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What I created while remotely participating at #IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024: wiki-gardened day 1’s BarCamp sessions notes pages, and documented my @-mention @-@-mention autolinking coding improvements I built the Sunday before.
Day 2 of IndieWebCamps is Create Day, where everyone is encouraged to create, make, or build something for their personal website, or the IndieWeb community, or both.
At the start of day 2, everyone is encourage to pick things to make¹. What to make at an IndieWebCamp² can be anything from setting up your personal website, to writing a blog post, redesigning your styling, building new features, helping other participants, or contributing to shared IndieWeb community resources, whether code or content.
Everyone is encouraged to at least pick something they consider easy, that they can do in less than an hour, then a more bold goal, and then perhaps a stretch goal, something challenging that may require collaboration, asking for help, or breaking into smaller steps.
For my "easy" task, I built on what another remote participant, @gregorlove.com completed the night before. gRegor had archived all the IndieWebCamp Brighton Sessions Etherpads onto the wiki, linked from the Schedule page³. gRegor had noted that he didn’t have time to clean-up the pages, e.g. convert and fix Markdown links.
I went through the 13 Session Notes archives and did the following:
* converted Markdown links to MediaWiki links
* converted indieweb.org (and some services) links to local wiki page links
* fixed (some) typos
With some help from @alexsirac.com (@alexture@todo.eu), I figured out how to create a MediaWiki Contributions summary link of my edits:
* https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=Tantek.com&namespace=all&start=2024-03-10&end=2024-03-10&offset=20240310143900&limit=25
I point this out to provide an example of an IndieWeb Create Day project that is:
* incremental on top of someone else’s work
* community contribution rather a personal-focused project
* editing and wiki-gardening as valid contributions, not just creating new content
I point this out to illustrate some of the IndieWeb community's recognitions & values in contrast to typical corporate cultures and incentive systems which often only reward:
* new innovations (not incremental improvements)
* solo (or maybe jointly in a small team) inventions, designs, specs, or implementations
* something large, a new service or a big feature, not numerous small edits & fixes
In this regard, the IndieWeb community shares more in common with Wikipedia and similar collaborative communities (despite the #Indie in #IndieWeb), than any corporation.
For my "more bold" goal, I wrote a medium-sized post about the auto-linking improvements I made the Sunday before the IndieWebCamp to my personal website with examples and brief descriptions of the coding changes & improvements.
* https://tantek.com/2024/070/t1/updated-auto-linking-mention-use-cases
My stretch goal was to write up a more complete auto-linking specification, based on the research I have done into @-mention @-@-mention user practices (on #Mastodon, other #ActivityPub or #fediverse implementations, and even across #socialMedia silos), as well as how implementations link URLs, domains, and paths.
That stretch goal remains a goal, however I did collect a handful of prior posts on @-mentions which I plan to source for specifying auto-linking and @-mentioning:
* https://tantek.com/2023/011/t1/indieweb-evolving-at-mention
* https://tantek.com/2023/014/t4/domain-first-federated-atmention
* https://tantek.com/2023/018/t1/elevate-indieweb-above-silo
* https://tantek.com/2023/019/t5/reply-domain-above-address-and-silo
* https://tantek.com/2023/109/t2/years-ago-first-federated-indieweb-thread
#autoLink #atDomain #atPath #atMention #atMentions #atat #atAtMention
I was one of a few remote participants in addition to ~18 in-person participants, the overwhelming majority of overall attendees, who demonstrated something at the end of IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024 day 2. See what everyone else made & demonstrated on Create Day:
* https://indieweb.org/2024/Brighton/Demos
This is post 13 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/070/t1/updated-auto-linking-mention-use-cases
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Glossary:
Create Day
https://indieweb.org/Create_Day
IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024
https://indieweb.org/2024/Brighton
References:
¹ https://indieweb.org/IndieWebCamps/Attending#Day_Two
² https://indieweb.org/what_to_make_at_IndieWebCamp
³ https://indieweb.org/2024/Brighton/Schedule#Saturday
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A couple of days ago in an informal discussion in the #indieweb chat channel about how different people view #Mastodon, the #fediverse, or #Bluesky, and services like #Bridgy & #BridgyFed quite differently, I noted¹ that one big unspoken difference was how things on the web last over time, from the traditional persistent web, vs the newer and growing ephemeral web.
There is the publicly viewable #OpenWeb that many of us take for granted, meaning the web that is persistent, that lasts over time, and thanks to being #curlable, that the Internet Archive archives, and that a plurality of search engines see and index (robots.txt allowing). The HTML + CSS + media files declarative web.
Then there are the https APIs that return JSON "web", the thing that I’ve started calling the ephemeral web, the set of things that are here today, briefly, gone tomorrow. I’ve previously used the more provocative phrase js;dr (JavaScript required, Didn’t Read) for this #ephemeralWeb, yet like many things, it turns out there is a spectrum from ephemeral to persistent.
