Statuses

People I love following and learning from on the web:

Kimberly Hirsh – https://kimberlyhirsh.com/ a fascinating reader, writer, educator, and fandom expert

Tom Critchlow – https://tomcritchlow.com/ – consultant, digital experimenter and bricoleur, networked writing and education

Aaron Davis – https://collect.readwriterespond.com/ – educator, edtech innovation and implementation 

Replied to Finding a new home for the WordPress community by Mike McAlisterMike McAlister (Ollie)
The recent turmoil at Twitter has a lot of WordPress community members looking for alternatives. What if we used WordPress to power our community?
This is a brilliant idea and is broadly what underpins the mission of the IndieWeb space for the past decade. The difference is that it isn’t platform specific and a large portion of it is already built and working! Of course it’s in different stages and forms of usability for various platforms, but most of the building blocks already exist for a broad variety of platforms, including (and especially for) WordPress. 

Because of the base level design, I can post on my site and syndicate content almost anywhere while often times getting replies and responses back from a number of platforms. Because it’s all built on open specs it means that people on WordPress can communicate directly with those on Drupal, Craft, Hugo, Kirby, Django, a variety of static site generators, Twitter, Mastodon, and almost any platform that chooses to support the broad standards. (Matt Mullenweg has already started down the road to having Tumblr support these building blocks.)

WordPress already has support for all of the major building blocks and works with a variety of social readers which make reading content and replying to it pretty simple and straightforward. Of course this doesn’t mean that there still isn’t work left to perfect it, smooth the corners, and lower the technical bars, and the costs for a wider diversity of people. For those that don’t want to deal with the hassle and maintenance, there are also several services that support most of the specs out of the box. Micro.blog in particular has a great user interface and does all the heavy lifting for $5/month. Without any cost, you can create an account and join that community using your own WordPress site today. 

If you’re into the idea, stop by the IndieWeb chat, ask questions, and join the party. I’ve got a collection of posts with a variety of resources, descriptions, how-tos, and videos if you need them: https://boffosocko.com/research/indieweb/

Here’s a short preview of what some of it looks like in practice: 

Aside: David Shanske, perhaps we ought to run one of our WordPress IndieWeb install fests one one of these coming weekends to help onboard people? 

For some arcane and historical reasons WordPress was filtering out the emoji in my my feeds which was preventing me from participating in some of the discovery portions of micro.blog using tagmoji.

Installing the Disable Emoji plugin seems to have remedied the issue. Hopefully without causing any other issues.

Replied to a post by Chris Baca (@cdbaca@indieweb.social)Chris Baca (@cdbaca@indieweb.social) (Indieweb.Social)
One of the things I don't see often talked about in the #indieweb sphere is how "meta" it is. E.g., I enjoy reading about how devs think about FOSS, but I don't want those to be the only indie people I read. Are there folks out there that are self-hosted but are writing about philosophy or literature, doing journalism, or thinking about other interesting things? Who should I throw in my feed reader? (A favorite of mine is Alan Jacobs @ blog.ayjay.org)
They are definitely out there. Micro.blog is an entire community of diverse people with this practice (admittedly with some technophiles scattered about). You can easily set up an account and pipe a feed of your content into that network and participate from your own site (for free). If you’re into education and related topics, you’ll find people like Maha Bali who are part of the Domain of One’s Own space which is similar to . Perhaps I’ll list some more for ?