Replying to people on the social web used to be “simple” before #socialMedia, when we used blogs. You would either write: 1. a short reply — directly on someone’s blog post comment form, OR 2. a longer reply — on your own blog, in-reply-to ... tantek.com/t5Nu1
Replying to people on the social web used to be “simple” before #socialMedia, when we used blogs. You would either write:

1. a short reply — directly on someone’s blog post comment form, OR

2. a longer reply — on your own blog, in-reply-to & linking to the other post and send a Pingback, expecting at least the other post’s author to see your reply, or you would also write a short comment in their blog post comment form with a brief summary & link to your longer reply post

Aside: web forums^1 at the time were proto-silos^2, and replies/threads were generally self-contained therein.


Then social media exploded and eventually everybody was replying everywhere all at once.

This was so burdensome that some even hired social media managers to perform the labor of how (and if) to reply on each silo, and attempt to keep up with every new silo that popped up.


After a few years of this mid-to-late-2000s social web chaos, in the early 2010s many of us went back to option 2. above from the pre-social-media era, and as part of owning our data^3, started posting our replies in general on our own #IndieWeb sites:

1. Regardless of brevity or length, we resumed posting peer-to-peer replies on our personal sites (now sent site-to-site with Webmentions^4), watched destinations retrieve & display our comments, and were pleased that our peer-to-peer comments looked like any other comments (except with permalinks back to our originals).

2. We also started posting replies to tweets, GitHub issues^5, etc. on our own sites, and automatically POSSE-threading them into their sites of origin.

3. When we wrote site-to-site replies where the original post had itself been syndicated to social media^6, we did both 1 & 2. This let readers follow the conversation in either place, providing an #IndieWeb record for if/when the social media thread was taken down, or disappeared along with another silo shutdown^7.


Following this 1,2,3 approach helped conceptually simplify replying on the social web, and worked well except for a couple of interesting ongoing challenges:

* What is the most efficient user interface path from viewing someone else’s post to writing a reply from your own site?

* How should you @-mention someone you are replying to? (and how can our tools write or pre-fill that for us?)

Regarding the latter, on day 14 I wrote a bit about how should we @-mention in general https://tantek.com/2023/014/t4/domain-first-federated-atmention though that was more of a general @-mention exploration.

As a follow-up to day 14, it’s worth looking into @-reply mentions in particular, specifically for each of the above 1,2,3 contexts, analyzing examples of each, and looking for patterns of @-reply mentions best practices that we can document & recommend.

This is day 16 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days, except I didn’t finish writing it (mostly) til the morning after, and editing later that afternoon.

← Day 15: https://tantek.com/2023/015/t1/publish-indieweb-decide-distribute
→ 🔮


^1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum
^2 https://indieweb.org/silo
^3 https://indieweb.org/own_your_data
^4 https://tantek.com/2023/012/t1/six-years-webmention-w3c
^5 https://indieweb.org/GitHub#POSSE_to_GitHub
^6 https://tantek.com/2023/015/t1/publish-indieweb-decide-distribute
^7 https://indieweb.org/site-deaths
#socialMedia #IndieWeb #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days
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Finished reading: Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (ISBN 9781931520898)

Have you found a good fit during eternal Caturday?

Why yes I did just paint my blank electrical plates to match the wall color because I didn't like how they stood out in white
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I always rewatch this on Martin Luther King day. The life and legacy of Martin Luther King is a topic too complicated for me to discuss in a simple note, but a Jewish and an African American group harmonizing together is not.
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Although there continues to be a corporate media blockade to the acknowledgement of links between global chaos and Russian active measures, in @BylineTimes authors of thi...
When you publish on your #IndieWeb site, you can decide afterwards where to distribute your content, and when. Figure out how you want to fit into the network of sites & instances.
We call this POSSE — for Publish on your Own Site, then Syndicate Elsewhere.^1

By prioritizing your own site, you decide whether (and when) you want to syndicate your posts (or a particular post) to a feed, to a fediverse, to a social media silo or silos, and/or to email like a newsletter.

You can make it as simple or as detailed as you want. It’s up to you.

Choose deliberately. Change your mind when things change.
 
You can opt out of any destination, either by not opting-in, i.e. explicitly not sending your posts to them, or blocking them if necessary.

Here are a few of the destination decisions I’ve made, and reasons why.

