Replied to a post by Buster Benson (@buster@medium.social)Buster Benson (@buster@medium.social) (Mastodon)
@tchambers @coachtony @jeffjarvis @mathowie Thanks for these links! Definitely exciting to see how this is being approached from different angles. I’m excited for this next chapter.
@buster@medium.social @tchambers @coachtony@medium.social @jeffjarvis @mathowie
Another example of longer posts which are folded under a “read more” type link within the Fediverse itself can be seen in the Hometown fork of Mastodon (https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown), which is running the hcommons.social platform. The admins have upped the character limit to 1000 instead of the usual 500. Ideally those reading in other parts of the network would see the beginning of a post and a “Read more” link to read the remainder of the piece.

I often post to my own WordPress website which has a plugin to make it appear as if it were ActivityPub compatible. If I follow it via a Hometown-based (Mastodon) server, like my hcommons.social account, I see all the full short notes/replies content which are usually 1000 characters or less. For posts over that limit, there’s a “Read More >” which opens up the entirety of the article within the hcommons.social interface where I can read it in its entirety. Naturally there’s a link to the original, so I can also go back to read that if I chose.

I’ve just gone over the 1000 character limit, so I’ll post this on my own site, syndicate a copy to my hcommons.social account, and with any luck it will serve as an example of how all this might work between WordPress, a forked version of Mastodon, and Mastodon itself, as well as for testing it for reading in other parts of the Fediverse if one wished.

Screencapture of post stream seen from within hcommons.social. It features a post with over 1000 characters and displays a Read more > link at the bottom of the post to see the entire article.

Beyond this reading experience, one should also be aware of a separate user interface/interaction problem inherent in how Mastodon and potentially other parts of the Fediverse handle replies and who can see them. I’ll leave this link to explain that issue separately: https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/109559268498004036. (Hopefully your instance will let you see a subsection of some of the replies to it…)

An additional benefit that one gets in bolting on ActivityPub the way it works for my WordPress site is that folks who subscribe to @chrisaldrich can see linked text natively from within Mastodon despite the fact that Mastodon doesn’t allow one to wrap text with URLs to link out.

RSVPed Attending Respectful Responses

How do we enable more positive serendipity & discovery via our websites, between both existing friends & family, and new positive interactions. And how do we raise barriers to spam, harassment, and other unpleasant social media interactions.

It's not just "fixing comments", it's much more than that.

Respectful responses include even simple interactions like likes, bookmarks, and reposts, as well as indirect comments like quote tweets.

A broader user-centric conversation about the problem that Vouch is designed to solve one or some parts thereof.

Plywood wall with various posters glued up featuring one that reads POST NO ILLS

Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash
Hammersmith, London, UK |
A comment on the fragile state of society today, by artist Tim Fishlock

Many who attended @WeAreNew_Public‘s #NewPublicFestival earlier this week may be interested in this upcoming IndieWebCamp pop up session.

📑 What the earliest fragments of English reveal | BBC

Annotated What the earliest fragments of English reveal by Cameron Laux (bbc.com)
If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.  
So sad to see that they’ve abrogated their responsibility for comments on their site to Twitter and Facebook

📑 The Vulnerability of Learning | Cathie LeBlanc

Replied to The Vulnerability of Learning by Cathie LeBlancCathie LeBlanc (Desert of My Real Life)

When I received Chris’s comment, my first response was that I should delete my post or at least the incorrect part of it. It’s embarrassing to have your incorrect understandings available for public view. But I decided to leave the post as is but put in a disclaimer so that others would not be misled by my misunderstandings.
This experience reminded me that learning makes us vulnerable. Admitting that you don’t know something is hard and being corrected is even harder. Chris was incredibly gentle in his correction. It makes me think about how I respond to my students’ work. Am I as gentle with their work as Chris was to mine? Could I be more gentle? How often have I graded my students’ work and only focused on what they did wrong? Or forgotten that feeling of vulnerability when you don’t know something, when you put your work out for others to judge? This experience has also reminded me that it’s important that we as teachers regularly put ourselves into situations in which we authentically grapple with not knowing something. We should regularly share our less than fully formed understandings with others for feedback. It helps us remember that even confident learners can struggle with being vulnerable. And we need to keep in mind that many of our students are not confident learners.  

I’m reminded here of the broad idea that many bloggers write about sooner or later of their website being a “thought space” or place to contemplate out in the open. More often than not, even if they don’t have an audience to interact with, their writings become a way of thinking out loud, clarifying things for themselves, self-evolving, or putting themselves out there for potential public reactions (good, bad, or indifferent).

While writing things out loud to no audience can be helpful and useful on an individual level, it’s often even more helpful to have some sort of productive and constructive feedback. While a handful of likes or positive seeming responses can be useful, I always prefer the ones that make me think more broadly, deeply, or force me to consider other pieces I hadn’t envisioned before. To me this is the real value of these open and often very public thought spaces.

For those interested in the general idea, I’ve been [bookmarking/tagging things around the idea of thought spaces I’ve read on my own website](https://boffosocko.com/tag/thought-spaces/). Hopefully this collection helps others better understand the spectrum of these ideas for themselves.

With respect to the vulnerability piece, I’m reminded of an episode of The Human Current I listened to a few weeks back. There was an excellent section that touched on building up trust with students or even a class when it comes to providing feedback and criticism. Having a bank of trust makes it easier to give feedback as well as to receive it. Here’s a link to the audio portion and a copy of the relevant text.