One popular example on that spectrum that’s closer to the ephemeral edge is anything on a Mastodon server running v4 (or later as of this writing) of the software. (I’m not bothering to discuss the examples of walled garden social media silos because I expect we will continue to see their demise² over time.)
For example, the Internet Archive version of the shutdown notice for the queer(.)af Mastodon server, is visibly blank:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240112165635/https://queer.af/@postmaster/111733741786950083
Note: only a single Internet Archive snapshot was made of that post.
However if you View Source, you can find the entirety of that #queerAF post duplicated across a couple of invisible-to-the-user meta tags inside the raw HTML:
"**TL;DR: Queer[.]AF will close on 2024-04-12** …"
[.] added to avoid linking to a dead domain.
Note: such meta tags in js;dr pages were part of the motivation to specify metaformats.
To be clear, the shutdown of queer(.)af was a tragedy and not the fault of the creators, administrators etc., but rather one of the unfortunate outcomes of using some ccTLDs, country-code top level domains, that risk sudden draconian rules, domain renewal price hikes, or other unpredictable risks due to the politics, turmoil, regime changes etc. of the countries that administrate such domains.
Nearly the entirety of every Mastodon server, every post, every reply, is ephemeral.
When a Mastodon server shuts down, all its posts disappear from the surface of the web, forever.
Perhaps internet archeologists of the future will discover such dead permalinks, check the Internet Archive, find apparent desolation, and a few of them will be curious enough to use View Source tools to unearth parts of those posts, unintentionally preserved inside ceremonial meta tags next to dead scripts disconnected from databases and an empty shell of a body.
All reply-contexts of and replies to such posts and conversations lost, like threads unraveled from an ancient tapestry, scattered to the winds.
If you’re reading this post in your Mastodon reader, on either the website of your Mastodon account, or in a proprietary native client application, you should be able to click through, perhaps on the date-time stamp displayed to you, to view the original post on my website, where it is served in relatively simple declarative HTML + CSS with a bit of progressive enhancement script.
Because I serve declarative content, my posts are both findable across a variety of services & search engines, and archived by the Internet Archive. Even if my site goes down, snapshots or archives will be viewable elsewhere, with nearly the same fidelity of viewing them directly on my site.
This design for longevity is both deliberate, and the default for which the web was designed. It’s also one of the explicit principles in the IndieWeb community.
If that resonates with you, if creating, writing, & building things that last matter to you, choose web tools, services, and software that support the persistence & longevity of your work.
#persistentWeb #longWeb #LongNow
This is post 10 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/035/t2/indiewebcamp-brighton-tickets-available
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Post glossary:
API (Application Programming Interface)
https://indieweb.org/API
Bluesky
https://indieweb.org/Bluesky
Bridgy
https://brid.gy/
Bridgy Fed
https://fed.brid.gy/
ccTLD (country-code top level domain)
https://indieweb.org/ccTLD
curlable
https://indieweb.org/curlable
declarative web
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/webvision/full/#thedeclarativeweb
Internet Archive
https://archive.org/
js;dr (JavaScript required; Didn’t Read)
https://tantek.com/2015/069/t1/js-dr-javascript-required-dead
JSON
https://indieweb.org/JSON
longevity
https://indieweb.org/longevity
Mastodon
https://indieweb.org/Mastodon
metaformats
https://microformats.org/wiki/metaformats
permalink
https://indieweb.org/permalink
principles in the IndieWeb community
https://indieweb.org/principles
progressive enhancement
https://indieweb.org/progressive_enhancement
reply
https://indieweb.org/reply
reply-context
https://indieweb.org/reply-context
robots.txt
https://indieweb.org/robots_txt
social media
https://indieweb.org/social_media
silo
https://indieweb.org/silo
View Source
https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/view_source/index.html
¹ https://chat.indieweb.org/2024-02-13#t1707845454695700
² https://indieweb.org/site-deaths
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Twenty years and two days ago, @KevinMarks.com (@KevinMarks@xoxo.zone @KevinMarks) and I introduced #microformats in a conference presentation.
I wrote a long retrospective last year: https://tantek.com/2023/047/t1/nineteen-years-microformats
Since that post nearly a year ago, here are the top three updates & interesting developments in microformats:
1. Growing rel=me adoption for distributed verification (✅ in Mastodon etc.)
* Wikipedia: https://tantek.com/2023/139/t1/wikipedia-supports-indieweb-rel-me
* Threads: https://tantek.com/2023/234/t1/threads-supports-indieweb-rel-me
* omg.lol profile links by default: https://home.omg.lol/info/profile-items
2. A proposal to merge h-review into h-entry, since reviews are in practice always entries with a bit more information:
* https://github.com/microformats/h-entry/issues/32
3. #metaformats adoptions, implementations, and iteration
* There was growing practical interest in metaformats, so I updated the spec accordingly
* A half dozen implementations shipped: https://indieweb.org/metaformats#IndieWeb_Examples
* Active discussion for evolving metaformats to support more real world use-cases: https://github.com/microformats/metaformats/issues
Hard to believe it’s been 20 years of iterating and evolving microformats, to #microformats2, growing adoption as #IndieWeb building blocks, distributed verification (those green checkmarks) in #Mastodon and across the #fediverse, and implementing metaformats parsing to standardize parsing various meta tags for link previews into equivalent microformats2.
