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Notices tagged with 100postsofindieweb, page 3
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Similar to @paulgraham.com (@paulg@mas.to @paulg)’s 2008 observation about trolls¹, there’s a sort of Gresham's Law of developers (vs users): developers are willing to use a forum with a lot of users in it, but users aren’t willing to use a forum with a lot of developer-speak.
Whether such forums are email lists, chat (IRC, #Matrix, #Slack, #Discord), or, well, online forums (#Reddit, #HackerNews), when discussions either start or shift into technical details, jargon, or acronyms, users (in a very broad sense) tend to stop participating, and sometimes leave, never to return.
Users in this context are anyone with a desire (or a preference) not to chat or even be bothered spending time reading about technical plumbing & #jargon, and see such discussions as a distraction at best, and more like noise to be avoided.
Paraphrasing Paul Graham again: once technical details, jargon, acronyms “take hold, it tends to become the dominant culture” and discourages users from showing up, discussing user-centric topics, or even staying in said forum.
The #IndieWeb community started in 2011 as a single #indiewebcamp IRC channel (no email list²) because it was tightly coupled to IndieWebCamp events, which were both highly technical and yet focused on actually making things work on your personal site that you need³, that you will use⁴ yourself. Conversations bridged real world use-cases and technical details.
It only took us five years after the first IndieWebCamp in Portland to recognize that the community had grown beyond the events, and had a clear need for a separate place for deep discussions of developer topics.
As part of renaming the community from IndieWebCamp to IndieWeb⁵, we created the #indieweb-dev (dev) channel for such technical topics like protocols, formats, tools, coding libraries, APIs, and any other acronyms or jargon.
The community did a good job of keeping technical topics in the dev channel, and encouraging new folks in the main #indieweb channel who started technical conversations to continue them in the dev channel.
Still, it was too easy for user-centric topics to veer into technical territory. It often felt more natural to continue a thread in the channel it started rather than break to another channel. There was also a need for regular community labor to nudge developer conversations to the developer chat channel.
We had already started documenting IndieWeb related jargon⁶ on the wiki and turned it into a MediaWiki Category so we could tag individual pages as jargon and have them automatically show-up in a list. Soon after, @aaronparecki.com (@aaronpk@aaronparecki.com) added a heuristic to the friendly channel bot Loqi to recognize when people started using jargon in the main IndieWeb chat channel and nudge⁷ them to the development channel.
Having Loqi do some of the gentle nudging has helped, though it‘s still quite easy for even the experienced folks in the community to get drawn into a developer conversation on main as it were.
We’ve documented both a summary and lengthier descriptions of channel purposes⁸ which help us remind each other, as well as provide a guide to newcomers.
Both experienced community members and newcomers share much of the user-centric focus of the IndieWeb, the IndieWeb being for everyone⁹, whether developer, hobbyist, or someone who wants an independent presence on the web without bothering with technical details. Whether some of us want to code or not, we all want to use our IndieWeb sites to express ourselves on the web, to use our sites instead of depending on social media silos. That shared purpose keeps us focused.
It takes a village: eternal community vigilance is the price of staying user-centric and welcoming to newcomers.
