Thanks to Matthew for reading my post on recent IndieWeb discourse and adding a new section with his responses and notifying me about it via email.

There are certainly a number of things in Matthew’s response that tempt me to respond, but I’d like to focus on this:

I am, nevertheless, a little annoyed by the exhortation to “talk with us”. What does it look like I’m doing over here, anyway? Oh, no, it’s not good enough to post one’s opinion on the web. I’m supposed to use one of the IndieWeb’s chats, either IRC, Slack, or Discord. […] I am already talking with you. I’m doing it here, on my own website for all to see, in the best IndieWeb tradition. And you are talking to me if you quote me on your own website or email me.

I don’t consider my post a reply to Matthew’s post. I do not see his post as an invitation to conversation. I read it as a “take” - an opinion piece intended to make the reader feel a certain way and then close the topic, complete with clickbait headline.

I shouldn’t have to point out that bloggers-blogging-at-bloggers has a long history of unproductive conversation. Reducing the impact of unproductive conversations is part is why there’s not an IndieWeb mailing list. It’s easy in these formats to go hard on the abstract, and to spend time constructing arguments instead of asking questions.

That’s not to say that posts can’t inspire change. In the past day or so indieweb.org/discuss has been updated to mention right in the opening sentence that the IRC, web, Slack, and Discord chats are all bridged. Discussions have also kicked up (not for the first time) around making the homepage more welcoming, focusing on principles first, etc.

Those changes are being decided in the real-time chat, where you can meet and talk with the individuals (all volunteers!) who make up the IndieWeb community. I reckon it beats trying to reverse-engineer that community from a wiki.