From last year’s activity, it’s clear there’s more use-cases, implementer interest, and community activity than ever. Looking forward to seeing what we can build in 2024.
Post Glossary
h-entry
https://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry
h-review
https://microformats.org/wiki/h-review
link-preview
https://indieweb.org/link-preview
metaformats
https://microformats.org/wiki/metaformats
microformats
https://microformats.org/wiki/
microformats2
https://microformats.org/wiki/microformats2
rel-me
https://microformats.org/wiki/rel-me
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Twenty years and two days ago, @KevinMarks.com (@KevinMarks@xoxo.zone @KevinMarks) and I introduced #microformats in a conference presentation.
I wrote a long retrospective last year: https://tantek.com/2023/047/t1/nineteen-years-microformats
Since that update nearly a year ago, here are the top three interesting developments in microformats:
1. Growing rel=me adoption for distributed verification:
* Wikipedia: https://tantek.com/2023/139/t1/wikipedia-supports-indieweb-rel-me
* Threads: https://tantek.com/2023/234/t1/threads-supports-indieweb-rel-me
* omg.lol profile links by default: https://home.omg.lol/info/profile-items
2. A proposal to merge h-review into h-entry, since reviews are in practice always entries with a bit more information:
* https://github.com/microformats/h-entry/issues/32
3. #metaformats adoptions, implementations, and iteration
* There was growing practical interest in metaformats, so I updated the spec accordingly
* A half dozen implementations shipped: https://indieweb.org/metaformats#IndieWeb_Examples
* Active discussion for evolving metaformats to support more real world use-cases: https://github.com/microformats/metaformats/issues
Hard to believe it’s been 20 years of iterating and evolving microformats, to #microformats2, growing adoption as #IndieWeb building blocks, distributed verification (those green checkmarks) in #Mastodon and across the #fediverse, and implementing metaformats parsing to standardize parsing various meta tags for link previews into equivalent microformats2.
From last year’s activity, it’s clear there’s more use-cases, implementer interest, and community activity than ever. Looking forward to seeing what we can build in 2024.
Post Glossary
h-entry
https://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry
h-review
https://microformats.org/wiki/h-review
link-preview
https://indieweb.org/link-preview
metaformats
https://microformats.org/wiki/metaformats
microformats
https://microformats.org/wiki/
microformats2
https://microformats.org/wiki/microformats2
rel-me
https://microformats.org/wiki/rel-me
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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
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Writing about writing: capture first, edit & publish later.
Braindump timely thoughts & experiences into as many draft notes as it takes, while ideas & memories are fresh.
Collecting higher fidelity memories seems more important than editing past writings or finishing/polishing a post for publishing, which can be done at a later time.
Sometimes the passage of time helps provide insights and broader understandings that can help with writing more effective posts, from better summaries to narratives that help sense-making.
Bits of even this minor post sat for weeks, and only today did I add a summary and related thoughts.
Similarly, it makes sense to edit and publish small notes on a subject, without feeling compelled to turn them into a larger blog post, or a longer list of points.
This is a key advantage to publishing on your own #indieweb site, you decide on the granularity of your posts, small, medium or large, instead of being constrained, burdened, or pressured by any particular #socialMedia user interface, character count limitation, or audience expectation.
Like Twitter before it, even the default #Mastodon user interface has limitations, and the #fediverse itself as a whole has audience/cultural expectations (certainly quite a few articles have been written about that).
On your own site you decide if you want to publish a post to make one point, or mention a related point or two, or collect things into a list or longer article, or eventually all of the above.
On your own site you feel more free to prioritize and share what is on your mind, instead of feeling compelled to first respond to whatever topics are trending, or to whatever you happen to read in your algorithmic feed.
#writingAboutWriting
This is day 47 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb. #100Days
← Day 46: https://tantek.com/2023/289/t1/bridgyfed-webmention-like-fediverse
→ Day 48: https://tantek.com/2023/365/t2/no-large-language-model-llm-used
Related:
* “More Thoughtful Reading & Writing on the Web” (https://tantek.com/2023/277/b1/thoughtful-reading-writing-web)
Post glossary:
algorithmic feed
https://indieweb.org/algorithmic_feed
article
https://indieweb.org/article
note
https://indieweb.org/note
post
https://indieweb.org/post
sense-making
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking_(information_science)
social media
https://indieweb.org/social_media
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Great article on #POSSE by David Pierce (@davidpierce@mastodon.social @pierce) @Verge:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/23/23928550/posse-posting-activitypub-standard-twitter-tumblr-mastodon
Several key points of POSSE explained in the article:
First, post on your own site:
“In a POSSE world, everybody owns a domain name, and everybody has a blog. (… a place on the internet where you post your stuff and others consume it.)”
