Paul weighs up the pros and cons of using silos (like Twitter and Facebook) and using the Indie Web. This bit made me want to stand on my desk and cry, “Oh captain, my captain!”:
“The market has proven that consumers want freely available social networks that are easy to use, and used by everyone else. Only centralised services can provide this, not familiarity with a command line and a succession of acronyms and protocols”, says my not entirely fictional naysayer.
I’m not sure this argument follows. While the human desire to connect and communicate easily with each other has been proven many times over, it’s becoming clear that all-encompassing centralised networks are not the solution. That way lies algorithmically-skewed streams of consciousness, layered upon sordid business models and Californian ideology. Fuck that.
The web is agreement, but that doesn’t mean we agree to use the same websites.
Celebrating 1 million webmentions at Homebrew Website Club!
A nice description of syndication via POSSEing.
(I never thought I’d find myself linking to quality content on Go Daddy.)
🎉 Jekyll’s default Minima theme now has #microformats baked in to its templates. Really pleased to see my pull request merged in the latest gem release. #indieweb
Hello from IndieWebCamp Baltimore!
Most of my online friends and acquaintances will never understand or participate in the IndieWeb, and so I require a bridge between these worlds. On one side I choose what content to post and how it is stored, and it exists mainly on an island that few visit regularly. On the other side is nearly everyone I know, blissfully ignorant of my real home on the web and unable to see any content shared there without manual intervention or working plugins.
This does not all seem bad, though. Maintaining control will require more attention be placed on managing my content, and this time must come from somewhere. I imagine that I’ll slowly begin using social media less, writing more, and learning more about how to develop solutions to problems that arise within my setup.
If you are one of those old or young bloggers, please join in. Drop Facebook, drop Twitter and drop Medium for original thought. Own your traffic. You can use them to engage in discussion. But don’t get lost in there. Write daily. Publish as often as you have something to say. Link to other blogs.