Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future
It is common to refer to universally popular social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest as “walled gardens.” But they are not gardens; they are walled industrial sites, within which users, for no financial compensation, produce data which the owners of the factories sift and then sell. Some of these factories (Twitter, Tumblr, and more recently Instagram) have transparent walls, by which I mean that you need an account to post anything but can view what has been posted on the open Web; others (Facebook, Snapchat) keep their walls mostly or wholly opaque. But they all exercise the same disciplinary control over those who create or share content on their domain.
Professor Alan Jacobs makes the case for the indie web:
We need to revivify the open Web and teach others—especially those who have never known the open Web—to learn to live extramurally: outside the walls.
What do I mean by “the open Web”? I mean the World Wide Web as created by Tim Berners-Lee and extended by later coders. The open Web is effectively a set of protocols that allows the creating, sharing, and experiencing of text, sounds, and images on any computer that is connected to the Internet and has installed on it a browser that can interpret information encoded in conformity with these protocols.
This resonated strongly with me:
To teach children how to own their own domains and make their own websites might seem a small thing. In many cases it will be a small thing. Yet it serves as a reminder that the online world does not merely exist, but is built, and built to meet the desires of certain very powerful people—but could be built differently.
I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
I started a Twitter account, and fell into a world of good, dumb, weird jokes, links to new sites and interesting ideas. It was such an excellent place to waste time that I almost didn’t notice that the blogs and link-sharing sites I’d once spent hours on had become less and less viable. Where once we’d had a rich ecosystem of extremely stupid and funny sites on which we might procrastinate, we now had only Twitter and Facebook.
And then, one day, I think in 2013, Twitter and Facebook were not really very fun anymore. And worse, the fun things they had supplanted were never coming back. Forums were depopulated; blogs were shut down. Twitter, one agent of their death, became completely worthless: a water-drop-torture feed of performative outrage, self-promotion, and discussion of Twitter itself. Facebook had become, well … you’ve been on Facebook.
Thank you for this post! I’ve added some of these spots to my to do list for my wife and I! I’ve been really enjoying reading the articles and I just wanted to thank you for having an RSS feed outside of Facebook. I have recently been removing myself from Facebook after all the privacy drama and am reading all my news and blogs in an RSS reader, so I was pleasantly surprised to find this blog had its own RSS feed!
It’s great that you have a comment form on the posts. You might consider enabling Webmentions. It’s a way for people to post comments to your site from their own. (Like this comment was posted on my website before I posted it here: )
If you are based on wordpress, here is some information: https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started_on_WordPress#Webmentions or if you are running your own website there is some more general information here: https://indieweb.org/Webmention
1. The explanatory text is nice, but runs a bit long for the uninitiated. I'm always worried that the length turns folks off? Perhaps something shorter for the gist of the idea with a link instead to a particular page that lays it out in more detail? I've also considered hiding some of the extra explanation behind a pop up or by using an abbr (or other appropriate html) tag with appropriate CSS hover markup so that when one hovers over a portion, they get a title-like window with all the gory details. Ideally, over time, with the spread of the concept the explanation won't be necessary at all.
2. One potentially crucial piece you're missing is that the post on their webpage HAS to have the permalink URL for your post on the page, otherwise the webmention will fail. Worse, without this bit of knowledge they won't know why it failed.
I would recommend starting at the bottom and then slowly reading your way to the top to try to understand what he's doing in each section. Note that there are one or two places where he splits a particular change up between a few commits or occasionally backtracks. There's also a section in which he "rips" out the WP core functionality of Post Formats in favor of using the Post Kinds Plugin--I'd recommend you don't do this to make your resultant theme the most flexible. I believe there's also a section in which he adds a "comment walker" and later removes it because the experimentaly functionality was later merged into the Webmentions/Semantic Linkbacks plugin to better handle comments, so you can safely ignore may of those chunks which are now stable.
I suspect that between this and the code models for SemPress and Independent Publisher (which should also have some David Shanske specific commits and related discussion that you can look up) you may be somewhat better off.
Good luck! We're all cheering for you!
Just FYI, I have some IndieAuth Swift classes in my Indigenous app. Eventually I want to turn them into a Swift library. However you are welcome to embed any of them in Icro that might help make login easier. Also, I’m happy to answer any questions you might have 🙂
It would be fun to have other folks in the community read the “standard” introductions for each section of This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition! I can take them in .wav for or .flac or anything that Audacity can open in a lossless way.
Regarding the webring: there has been no progress! I intended to circle back with Doug Beal about it but it was forgotten. I have been playing with glitch.com for several IndieWeb-related projects, recently, and that would be a fun one!
Hmm, looks like my new inline micropub browser extension is just about ready for testing! #indieweb
I most definitely want to start getting some Health data into my website! It’s tough because I want to do ALL of it, but it’s probably better to just do a couple at a time. Right now I want to definitely get sleep data. Activity Rings is also a great idea.
I kind of feel like Health should probably be its own app as to avoid Indigenous becoming EVERYTHING. Thankfully I’ve tried to keep the IndieWeb controllers separated from my Indigenous centric code to be able to do multiple apps easier and eventually push out some swift libraries to make Micropub apps easier for everyone on iOS. What would be your more important Health data?
This was a great episode. I don’t do much private stuff on my website, but I do a little. Sometimes there are location checkins or watch posts that are more for my own memories than things I want to share publicly. In those cases I have them use the Micropub visibility property. Technically all of my posts support that but I’ve mainly just used it with checkins and watch posts. Since not many Micropub clients support visibility I added a text shortcut that if I add to my post content it will add the visibility hidden inside my Micropub endpoint.