Second, syndicate elsewhere, appropriately for each destination:
“Then, your long blog post might be broken into chunks and posted as a thread on X and Mastodon and Threads. The whole thing might go to your Medium page and your Tumblr and your LinkedIn profile, too. If you post a photo, it might go straight to Instagram, and a vertical video would whoosh straight to TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. Your post appears natively on all of those platforms,”
You can use Bridgy Publish (https://brid.gy/) to POSSE to many destinations, and Bridgy Fed (https://fed.brid.gy/) to #federate to #Mastodon and other #fediverse destinations, directly from your site instead of posting a copy on yet another account on yet another server.
Third, and this is a key piece that distinguishes proper POSSE setups, with original post perma(short)links back to your posts on your domain:
“typically with some kind of link back to your blog.”
All copies link to (your) home.
"And your blog becomes the hub for everything, your main home on the internet."
You have power over your domain (name), not outside silos.
David embedded a screenshot of one of my posts, a reply post:
in which I posted a reply *on my own site*¹ to @Zeldman.com’s tweet (itself a reply to a POSSE copy of one of my posts), and POSSEd my reply to Twitter so it would thread with his reply.
This illustrates another important detail of a proper POSSE setup:
Fourth, post *replies* and other responses from your own site, whether to other #IndieWeb sites, or to others’s silo posts (tweets etc.).
Own your data means owning your replies as well.
David also noted several challenges and good questions about POSSE. Some of these have answers & established practices, others are areas of exploration. E.g.
"The first is the social side of social media: what do you do with all the likes, replies, comments, and everything else that comes with your posts?"
The short answer is #backfeed: https://indieweb.org/backfeed
Backfeed is a concept I first wrote about as “reverse syndication”².
As you syndicate your posts out to #socialMedia silos, you reverse syndicate any responses there back to your original post.
Your site can do this with a service like #Bridgy, which uses the #Webmention standard to forward such silo responses back to your site, and #BridgyFed which does same for responses from Mastodon to your #federated posts.
David asked many other questions, which are deserving of their own posts to help answer, so I’ll leave you with just one more:
"The most immediate question, though, is simply how to build a POSSE system that works."
The short answer is: just start³.
Even if you have to do it manually (until it hurts), even if you have to edit your posts on a static GitHub site (behind your domain name of course), and then copy & paste to your silo(s) of choice, just start.
By practicing POSSE, even manually, you will learn what aspects of POSSE & backfeed matter the most to you, what aspects actually involve reaching & responding to friends and others you care about.
By doing so you will naturally focus on setting up & making what you need, and you too can join the future of web publishing, today.
Questions? Join us in the chat: https://chat.indieweb.org/ (also on Discord, IRC, and Slack⁴)
This is day 46 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb. #100Days
← Day 45: https://tantek.com/2023/289/t1/bridgyfed-webmention-like-fediverse
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Post glossary:
backfeed / reverse syndication
https://indieweb.org/backfeed
Bridgy
https://brid.gy/
make what you need
https://indieweb.org/make_what_you_need
manual (until it hurts)
https://indieweb.org/manual_until_it_hurts
original post link
https://indieweb.org/original_post_link
own your data
https://indieweb.org/own_your_data
own your replies
https://indieweb.org/own_your_replies
permalink
https://indieweb.org/permalink
permashortlink
https://indieweb.org/permashortlink
POSSE
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
silo
https://indieweb.org/silo
social media
https://indieweb.org/social_media
static site
https://indieweb.org/static_site
start
https://indieweb.org/start
Webmention
https://indieweb.org/Webmention
¹ https://tantek.com/2023/253/t2/
² https://tantek.com/2010/034/t2/diso-2-personal-domains-shortener-hatom-push-relmeauth
³ https://tantek.com/2023/001/t1/own-your-notes
⁴ https://indieweb.org/discuss
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Implemented liking/favoriting of #Mastodon posts via Bridgy Fed on my site! (Actually of any post on any site that #BridgyFed can discover an #ActivityPub endpoint to send likes to.)
Tested it by liking @evanp.me (@evan@cosocial.ca @evanpro)’s reply¹ confirming that he received a notification from my prior post². I sent a #Webmention from my like post³ to Bridgy Fed, and it #federated the like to Evan’s server, which subsequently showed up in the "favourites" list of Evan’s post:
https://cosocial.ca/@evan/111237962392745000/favourites
Every step that connects heterogenous #socialWeb systems & protocols feels like progress.