The ideas behind this post were originally shared in the IndieWeb meta chat channel.¹⁰
This is post 8 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/033/t1/earthquake-sanfrancisco-shifted
→ 🔮
Post glossary:
development channel (indieweb-dev)
https://indieweb.org/discuss#dev
Discord
https://indieweb.org/Discord
format
https://indieweb.org/format
Hacker News (HN)
https://indieweb.org/Hacker_News
IndieWeb
https://indieweb.org/IndieWeb
IndieWebCamp
https://indieweb.org/IndieWebCamp
IRC
https://indieweb.org/IRC
jargon
https://indieweb.org/jargon
Loqi
https://indieweb.org/Loqi
main IndieWeb chat channel (on main)
https://indieweb.org/discuss#indieweb
Matrix
https://indieweb.org/Matrix
meta chat channel
https://indieweb.org/discuss#meta
MediaWiki Category
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Categories
plumbing
https://indieweb.org/plumbing
protocol
https://indieweb.org/protocol
Reddit
https://indieweb.org/Reddit
tools
https://indieweb.org/tools
Slack
https://indieweb.org/Slack
social media silos
https://indieweb.org/silos
¹ https://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html (2008 essay, HN still succumbed to trolling)
² https://indieweb.org/discuss#Email
³ https://indieweb.org/make_what_you_need
⁴ https://indieweb.org/use_what_you_make
⁵ https://indieweb.org/rename_to_IndieWeb
⁶ https://indieweb.org/jargon
⁷ https://indieweb.org/Category:jargon#Loqi_Nudge
⁸ https://indieweb.org/discuss#Chat_Channels_Purposes
⁹ https://tantek.com/2024/026/t3/indieweb-for-everyone-internet-of-people
¹⁰ https://chat.indieweb.org/meta/2024-01-22#t1705883690759800
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Similar to @paulgraham.com (@paulg@mas.to @paulg)’s observation about trolls¹, there’s a sort of Gresham's Law of developers (vs users): developers are willing to use a forum with a lot of users in it, but users aren’t willing to use a forum with a lot of developer-speak.
Whether such forums are email lists, chat (IRC, #Matrix, #Slack, #Discord), or, well, online forums (#Reddit, #HackerNews), when discussions either start or shift into technical details, jargon, or acronyms, users (in a very broad sense) tend to stop participating, and sometimes leave, never to return.
Users in this context are anyone with a desire (or a preference) not to chat or even be bothered spending time reading about technical plumbing & #jargon, and see such discussions as a distraction at best, and more like noise to be avoided.
Paraphrasing Paul Graham again: once technical details, jargon, acronyms “take hold, it tends to become the dominant culture” and discourages users from showing up, discussing user-centric topics, or even staying in said forum.
The #IndieWeb community started in 2011 as a single IRC channel #indiewebcamp (no email list²) because it was tightly coupled to IndieWebCamp events, which were both highly technical and yet focused on actually making things work on your personal site that you need³, that you will use⁴ yourself. Conversations bridged real world use-cases and technical details.
It only took us five years after the first IndieWebCamp in Portland to recognize that the community had grown beyond the events, and had a clear need for a separate place for deep discussions of developer topics.
As part of renaming the community from IndieWebCamp to IndieWeb⁵, we created the #indieweb-dev (dev) channel for such technical topics like protocols, formats, tools, coding libraries, APIs, and any other acronyms or jargon.
The community did a good job of keeping technical topics in the dev channel, and encouraging new folks in the main #indieweb channel who started technical conversations to continue them in the dev channel.
Still, it was too easy for user-centric topics to veer into technical territory. It often felt more natural to continue such threads in the channel it started rather than break to another channel. It was also a constant bit of community labor to nudge developer conversations to the developer chat channel.
We had already started documenting IndieWeb related jargon⁶ on the wiki and turned it into a MediaWiki Category so we could tag individual pages as jargon and have them automatically show-up in a list. Soon after, @aaronparecki.com (@aaronpk@aaronparecki.com) added a heuristic to the friendly channel bot Loqi to recognize when people started using jargon in the main IndieWeb chat channel and nudge⁷ them to the development channel.
Having Loqi do some of the gentle nudging has helped, though it‘s still quite easy for even the experienced folks in the community to get drawn into a developer conversation on main as it were.
We’ve documented both a summary and lengthier descriptions of channel purposes⁸ which help us remind each other, as well as provide a guide to newcomers.
Both experienced community members and newcomers share much of the user-centric focus of the IndieWeb, the IndieWeb being for everyone⁹, whether developer, hobbyist, or someone who wants an independent presence on the web without bothering with technical details. Whether some of us want to code or not, we all want to use our IndieWeb sites to express ourselves on the web, to use our sites instead of depending on social media silos. That shared purpose keeps us focused.
It takes a community to keep a community healthy and welcoming to newcomers. Eternal community vigilance is the price of being user-centric and welcoming to newcomers.
