“You can be a carpenter this time around.” – Lucy Bellwood

A personal website is a lovely thing. Nobody will buy this platform and use it as their personal plaything. No advertisers will boycott and send me scrambling to produce different content. No seed funding will run out overnight.

#personal #publishing #indieweb #writing #sharing #rss

I can’t recommend @maggie@indieweb.social’s website enough. If you’re into the intersection of design, note taking and digital anthropology, this is a great read.

Socratic blogging

Ok let's be honest. I like the fediverse because it caters to me. I have huge technical privilege. I've been writing code and making games and building computers and setting up websites and all those sorts of things since I was a child — and I find doing all those things fun. For me I've set up microblog.pub as a single person activitypub/fediverse/mastodon instance because then I can play with it. I spend hours tweaking my css to make the site look how I want. I contribute patches and discussions to the help build, improve, and add features to the microblog.pub software that I use. All of that is a source of joy for me. But that's me.

Most people don't have my technical privilege. Most people just want a social media platform that will do the job of connecting them to their networks and showing them the content they're looking for.

And I can yell and shout about how #indieweb or fedi/masto/AP is better than platforms for this that or the other reason. And I do genuinely believe in those open platforms for those reasons. But those reasons aren't why I love them. I love them because the open systems are empowering to me, specifically, because of my technical privilege and because they provide a space for me to play in the way I like to play.

What sucks, though, is that this is about community. There are plenty of things in life where if you want to do things your weird way that's different to everyone else, you can do that and have your fun and it doesn't actually matter what other people think. But that's not true for social networking. If everyone else has different wants, needs, and priorities from their social network and thus chooses to do something else from what your wants, needs, and priorities direct you to choose, then your experience of doing the thing you choose is lessened by the fact that your communities don't join you.

So I'm left stressed. I deeply love open platforms. I love the web. I want other people to love it too and to come join me playing there. But I also totally understand why the touted benefits of those platforms don't even remotely make up for the poor UX to people who just want the social media to work. It's all well and good to be invested in the community project of building the network but not everyone has the desire or the resources to be part of that kind of project. So I'm anxious because I know that it IS better for most of my friends to use something else. It makes more sense for them to go to a platform that is all owned by and managed by a single legal entity because that is what provides the most value for the least cost (difficulty of use). But then my playground is lessened. And I recognise that that playground was only ever fun for me and not most of my friends, because of that technical privilege,. But it still makes me anxious and it still makes me sad. Cause I want to keep playing.

It takes one person to knock down a silo - daverupert.com

Pour a foundation for your own silo or home.

#silos #indieweb #twitter #mastodon #fediverse #personal #publishing #sharing
#words #writing #reading #text #web #history #indieweb #personal #publishing
Navigating the rollercoaster of social networking silos is much easier when all it takes is a plug-in on your website 😇 #IndieWeb

Add support for bookmarks with h-cite

Bookmark posts with anchors break permalinks

Mastodon is just blogs

Do you still miss Google Reader, almost a decade after it was shut down? It’s back!

A Mastodon server is a feed reader, shared by everyone who uses that server.

I really like Simon’s description of the fediverse:

A Mastodon server (often called an instance) is just a shared blog host. Kind of like putting your personal blog in a folder on a domain on shared hosting with some of your friends.

Want to go it alone? You can do that: run your own dedicated Mastodon instance on your own domain.

This is spot-on:

Mastodon is just blogs and Google Reader, skinned to look like Twitter.

#mastodon #fediverse #social #networks #twitter #blogs #blogging #rss #syndication #feeds #readers #indieweb #decentralisation #activitypub #hosting #servers

That fediverse feeling

#mastodon #fediverse #social #networks #indieweb #twitter #syndication #personal #publishing #blogs #blogging #community #vibes

Syndicating to Mastodon

#indieweb #syndication #mastodon #fediverse #social #networks #bridgy #code #coding #api

Bird’s-eye View · Paul Robert Lloyd

I love not feeling bound to any particular social network. This website, my website, is the one true home for all the stuff I’ve felt compelled to write down or point a camera at over the years. When a social network disappears, goes out of fashion or becomes inhospitable, I can happily move on with little anguish.

#indieweb #syndication #indiekit #posse #fediverse #mastodon #twitter #social #networks #personal #publishing #coding #code

Notes: beginner's guide to the indie web

So this is serving #indieweb #mf2 html on my page with as deep a stack as I like, and in my activitystream it's serving both misskey's old quoteUrl field and the new FEP-e232 format for the quote

To toot, or not to toot, that is the question.

 

Fediverse

Despite growing pains and potential problems, I think this could be one of the most interesting movements on the web in recent years. Let’s see where it goes.

I’m getting the same vibe as Bastian about Mastodon:

Suddenly there was this old Twitter vibe. Real conversations. Real people. Interesting content. A feeling of a warm welcoming group. No algorithm to mess around with our timelines. No troll army to destory every tiny bit of peace. Yes, Mastodon is rough around the edges. Many parts are not intuitive. But this roughness somehow added to the positive experience for me.

This could really work!

#mastodon #fediverse #social #networks #twitter #community #scale #scaling #decentralisation #indieweb
I’ve added Mastodon syndication to my website’s backend, which means this post should appear on my website (barryfrost.com), my Twitter account (@barryf) and my Mastodon account (@barryf@mastodon.social). #indieweb
#indieweb #twitter #mastodon

New IndieAuth Client PHP Release