This is day 45 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb. #100Days #IndieWeb #like #likes #fediverse #favorite #favourite #favourites
← Day 44: https://tantek.com/2023/234/t1/threads-supports-indieweb-rel-me
→ 🔮
¹ https://cosocial.ca/@evan/111237962392745000
² https://tantek.com/2023/287/t1/federating-mentions
³ https://tantek.com/2023/289/f1
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Bridgy Fed (#BridgyFed) recently added support for federating @-@-mentions to #Mastodon: https://fed.brid.gy/docs#mention
So here’s a test:
Happy birthday @evanp.me (@evan@cosocial.ca @evanpro)!!!
Let’s see if Evan receives one or more notifications of these mentions, especially on cosocial, directly from my blog to his Mastodon account.
Previous related posts on how to @-mention across the #IndieWeb, #fediverse, and silos:
* https://tantek.com/2023/014/t4/domain-first-federated-atmention
* https://tantek.com/2023/017/t1/socialweb-blogs-reply-comment-post
* https://tantek.com/2023/018/t1/elevate-indieweb-above-silo
* https://tantek.com/2023/019/t5/reply-domain-above-address-and-silo
which is enough material on the subject to be worth a broader overall blog post on at-mentions, @-mentions, @-@-mentions, how to write them, how to send #Webmentions or #federate them, and perhaps how to recognize & send notifications for them.
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I recently wrote a high level summary blog post:
W3C Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee (TPAC) Meetings 2023
https://tantek.com/2023/262/b1/w3c-technical-plenary-tpac
of my time at the #W3C (@W3.org, @w3c@w3c.social, @W3C) #TPAC the week before.
Posting this note to explicitly #hashtag that article with topics mentioned therein:
#Sevilla #Seville #Spain #WICG #SocialCG #SWICG #Fediverse #SocialWeb #sustainability #IndieWeb #ActivityPub
because I forgot to put explicit categories (p-category markup) in the article post.
Adding that markup after publishing, and then sending an ActivityPub update (via #BridgyFed) is apparently not enough for #Mastodon to notice that the Update has new tags to display and aggregate on tag pages. In my next #w3cTPAC article post I’ll be sure to include category markup before publishing and see if that works.
Post glossary:
article post
https://indieweb.org/article
note post
https://indieweb.org/note
p-category
https://indieweb.org/p-category
tags
https://indieweb.org/tags
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going to the #SocialWeb CG meeting @W3C #w3cTPAC tomorrow (2023-09-12) at 09:30 CEST.
Looking forward to seeing @evanp.me (@evan@cosocial.ca @evanpro) and many others!
So many advances in #ActivityPub, #Webmention, Micropub, #IndieAuth etc. that it may be time to restart the #SocialWebWG to officially update all our active specifications.
We can & should also reach out to #Bluesky & #Nostr communities to work together on shared semantics and bridging protocols to continue growing a heterogenous #fediverse built on the #OpenWeb.
We know it is possible. We worked hard in the Social Web working group to align a lot of semantics across #ActivityStreams and #microformats2. The fruitful results of that are services like http://fed.brid.gy/ which I myself use to send a Webmention when I make a new post (like this one) and have #BridgyFed automatically federate it via ActivityPub using my personal site identity to #Mastodon followers and others.
@snarfed.org wrote up a recent comparison of top #decentralized #socialProtocols that can help inform a lot of this discussion: https://snarfed.org/2023-09-04_50856
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If you added a #Mastodon / #ActivityPub follow form to your #IndieWeb site based on Bridgy Fed (e.g. using code/instructions I previously posted¹), you need to update it to add another invisible input element for the "protocol", e.g.:
<input name="protocol" type="hidden" value="web" />
Otherwise people trying to use your form to follow you may see an error from #BridgyFed like:
> Bad Request
> Missing required parameter protocol
Here is the complete example that I posted previously with the new invisible input:
<form method="post" action="https://fed.brid.gy/remote-follow">
<label for="follow-address">🐘 Follow
<kbd>@tantek.com@tantek.com</kbd>:<br />
enter your @-@ fediverse address:</label>
<input id="follow-address" name="address" type="text" required="required"
placeholder="@you@instance.social" alt="fediverse address" value="" />
<input name="domain" type="hidden" value="tantek.com" />
<input name="protocol" type="hidden" value="web" />
<button type="submit">Follow</button>
</form>
I also updated that previous post¹ with the new input in case people find that instead.
This is day 42 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb. #100Days
← Day 41: https://tantek.com/2023/139/t1/wikipedia-supports-indieweb-rel-me
→ 🔮
¹ https://tantek.com/2023/020/t2/bridgy-fed-follow-form
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One of the pretty neat innovations from #Mastodon has been actual, functional, and fairly reliable (from all accounts I’ve seen) distributed system account migration, with the notable exception of post migration, which has additional challenges worth exploring.
To be clear, as far as I know, no other blogging (or chat) software, system, or even protocol comes close to achieving the level of functionality described in Mastodon’s documentation:
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#migration
In short, moving:
* all your profile information
* moving all your followers & followings, transparently
* redirecting your old account to your new one
More at that link. From the docs, it’s clear that quite a bit of thought & consideration went into the design & implementation.