The ideas behind this post were originally shared in the IndieWeb meta chat channel.¹⁰
This is post 8 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/033/t1/earthquake-sanfrancisco-shifted
→ 🔮
Post glossary:
development channel (indieweb-dev)
https://indieweb.org/discuss#dev
format
https://indieweb.org/format
IndieWeb
https://indieweb.org/IndieWeb
IndieWebCamp
https://indieweb.org/IndieWebCamp
jargon
https://indieweb.org/jargon
Loqi
https://indieweb.org/Loqi
main IndieWeb chat channel (on main)
https://indieweb.org/discuss#indieweb
meta chat channel
https://indieweb.org/discuss#meta
MediaWiki Category
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Categories
plumbing
https://indieweb.org/plumbing
protocol
https://indieweb.org/protocol
tools
https://indieweb.org/tools
social media silos
https://indieweb.org/silos
¹ https://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html
² https://indieweb.org/discuss#Email
³ https://indieweb.org/make_what_you_need
⁴ https://indieweb.org/use_what_you_make
⁵ https://indieweb.org/rename_to_IndieWeb
⁶ https://indieweb.org/jargon
⁷ https://indieweb.org/Category:jargon#Loqi_Nudge
⁸ https://indieweb.org/discuss#Chat_Channels_Purposes
⁹ https://tantek.com/2024/026/t3/indieweb-for-everyone-internet-of-people
¹⁰ https://chat.indieweb.org/meta/2024-01-22#t1705883690759800
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I felt the #earthquake here in #SanFrancisco. A single quick sharp jolt with rapid decay, duration less than 2s, meaning it was relatively nearby and small in magnitude
I was about to say, perhaps #earthquakes are the last use-case for #Twitter because yes I reflexively checked it and did see posts about it from folks, including a few friends.
Then I checked https://indieweb.social/tags/earthquake and it has plenty of recent #fediverse posts about the earthquake, several @sfba.social.
Feels like something big has shifted.
The #federated #IndieWeb has replaced another #socialMedia silo use-case.
This is post 7 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/027/t1/indieweb-ideals-systems-swappable
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Post glossary:
silo
https://indieweb.org/silo
social media
https://indieweb.org/social_media
use-case
https://indieweb.org/use_case
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For the #IndieWeb ideals of independence from intermediaries, not requiring corporate platforms or other organizational intermediaries¹, the best systems we have still depend on organizations. However they are all swappable, at will, by the individual:
1. domain names, depend on registrars, which you can switch
2. web hosts, depend on hosting providers, which you can switch
3. internet access, depends on internet service providers, which you can switch
4. web browsing, depends on browsers, which you can switch
5. personal devices, that have choice of web browser and internet access, which you can switch, upgrade, and use multiples of simultaneously
When you can migrate from one provider to another, one device to another, without disruption, without breaking your people-to-people connections, the providers and devices serve you, instead of gatekeeping you.
This freedom to swap, freedom to choose, depends on practical #interoperability across multiple implementations, multiple services. Open standards are the means to encouraging, testing, and verifying this user-feature interoperability across implementations and services.
This is post 6 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/026/t3/indieweb-for-everyone-internet-of-people
→ 🔮
Post glossary:
domain name
https://indieweb.org/personal-domain
interoperability
https://www.w3.org/wiki/Interoperable
web host
https://indieweb.org/web_host
¹ https://tantek.com/2024/026/t3/indieweb-for-everyone-internet-of-people
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The #IndieWeb is for everyone, everyone who wants to be part of the world-wide-web of interconnected people. The social internet of people, a network of networks of people, connected peer-to-peer in human-scale groups, communities of locality and affinity.
These peer-to-peer links should not require corporate platforms or other organizational intermediaries, nor should they require depending on developer intermediaries, nor server administrator intermediaries.
This is the "indie" in IndieWeb, independence from intermediaries, not independence from people. Because the "web" in IndieWeb, is yes the Web of the World Wide Web, and it is also the Web of people.
The "indie" in IndieWeb is also the independent agency to opt-into human-scale groups, opt-into peer-to-peer connections, opt-into communities, opt-into publics. As the POSSE page says: “Figure out how you want to fit into the network”.
The "web" in IndieWeb is also an open acknowledgment and acceptance that regardless of what groups, connections, communities, and publics you opt-into, that they are all interconnected in a larger web, that even without connecting, you can accept and respect from a distance.