You can delay sending a post to an RSS or Atom feed, say 10 minutes after the time of publication, to give yourself a chance to edit your post, fix typos or links, before a classic feed reader retrieves and perhaps caches your post.

You can further delay sending to known uneditable destinations, like Twitter or email, to give yourself even longer to make further edits, corrections, updates, or improvements based on feedback to your original post.

Some destination decisions may depend on the type of post.

When you post a reply to someone else’s post, in addition to sending a webmention to that other post, it makes sense to also distribute it to where that other post was originally distributed, or a subset thereof, threading your POSSE reply with their original post POSSE copy.

https://indieweb.org/reply#POSSE_a_reply

For example, if you reply to someone’s IndieWeb note, and they’ve POSSEd that note to Twitter, you should POSSE your reply to Twitter as well, threading it with their POSSE copy, if you’re still using Twitter that is. If they did not POSSE their original note to Twitter, there may be reasons to POSSE your reply to Twitter anyway, if your reply makes sense there on its own.

https://indieweb.org/Twitter#POSSE_Replies_to_Twitter

Some destinations have content limitations^2, and you may want to take that into consideration when authoring your content, or not.

For example, you may want to more carefully copy-edit the first 256 (for now) characters of a note if you plan to POSSE to Twitter, so that the content that makes it through makes sense as an introduction, or a summary, or a hook, and perhaps has discovery features like hashtags.

https://indieweb.org/Twitter#POSSE_Notes_to_Twitter

You can use that POSSE tweet text length limitation strategically, placing content after that 256 character cut-off that you may want to edit or expand in an update, or content Twitter may mess-up, like @-domain mentions I described yesterday (day 14).

When you publish a multiphoto^3 post, if you’re POSSEing to Twitter, you may want to re-order your photos to choose which four photos show up in your POSSE tweet, e.g. if you happen to be using Bridgy Publish to cross-post your photos to Twitter. You can always re-order your original multiphoto post after POSSEing it.

If you’re POSSEing photos to Instagram, since you can only do that manually, there’s no need to edit your original to fit Instagram’s 10-photo limitation, or 2200 characters caption limit, or 30 hashtags limit, or 20 person-tags limit.

https://indieweb.org/multi-photo#How_to_POSSE

Or you can reconsider what if anything you get from syndicating to Twitter or Instagram.

Are people still seeing and interacting with your posts there? Are your friends?

If & when social media algorithms deprioritize your original posts in favor of showing more ads, you can deprioritize posting to social media.

If & when your friends quit social media silos^4, you can quit posting copies of your posts to those social media silos.

You decide what content goes where, when, why, and can change your decisions any time you want.

POSSEing to social media was always a stopgap.

As social media silos self-destruct, you can stop syndicating to them.

Thanks to Chris Aldrich (https://boffosocko.com/) for the banner image.

This is day 15 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days.

← Day 14: https://tantek.com/2023/014/t4/domain-first-federated-atmention
→ 🔮

^1 https://indieweb.org/POSSE
^2 Day 5: https://tantek.com/2023/005/t3/indieweb-simpler-approach
^3 https://indieweb.org/multi-photo
^4 https://indieweb.org/silo-quits
#IndieWeb #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days
When you publish on your #IndieWeb site, you can decide afterwards where to distribute your content, and when. Figure out how you want to fit into the network of sites & instances. indieweb.org/images/6/6a/fi… indieweb.org/POSSE We call this POSSE — ... tantek.com/t5Ns1
Some people are somehow still on Twitter. Why?

Are you getting into the game during eternal Caturday?

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Craig Hockenberry, writing on his long-lived personal blog:

Well, it happened.

We knew it was coming.

A prick pulled the plug.

Over the weekend, Tweetbot, Twitterrific, and every other popular third-party Twitter client was unceremoniously banned. It’s a stupid petty move on Twitter’s part, executed in an impressively stupid petty way. I imagine it’s the final nail in the coffin for several high-profile Twitter hangers-on.

Most of the people I follow, though? They’re long gone.

furries
This is why #Russia must be stopped in #Ukraine #Putin is demanding 1/2 the country. In exchange he will stop bombing the people of #Ukraine Peace talks with Putin mean death to Ukraine. The world can not stand for such terror
Two young moms, two neighbours and friends, killed by Russians yesterday in Dnipro. Forever young and beautiful. RIP… #StopRussia #StandWithUkraine