Once I had setup #BridgyFed to #federate posts from my own site¹, I myself made use of the this Mastodon feature to migrate from my try-it-out @t@xoxo.zone account to my #IndieWeb @tantek.com (move destination handled by BridgyFed).
For me the migration experience was 100%, because I had not posted anything @t@xoxo.zone.
The challenge of post migration is not unique to Mastodon, though I believe it goes beyond “simple” export & import support, which is still a good place to start.
Mastodon has two forms of posts “export” currently:
* RSS feeds, which will get you some number of recent posts, by adding ".rss" to the end of any Mastodon profile URL, e.g. https://indieweb.social/@tchambers.rss
* Activity Streams 2.0 JSON, per https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#export (note: it currently says “ActivityPub JSON format”, but there is no such thing, #ActivityPub uses the #ActivityStreams 2.0 JSON format and I’ve filed a PR² to fix this in the docs)
Lots of software & services import RSS, e.g. #WordPress.
As far as I know, nothing (not even Mastodon itself) actually supports importing Activity Streams 2.0.
There is a more complete format (with specification!) for exporting & importing blog content:
Blog Archive Format (.bar), first specified here with example file:
* https://www.manton.org/2017/11/24/blog-archive-format.html
More details and another example file:
* https://www.manton.org/2021/12/27/importing-blog-archive.html
Blog Archive Format has the very nice features of:
* portable HTML feed (h-feed) and JSON Feed
* photos and other media
* locally browsable post archive
Naturally, https://micro.blog/ supports both exporting & importing Blog Archive Format.
There’s an interesting opportunity here for an open source converter
* from Activity Streams 2.0
* to Blog Archive Format
Such a library would make an excellent drop-in addition to any #ActivityPub implementation, allowing both export of posts, and also a browsable archive format, so you could visually double check when importing to another service that these were the old posts you were looking for.
This would be a good first step, using an open standard, towards Mastodon itself supporting post migration³.
Ideally, similar to account migration, the old posts server should also at least:
* redirect old permalinks to the new permalinks
* redirect any replies being delivered by ActivityPub to the new location
* provide #Webmention discovery forwarding from the old URLs to the new URLs (e.g. using HTTP LINK headers)
for some amount of time.
Want to add support for Blog Archive Format or got questions or feedback?
Join in the development conversations: https://chat.indieweb.org/dev
This is day 39 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb. #100Days
← Day 38: https://tantek.com/2023/110/t2/beyond-mastodon-indieweb-own-domain
→ 🔮
Glossary
account migration
https://indieweb.org/account_migration
blog archive format
https://indieweb.org/blog_archive_format
h-feed
https://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed
JSON Feed
https://www.jsonfeed.org/
post migration
https://indieweb.org/post_migration
Webmention
https://indieweb.org/Webmention
References
¹ https://tantek.com/2022/301/t1/twittermigration-bridgyfed-mastodon-indieweb
² https://github.com/mastodon/documentation/pull/1202
³ https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
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In https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/20/23689570/activitypub-protocol-standard-social-network, author @pierce@mas.to does an excellent job covering a broad range of #ActivityPub related updates, and goes beyond the usual #Mastodon focus to describe numerous implementations.
I was very happy to see that he also clearly communicated several #IndieWeb principles¹, practices, goals, and reasons why². Like this quote:
“But the advice you’ll hear from most people in this space is this: own your own domain. Don’t be john@/mastodon.social or anna@/facebook.com. Have a space that is yours, that belongs to you, a username and identity that can’t disappear just because a company goes out of business or sells to a megalomaniac.”
and this:
“It’s [your own domain is] your YouTube channel name and your TikTok username and your Instagram handle and your phone number and your Twitter @, all in one name.”
Great interviews with @stevetex@mozilla.social, @mike@flipboard.social, @dustycloud.org (@cwebber@octodon.social), @evanp.me (@evan@cosocial.ca), @anildash.com (@anildash@me.dm), @coachtony@me.dm, and @manton.org.
As Manton said in the article:
“If you solve identity with domain names, it makes things easier because it fits the way the web has been for 20 years,”
Pierce also noted:
“you might soon be able to turn your personal website into your entire social identity online”
Already can.
I replied to Pierce’s post³ about his article noting this⁴, from #federating directly from my website for the past ~6 months⁵, to over a decade of using it as my social identity with the POSSE method⁶ with various #socialMedia silos.
It’s important enough that I’ll repeat part of Pierce’s quote at the top:
“own your own domain. Don’t be john@/mastodon.social or anna@/facebook.com. Have a space that is yours”
He gets it. Don’t be someone at someone else’s server.
Big Chad or Little Chad’s garages⁷ are social media stepping stones towards owning your own domain and IndieWeb presence.