The IndieWeb is for everyone, everyone who wants independence from organizations, independence of agency to associate, and who embraces the web of humans that want to interconnect, to communicate, to value and respect each other, whether one degree apart or thirty.¹
This is post 5 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/023/t1/should-public-posts-flow-across-sites
→ 🔮
Post glossary:
IndieWeb
https://indieweb.org/
POSSE
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
publics
https://indieweb.org/publics
¹: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/aug/03/internet.email
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@snarfed.org posted a great overview of thoughtful (and sometimes heated) discussions across blogs and the #fediverse about how freely should “public” posts & comments on the web flow across sites:
“Moderate people, not code” (https://snarfed.org/2024-01-21_moderate-people-not-code)
If you are designing or creating any kind of publishing or social features on the web, this post is for you.
It touches on topics ranging from #contextCollapse to #federation to #moderation and everything in between.
Does your choice of publishing tool set expectations about where your content might propagate, or whether it will be indexed by search engines? Should it?
Do the limitations of your server (e.g. js;dr) imply limitations of where your posts go, or whether they can be searched or archived? Should they?
When you post something publicly, are you truly posting it for a global audience for all time, or only for one or a few more limited #publics for an ephemerality?
When you reply to a post, do you expect your reply to only be visible in the context you posted it, or do you expect it to travel alongside that post to anywhere it might propagate to?
On the #IndieWeb, especially for public posts, some of these questions have easier and more obvious answers, because the intent of nearly all public IndieWeb posts is to interact across the web with other posts and sites, typically via the #Webmention protocol. However there are still questions.
Are the expectations for a blog and blogging different from a social media site, whether a silo or an instance on a network?
Is a personal website with posts still just a blog, or does it become something new when you start posting responses from your site, or receiving (e.g. via Webmention) and displaying responses from across the web to your posts on your site? Or is it now a “social website”?
If you have a social website, what is your responsibility for keeping it, well, social? Do you moderate Webmentions by default? Do you use the Vouch extension for some automatic moderation?
Are #POSSE & #backfeed different from federation or are they the same thing from a user-perspective, with merely different names hinting at different implementations?
Do you allow anyone from any site to respond or react to your posts? Or do you treat your social website like your home, and follow what I like to call a "house party protocol", only letting in those you know, and perhaps allowing them to bring a +1 or 2?
I have many more questions. Each of these deserves thoughtful discussions, documentation of what different tools & services do today that we can try out, learn from, and use to make considered decisions when creating new things to post on and across websites.
This is post 4 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/022/t1/indiewebcamp-brighton-planned
→ 🔮
Post glossary:
backfeed
https://indieweb.org/backfeed
blog
https://indieweb.org/blog
blogging
https://indieweb.org/blogging
comments
https://indieweb.org/comments
context collapse
https://indieweb.org/context_collapse
ephemerality
https://indieweb.org/ephemerality
js;dr
https://indieweb.org/js;dr
moderation
https://indieweb.org/moderation
POSSE
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
posts
https://indieweb.org/posts
publics
https://indieweb.org/publics
reply
https://indieweb.org/reply
Vouch
https://indieweb.org/Vouch
Webmention
https://indieweb.org/Webmention
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The first IndieWebCamp of the year has been planned!
🎪 IndieWebCamp Brighton
🗓 2024-03-09…10
🏢 The Skiff, Brighton, England
🎟 Tickets available 2024-02-01!
Event: https://events.indieweb.org/2024/03/indiewebcamp-brighton-2024-xRTP2hAZOvZd
Wiki: https://indieweb.org/2024/Brighton
Questions about #IndieWebCamp? Ask in #IndieWeb chat!
💬 https://chat.indieweb.org/
This is post 3 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/003/t1/2023-indieweb-gift-calendar-numbers
→ 🔮
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31 days of #IndieWeb gifts: the _2023 IndieWeb Gift Calendar_ (https://indieweb.org/2023-12-indieweb-gift-calendar) wrapped up a full month of IndieWeb-related creations & updates from the community (and sometimes beyond) to everyone who wants to improve their #IndieWeb experience.