👓 The Vulnerability of Learning | Desert of My Real Life

Read The Vulnerability of Learning by Cathie LeBlancCathie LeBlanc (Desert of My Real Life)
Listening to the students talk about feeling unsure and vulnerable when they first encountered open educational practices made me think about my own learning. As a mid-career academic who has changed jobs and even disciplines, I am a confident learner. I have received lots of praise and other kinds of positive reinforcement for my ability to learn new things. If you have read previous posts on my blog, you might know that I am really interested in developments in the IndieWeb movement and am trying to write about some of my experiences with using IndieWeb tools to build my own web site. I’ve been building my own sites for years and so I have a lot of confidence in my ability there as well. Working on the IndieWeb stuff has been challenging because there’s a lot of new language and new concepts as well as some aspects of web development that I have not engaged with before. I often feel vulnerable when I write my posts about the IndieWeb because my understanding of how everything works is emerging. In other words, I don’t get it all yet but I’m still writing publicly about my work.

📑 The Vulnerability of Learning | Cathie LeBlanc

Replied to The Vulnerability of Learning by Cathie LeBlancCathie LeBlanc (Desert of My Real Life)

Chris was incredibly gentle in his correction. It makes me think about how I respond to my students’ work. Am I as gentle with their work as Chris was to mine?  

What a relief to hear this! The hardest part about writing my response was in possibly coming off too hard or painfully pedantic and not wanting to turn you off in your explorations.

👓 Sunday, December 16, 2018 | Scripting News

Read Scripting News: Sunday, December 16, 2018 by Dave Winer (Scripting News)
Feeling courageous? Click the [repost] symbol next to this post. #
I like that Dave is continuing to experiment with allowing others to use Twitter to interact with his blog. Reminds me of some of my experiments almost two years ago.

👓 The Impossibility of ‘Heathers’ | National Review

Read The Impossibility of 'Heathers' by Kevin D. WilliamsonKevin D. Williamson (National Review)
Which movies from your youth would be impossible to make today due to political correctness?
Interesting that he asks for reader responses here, but the website provides no way to actively respond.

👓 More control over comments | Inoreader blog

Read More control over comments (Inoreader blog)
You can see that we are focused lately on the social stuff. Why? Because it was always there in front of you, but there were many obstacles that made it not very usable or friendly. Comment has improved, but one thing with them remained. Many people don’t know that comments in InoReader are actually public …

👓 Thinking through the IWC Berlin displaying responses session | Eddie Hinkle

Read Thinking through the IWC Berlin displaying responses session by Eddie HinkleEddie Hinkle (eddiehinkle.com)
I remotely attended the Displaying Responses session of IndieWebCamp Berlin 2018. It was very interesting and they made some good progress thinking though how to deal with how and when to display responses received to posts on your website. They came to the conclusion that there are four groups of people that you want to treat their responses differently: Accepted / Immediate Connections 2nd level connections Everyone Mute or Blocked Accepted / Immediate Connections These are essentially your friends on Facebook or your follow list on Twitter. These are people that you have chosen to connect with in some way and this logical conclusions can be drawn around the level of interactions you're willing to have. My plan is to display these responses completely (name, photo and content of response). This list will be generated for me by adding anyone I follow, as well as anyone I have sent a reply to. This will NOT add people to whom I have liked, emoji reacted, quoted, or bookmarked. Those are lower level responses that do not indicate a deeper level of a desire to connect with that person. 2nd Level Connections These are "friends of friends". You can assume they won't do anything TOO bad, but you might not want them posting all over your site. There is a deeper level of trust here because of mutual connection but still some care should be taken. This can be determined through different ways. One way that has been brainstormed in the IndieWeb is Vouch. I don't currently track 2nd level connections but I liked how Tantek thought this through, so my plan is for replies to display their photo and name as "other people that have responded to this post", but not display the content of their reply. I also think if they send a like, emoji reaction or quote, I'll display it just like I would an Immediate Connection. Everyone This is the World Wide Web, and anyone could send anything to my website via webmention. So this is a category you likely want to moderate. My initial thought is I will accept likes, quotes and emoji reactions from them but I won't list attribution of who did it while moderated, just the reaction itself. For replies I am considering potentially listing the url of the author of the post under "other people who have replied" but no name, photo or content while moderated. Mute or Blocked These are people who you do not trust for whatever reasons have happened for you. You don't want to associate with them in any way. Responses are not displayed from these people and they are not listed in the moderation queue. Some thoughts on moderation This means I'll need a moderation queue. Anything from a 2nd level connection or from the Everyone group will enter the moderation queue. Responses from 2nd level connections should appear higher in the queue than responses from the Everyone group. From there I can choose to: approve a response (display it like an immediate connection) approve response and accept author (makes this author an immediate connection so they aren't moderated anymore) ignore response (this leaves the response as is, it leaves the queue but doesn't display additional details) remove response (this removes the response from my storage) remove response and block author (this both removes the response from my storage and makes sure I don't receive responses from them in the future) All in all, it was a great session that I really enjoyed and I'm looking forward to actually working on implementing some of these features into my site.
A well laid out synopsis of how this could be done well. Filing for future templating.