’t think that even micro.blog has something that you could use to follow the daily photo challenges by does it?

Other examples

https://daily.ds106.us/ is a good example of a sort of /planet that does regular challenges and has a back end that aggregates responses (usually from Twitter). I imagine that people are subscribed to the main feed of the daily challenges, but I don’t imagine that many are subscribed to the comments feed (is there even one?)
Maxwell’s Sith Lord Challenge is one of the few I’ve seen in the personal site space that has aggregated responses. I don’t think it has an easy way to subscribe to the responses though an h-feed of responses on the page might work in a reader? Maybe he’s got some thoughts about how this worked out?
Ongoing challenges, like a 30 day photography challenge for example, are even harder because they’re an ongoing one that either requires a central repository to collect, curate, and display them (indieweb.xyz, or a similar planet) or require something that can collect one or more of a variety of submitted feeds and then display them or allow a feed(s) of them. I’ve seen something like this before with http://connectedcourses.net/ in the education space using RSS, but it took some time to not only set it up but to get people’s sites to work with it. (It was manual and it definitely hurt as I recall.)
I don’t think of it as a challenge, but I often submit to the IndieWeb sub on indieweb.xyz and I’m also subscribed to its output as well. In this case it works as an example since this is one of its primary functions. It’s not framed as a challenge, though it certainly could be. Here one could suggest that participants tag their posts with a particular hashtag for tracking, but in IndieWeb space they’d be “tagging” their posts with the planet’s particular post URL and either manually or automatically pinging the Webmention endpoint.
Another option that could help implement some fun in the system is to salmention all the prior submissions on each submission as an update mechanism, but one would need to have a way to unsubscribe to this as it could be(come) a spam vector.

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.

Replied to a tweet by @mrled (Twitter)
Discord. Ha!

What we really need is a planet of posts tagged with RSS that has its own RSS feed! I’ll start by offering my feed about RSS: https://boffosocko.com/tag/RSS/feed/

Or maybe if you’re daring, we need a shareable OPML file of feeds? Send me your feed about RSS, and I’ll add it to my list.

But seriously what is really new in RSS land?

RSS 2.0 will celebrate it’s 12th birthday at the end of the month on March 30th. It hasn’t changed or evolved since that time.

While many say it’s dead, it’s still thriving all around the web as a serious form of glue that’s supported by almost every major platform out there.

People are still adding these sidefiles to their sites all these years later. In fact, I just read a colleague’s article about moving from ATOM to RSS the other day. And it wasn’t that long ago that the Knight First Amendment Institute fixed their RSS feed.

But who is still iterating on doing new and interesting things with RSS?

One of the more interesting things I’ve seen is Julien Genestoux‘s work with SubToMe, which iterates significantly on making RSS easier to use and subscribe to sites.

There’s also Dave Winer‘s work with OPML and FeedBase which are intriguing.

Last year I saw some ideas out of Matt Webb who also made https://aboutfeeds.com/.

Ryan Barrett has some great RSS translation tools in Granary.

I’m using RSS and OPML to power a blogroll on steroids.

What are your favorite RSS tools and experiments?

Read On planets and reading lists by Malcolm BlaneyMalcolm Blaney (unicyclic.com)

This is going to be a long one, so the short version is summed up in this screenshot:
screen shot of a page that reads This is a planet that follows members of the IndieWeb community. Anyone can join, all you need to do is send a webmention from a follow post to this page, and it will follow you back!

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:

the year of the indieweb directory  

👓 On planets and reading lists | Malcolm Blaney

Read On planets and reading lists by Malcolm BlaneyMalcolm Blaney (unicyclic.com)
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...

Dividing and Conquering the IndieWeb Related Content on My Website

Both for my own benefit as well as for that of others who may be following along, I realize that I’ve been tagging a lot of material on my site with the broad category of “IndieWeb”. Some of it is definitely more significant and content rich than others, but in aggregate it may often seem like a firehose. If you’re following the community relatively closely already, you’ll probably be seeing a lot of redundant material.