From plugins & libraries, to tools & services, to events & meetups, to web components & wiki pages, and blog posts & newsletters, there was something for everyone.
Some numbers:
🎁 67 total gifts
📄 32 new IndieWeb wiki pages
📜 7 posts on improving blogs, IndieWeb specs, and event summaries
💻 6 Homebrew Website Club online meetups
📫 5 This Week In The IndieWeb newsletters
🧱 4 library updates: new web components, #microformats2 parser update
🌉 3 Bridgy Fed updates & improvements
🧩 2 plugin updates: #Elgg IndieWeb & #WordPress #IndieAuth
🎪 1 #IndieWebCamp San Diego (2 days!)
📚 1 indiebookclub new year in review overview feature
📽 1 IndieWeb movie viewings aggregator
🧶 1 #Threads federating out #ActivityPub (followable by #BridgyFed)
Gift were shared by:
👥 20 individuals
🏢 1 company
I compiled these numbers by hand. Let me know if you see any errors. There are many more potential stats like:
* average (mean and median) number of gifts per contributor
* how many edits to the Gift Calendar wiki page
* how many different editors of the wiki page
* average (mean and median) number of edits per editor
I’ll leave those as exercises for others if they wish!
This is post 2 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/001/t1/restarting-100days-indieweb-gift-calendar
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Time to begin again: restarting my #100Days of #IndieWeb project for 2024, as a #100Posts of IndieWeb project, and congrats to the IndieWeb community on a fully completed 2023 IndieWeb Gift Calendar!
Last year I completed 48 out of a planned 100 posts in my #100DaysOfIndieWeb project, for nearly 48 days (some days had multiple posts). Instead of resetting my goals accordingly, say down to 50, I’m going for 100 again, however, this time for 100 posts rather than 100 days, having learned that some days I find the time for multiple posts, and other days none at all.
Looking back to the start of last year’s 100 Days project, it’s been one year since I encouraged everyone to own their own notes¹. Since then many have started, restarted, or expanded their personal sites to do so. Some have switched from a #Twitter account to a #Mastodon (or other #fediverse) account as a stopgap for short-form status posts. A step in the right direction, yet also an opportunity to take the leap this year to fully own their identity and posts on the web.
In 2023 Twitter also broke all existing API clients (including my website). I did not feel it was worth my time to re-apply for an API key and rebuild/retest any necessary code for my semi-automatic #POSSE publishing, not knowing when they might break things again (since there was no rational reason for them to have broken things in the first place).
I manually POSSEd a few posts after that, yet from the lack of interactions, either Twitter’s feed algorithm² isn’t showing my posts, or people have largely left or stopped using Twitter.
Either way, when your friends stop seeing your posts on a silo, there’s no need to spend any time POSSEing to it.
On the positive side, the IndieWeb community really came together in 2023, shining brightly even through the darker days of December.
We, the IndieWeb community (and some beyond!) provided a gift (or often multiple) to the rest of community for every single day of December 2023³, the first time we successfully filled out the whole month since the 2018 IndieWeb Challenge⁴, and only the second time ever in the seven years of the IndieWeb Challenge-turned-Gift-Calendar.
By going through the various gifts (more than 2 per day on average!), there are many interesting numbers and patterns we could surface. That deserves its own post however, as does a summary of the 48 posts⁵ of my 2023 100 Days of IndieWeb attempt, so I’ll end this post here.
Happy New Year to all, with an especially well deserved congratulations to the IndieWeb community and everyone who contributed to the 2023 Gift Calendar. Well done!
Let’s see what else we can create & share on our personal sites in 2024 and continue setting a higher bar for the independent web by showing instead of telling. #ShowDontTell
This is post 1 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
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→ 🔮
Post glossary:
API
https://indieweb.org/API
POSSE
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
silo
https://indieweb.org/silo
¹ https://tantek.com/2023/001/t1/own-your-notes
² https://indieweb.org/algorithmic_feed
³ https://indieweb.org/2023-12-indieweb-gift-calendar
⁴ https://indieweb.org/2018-12-indieweb-challenge
⁵ https://tantek.com/2023/365/t2/no-large-language-model-llm-used
Tantek
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