We’re here when you’re ready to take that next step: https://chat.indieweb.org/
This is day 38 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb. #100Days
← Day 37: https://tantek.com/2023/109/t2/years-ago-first-federated-indieweb-thread
→ 🔮
¹ https://indieweb.org/principles
² https://indieweb.org/why
³ https://mas.to/@pierce/110231624819547202
⁴ https://tantek.com/2023/110/t1/
⁵ https://tantek.com/2022/301/t1/twittermigration-bridgyfed-mastodon-indieweb
⁶ https://indieweb.org/POSSE
⁷ https://tantek.com/2023/001/t1/own-your-notes
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Watching #MozFest session Dialogues & Debates: Making the Fediverse¹ and panelist @stevetex@mozilla.social (@stevetex) just announced that we (#Mozilla) are standing up a #Mastodon instance², starting with limited sign-ups.
I’m excited that Mozilla is experimenting with #socialWeb alternatives to centralized #socialMedia silos.
There are many #Mozillians with #fediverse addresses you can follow:
* https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mastodon
Several of these folks also have their own #IndieWeb sites.
It’s interesting seeing how people are individually choosing to use a fediverse address on someone else’s server, vs their own server like with a subdomain, vs just using their existing site.
One trend I have seen is people using someone else’s Mastodon server as a stepping stone, a learning experience, before migrating to either self-hosting Mastodon (or an easier to run alternative like microblog.pub³, not to be confused with micro.blog⁴), or ideally directly using their own site, blog etc. to connect to the fediverse⁵.
Do you have an @-@ address and want to use your own site instead?
If you’re a #webdev, you can totally do this by connecting your existing personal site with https://fed.brid.gy/ and own your presence on the web, social web, fediverse all at one place.
Got questions? Drop by the IndieWeb chat! https://chat.indieweb.org/dev
This is day 35 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days
← Day 34: https://tantek.com/2023/072/t1/blog-as-if-ai-trained-posts
→ 🔮
¹ https://schedule.mozillafestival.org/session/UEEGYL-1
² https://mozilla.social/
³ https://indieweb.org/microblog.pub
⁴ https://indieweb.org/micro.blog
⁵ https://tantek.com/2022/301/t1/twittermigration-bridgyfed-mastodon-indieweb
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Watching #MozFest session Dialogues & Debates: Making the Fediverse¹ and panelist @stevetex@mozilla.social (@stevetex) just announced that we (#Mozilla) are standing up a #Mastodon instance², starting with limited sign-ups.
I’m excited that Mozilla is experimenting with #socialWeb alternatives to centralized #socialMedia silos.
There are many #Mozillians with #fediverse addresses you can follow:
* https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mastodon
Several of these folks also have their own #IndieWeb sites.
It’s interesting seeing how people are individually choosing to use a fediverse address on someone else’s server, vs their own server like with a subdomain, vs just using their existing site.
One trend I have seen is people using someone else’s Mastodon server as a stepping stone, a learning experience, before moving to either self-hosting Mastodon (or an easier to run alternative like microblog.pub³, not to be confused with micro.blog⁴), or ideally, directly using their existing site, blog etc. to connect to the fediverse⁵.
Do you have an @-@ address and want to use your own site instead?
If you’re a #webdev, you can totally do this by connecting your existing personal site with https://fed.brid.gy/ and own your presence on the web, social web, fediverse all at one place.
Got questions? Drop by the IndieWeb chat! https://chat.indieweb.org/dev
¹ https://schedule.mozillafestival.org/session/UEEGYL-1
² https://mozilla.social/
³ https://indieweb.org/microblog.pub
⁴ https://indieweb.org/micro.blog
⁵ https://tantek.com/2022/301/t1/twittermigration-bridgyfed-mastodon-indieweb
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3 weeks since the 1st, since asking you to own your notes^1
Still tweeting in Big Chad’s garage or tooting in little Chad’s garage next door?^2 What's the delay?
Choosing a domain name?^3
Or a service or other path?^4
Or #TwitterMigration to #Mastodon?
Two #IndieWeb alternatives to owning your notes (https://micro.blog/ or https://fed.brid.gy/, either with your own domain) both support migrating your followers from Mastodon.
For example, I migrated my experimental @t@xoxo.zone Mastodon account to my own site^5, @tantek.com, thanks to the migration support in Bridgy Fed.
If you’re not sure where you’d like to migrate, you can try https://micro.blog/ for 30 days to see if it works for you.
If you’re a #webDev or otherwise like to tinker, it’s well worth the time to setup your own website with an SSG or CMS^6 or your own code, and grow it incrementally as you post and have time to do so.
Either way, drop by https://chat.indieweb.org/ and ask any questions you have.
There’s a whole community that wants you to succeed, that wants to help you own your notes.
This is day 21 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days, written the night after.