As a result, and since it’s easy to do, I’m only going to categorize a much smaller segment of the richer material that I write or which is I deem to be extremely broadly appealing with the IndieWeb category. The remainder of smaller pieces by others, bookmarks, short replies, or other tangential related things (UX, UI, silos, silo quits, etc.) I’m going to use the alternate and separate IndieWeb tag.

Thus if you’re active in the IndieWeb community and only want my IndieWeb related materials then follow the category  and not the tag. If you’re not closely following the community and want everything then I recommend following the content from both the category and the tag. 

With the subtle change this may also help IndieWeb related planets like Aaron Parecki’s https://stream.indieweb.org/ or Malcolm Blaney’s https://unicyclic.com/indieweb/ pick up relevant data without needing to do heavy de-duplication for fear of spamming various channels.

In the coming days/weeks I’ll try to go back into my backlog of posts and re-categorize and re-tag things based on this general scheme.

My direct content:
Category Only | feed: https://boffosocko.com/category/indieweb/feed/

Miscellaneous bookmarks, replies, other content I collect for my commonplace book, etc: 
Tag Only | feed: https://boffosocko.com/tag/indieweb/feed/

The firehose of everything IndieWeb related from my site:
Category AND/OR Tag | feed: https://boffosocko.com/?s=indieweb&feed=rss2

And of course I still try to  aggregate and orient most of the important pieces in my IndieWeb Collection.

🔖 Personal sites are awesome

Bookmarked Personal sites are awesome by Andy Bell (personalsit.es)

Personal sites are awesome, so this site was built so we can all discover each others. All the links are by folks that want to share their site with the world.

If you want your site to appear on here, go ahead and submit it on GitHub, or drop me an email.

I just ran across this interesting version of a directory which is being built based on a GitHub repo and deployed to https://personalsit.es/

It’s built by Andy Bell who has been building his own website and is at least IndieWeb aware. I’ve added the example to the IndieWeb wiki page for directories. While interesting and useful, like some of the other directories I’ve seen floating around, there is a small hurdle that one needs to be able to fork a GitHub repo, edit it, and send a PR to be included, though I do like that he has an email option to bring the technical hurdle down. The other benefit is that it allows people to modify or delete their data as well. I do like the decentralized nature of of it, but I wonder about scale and search-ability.

I can’t help but wonder about building a similar directory site that aggregates its data by Webmention and uses the h-cards from websites to automatically update itself. Naturally having an OPML file(s) (think various versions that are sortable using tags/categories) or some other exportable and/or subscribe-able ability for feed readers would be highly useful.

In addition to resources like chat-names, Indie Map‘s list, as well as some planets, OPML resources like my own IndieWeb list, and the IndieWeb web ring, this could be another interesting directory creation method for IndieWeb-specific websites.


👤 Kicks Condor; Brad Enslen;

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Reply to iamjeffperry tweet about community infrastructure

Replied to a Twitter thread by Jeff PerryJeff Perry (Twitter)
Perhaps in the vein of what you might be looking for, I’ve got a multi-user site built on WithKnown. It functions much like a stand-alone-Facebook-like service where users have their own accounts and can interact with each other on the service. It also has an OAuth server which allows users to use their own websites to log in and be able to post or syndicate content from their own websites into it, that way they have a choice of owning all of the content they post to it or not.

Note: this particular test site is meant more for folks to do quick test drives of the Known platform rather than serving as a platform in the way you’re describing. As an example of what you may be looking for though, here’s an original post on my own website (note the “also on” link at the bottom) and here’s the copy that was syndicated into the separate “community service” on an entirely different domain.

I suspect you could use other sites/services like WordPress to do something like this as well.

Alternately, you could have folks post on their own site and aggregate things in a “planet-like” fashion via RSS (by keyword perhaps) or other means on a central hub as suggested by Aaron Parecki.