I received some feedback during the week that creating a full content re-post wasn't ok. I accept that this is a pretty common view, probably the view of the majority of people.
But what to do if you like the idea of full content re-posts? I am more than happy for people to share my writing, but I ...
I totally get where both sides are coming from. It’s definitely a presentation problem.
I’ve even had incoming emails in the past like this. Once a site owner actually asked me to add a rel=”canonical” tag to point back to their site, which I was quite impressed with. Ultimately I just fixed my display and provided only an excerpt. My intention was only to ever provide the reposted site the ultimate credit.
These days I don’t do too much reposting at all, and if I do, I’ll highlight a snippet and then ping the Internet Archive to save a copy on my behalf so that it’s still there in the future if I want to refer back to an original.
In rare cases for things that I find highly important, I’ll also repost, but keep it as a private post on my site that only I can see as an archived copy. Other times I’ll post and also add a rel-canonical back to the original site. I’m certainly never reposting as a means of creating traffic for my own site.
It’s interesting to me how frequently these same sorts of behaviors on personal websites will freak people out when they’re daily occurrences within the social sphere where they may not have better presentation. I had an online magazine send me a take down request a few weeks back for using a photo version of one of their generic mastheads in a spot that was obviously a reply context (and incidentally met all the requirements of fair use). Sometimes you can’t win despite your best intentions–just keep trying and we’ll get there.
As I've embraced indie post types, such as reposts, I've noticed that actually I've been using them wrong.
Looking at https://indieweb.org/bookmark#Repost it appears I've been conflating a "retweet" on Twitter with a "repost", thinking they were the same. Alas, they are not, and it makes more sense to be a bookmark.
I've since updated the posts using the wrong type and will get things right next time!
Here’s my pitch for a Dumb Twitter app: The app forces you to tweet at the original 140 character tweet length. You can reply. You can’t like or retweet. You most certainly can’t quote tweet. There is no private DMing. Linear tweet stream only. ❧
Perhaps he’s unaware of it, but this sounds a lot like the design decisions that micro.blog has made in it’s platform which is very similar to DoOO, but for the broader public.
“The single change social networks could make that would have the most positive impact is to remove all kinds of resharing. Force people to speak in their own voices or not at all. Using other peoples' language to express yourself forces you to evaluate the world on their terms.”
I’ve been awaiting the percolation of your prior thoughts. For additional reference Manton Reece may have some thoughts as this lack of repost functionality is relatively central to how micro.blog works.
They make up a quarter of all tweets, but at long last someone has found a way to turn them off…
This is an interesting theory. I’ll have to dig into the mechanics and try it out. I often find that don’t pay as much attention in general to retweets as I do to original content. I even far prefer people who are excellent aggregators in focused topics and post their content as bookmarks to the article rather than retweeting content.
Back at IndieWebCamp Austin, I became enamored of adding additional methods of interacting with my website, particularly for those who weren’t already on the IndieWeb train. I’d seen these types of interactions already on Tantek Çelik’s site in the past, so naturally I figured I would start there.
Web Actions
Some basic searching revealed that in IndieWeb parlance, these types of functionalities are known as web actions. While they’re often added to make it easier for one site with the proper infrastructure to interact with another, they’re also designed for social web silos (Like Twitter, Facebook, et al.) to do this type of interaction simply as well.
As a small scale experiment, I thought I would begin manually and add some simple interface to allow Twitter users (who may not yet have their own websites to use to respond to me instead) to be able to quickly and easily reply to, repost, or like posts on my site. A little bit of reading on the wiki and Twitter’s developer site allowed me to leverage something into existence pretty quickly.
Interestingly, although there are many plugins that help users simply share a blog post to Twitter, I couldn’t easily find a WordPress plugin that already allows these other interactions as options at all. I suspect it may be because the other side of the interaction of bringing the replies back to one’s site isn’t commonly known yet.
Example
I was able to write a post, syndicate it to Twitter, upload the button images, and then inject the Twitter post ID (939650287622434816 in this example) for my syndicated copy into my post like so:
And voila! My new post now had some simple buttons that allow users a simple one click interaction with a popup window to reply to, repost, or like my post.
Displaying responses
Naturally, through the “magic” of Brid.gy, I’m able to collect these responses via backfeed with the Webmention protocol using the Webmention Plugin for WordPress back to my own website. In simpler and less technical terms, if you use one of these buttons, your interaction with my website as posted to Twitter comes back to live on my website. Thus users can use Twitter to write a comment or reply on Twitter and it will display in my comments section just as if they had written it directly in my comments box. Likes and reposts are sent to my site and are displayed relatively naturally as facepiles under the comment headings “Likes” and “Reposts”.
I’ll do another manual example with this particular post, so feel free to use the buttons at the bottom of this post to make your response via Twitter if you wish.
Future Improvements
Taking some of this code and abstracting into a plugin for others to use would be a nice feature. Doing this would also potentially make it available as a potential plugin in the larger IndieWeb suite of WordPress plugins. Perhaps it could be easily added into the codebase in one or another pre-existing plugins? I might think that David Shanske’sSyndication Links plugin or Bridgy Publish plugin might make sense as they’re already adding functionality for part of the publishing half of the cycle by either publishing to Twitter and/or importing the Tweet ID back into one’s WordPress site for potential display. One or the other could do a simple if/then on the existence of a syndicated Tweet, then extract the Twitter ID, and add the buttons to the interface appropriately.
It would be interesting to add full mark up to make <indie-action> functionality possible for a broader class of web actions, particularly if it could be integrated directly into WordPress in a more interesting manner to work with the Post Kinds Plugin or the IndieWeb PressThis type of bookmarklet functionality.
Instead of having these types of interactions injected at the bottom of the post, it may make more sense to have it display in the comment block instead.
I suspect that Facebook, Instagram, and others also enable some types of functionality, so adding the ability to use them the same way would be awesome. And even more so in the case of RSVP’s to events since Brid.gy handles those relatively well between Facebook and WordPress sites. (See this example.)
Try it yourself
Go ahead and use the buttons below to interact with this post via Twitter.
Malcolm Blaney (mblaney.xyz)
Adam Croom
Ben Werdmuller
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