← Day 20: https://tantek.com/2023/022/t1/indieweb-eat-what-you-cook
→ 🔮
^1 https://tantek.com/2023/001/t1/own-your-notes
^2 https://xkcd.com/1150/
^3 https://tantek.com/2023/004/t1/choosing-domain-name-indieweb
^4 https://tantek.com/2023/003/t1/indieweb-path-chosen-why
^5 https://tantek.com/2022/358/t3/
^6 https://indieweb.org/CMS
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Sometimes it’s the little things, like editing a post. Edit a reply, see a comment update on another post.
From day 5 (https://tantek.com/2023/005/t3/indieweb-simpler-approach)
* Can I edit my post after publishing?
Whether a tweet or Instagram photo, the answer is no.^1
Blogs and websites have had editing capabilities since the start.
However, no site is an island, it's a *web* site. Interlinked.
We expect edits on one site to show up when embedded or syndicated on other sites.
#Webmention provides the ability for cross-site comments, and unlike the "one-off" prior protocols of Trackbacks & Pingbacks^2, when you update a cross-site comment, by resending a Webmention, the other post updates its copy of your reply: https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/#sending-webmentions-for-updated-posts
If you delete a reply, by resending a Webmention, the other post can delete its copy (or mark it as deleted) https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/#sending-webmentions-for-deleted-posts
Similarly, the #ActivityPub protocol specifies update & delete capabilities, as implemented by #Mastodon and others.
#BridgyFed (https://fed.brid.gy) bridges (as the name says) these two protocols, which enables the following interactions.
#IndieWeb post -(Webmention)-> BridgyFed -(ActivtyPub)-> Mastodon displays post
and then this:
IndieWeb updated post -(Webmention)-> BridgyFed -(ActivtyPub)-> Mastodon displays updated post
This works for replies to toots as well:
IndieWeb reply to toot -(Webmention)-> BridgyFed -(ActivtyPub)-> toot displays reply
and subsequently:
IndieWeb updated reply -(Webmention)-> BridgyFed -(ActivtyPub)-> toot updates display of reply
Thanks to these update protocols in Webmention & ActivityPub, and BridgyFed connecting them, after adding “forward-in-time” links (https://tantek.com/2023/006/t1/forward-in-time-links) I was able to resend webmentions for my previous #100DaysOfIndieWeb posts, and have those forward links show up wherever my posts were already displayed on Mastodon.
Posts interlinked with replies interlinked with protocols interlinked.
This is day 9 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days.
← Day 8: https://tantek.com/2023/008/t7/bridgy-indieweb-posse-backfeed
→ 🔮
^1 The ability to edit tweets has literally been the most requested feature on Twitter since perhaps its launch. Last year, paid Twitter “Blue” accounts finally got the ability to edit tweets, sort of: five times within 30 minutes of posting. Too little, too late.
* https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/03/twitters-edit-button-is-rolling-out-to-blue-subscribers-in-canada-australia-and-new-zealand/
* https://blog.hootsuite.com/can-you-edit-a-tweet/
* https://www.pcmag.com/news/twitters-edit-button-is-coming-soon-for-paid-users
* https://www.macrumors.com/2022/10/06/twitter-edit-tweet-option-united-states/
* https://9to5mac.com/2022/10/06/twitter-rolling-out-edit-button/
^2 Pingbacks were originally (and for many years) only implemented as one-off cross-blog interactions. One-time, uneditable. Pingbacks (and Trackbacks before them) were notoriously ugly when they showed up on blogs, listed & displayed as a separate thing (never tie presentation to the name of a protocol) with cryptically elided summaries: https://indieweb.org/pingback#Poor_display.
It took over 10 years since being specified (2002) for the IndieWeb community to re-use pingbacks for actual comments across sites: https://tantek.com/2013/113/b1/first-federated-indieweb-comment-thread separating presentation & UI from the protocol.
This separation of concerns approach evolved into the Webmention specification, separating the protocol from the display of comments, likes, reposts, and other social web https://indieweb.org/responses.
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Is it hard to setup & use your own #IndieWeb site?
Depends on the path chosen, and why.
1 turnkey: get a https://micro.blog/ - easier than #Mastodon, works with
2 #webdev: install a https://indieweb.org/CMS - needs tech knowhow
3 builder: assemble https://indieweb.org/building_blocks as desired, experiment, iterate, and explore how deep the rabbit hole goes
All paths share perhaps the hardest part:
Picking a domain name. Next, tips for choosing one.
This is day 3 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days
Day 2: https://tantek.com/2023/002/t6/key-owning-notes-domain-name
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Is it hard to setup & use your own #IndieWeb site?
Depends on the path choosen, and why
1 turnkey: get a https://micro.blog/ - easier than #Mastodon, works with
2 #webdev: install a https://indieweb.org/CMS - needs tech knowhow
3 builder: assemble https://indieweb.org/building_blocks as desired, experiment, iterate, and explore how deep the rabbit hole goes
All paths share perhaps the hardest part:
Picking a domain name. Next, tips for choosing one.
This is day 3 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days
Day 2: https://tantek.com/2023/002/t6/key-owning-notes-domain-name