Videos from the last XOXO are going up on YouTube. Here’s a playlist of XOXO 2024 main stage talks. There are a lot of lessons to take away from these, and many calls to action.

But if you only watch one, it should maybe be this one that broke the audience entirely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df_K7pIsfvg

🥑🥗

Has there been a tragic accident during eternal Caturday

Recently finished this (good, heavy, tip-of-an-iceberg) book on influence operations:

https://martymcgui.re/2024/09/05/222732/

Now watching how it’s playing out in today’s (war and commercial) games industries. 😳

https://youtu.be/lYaDXZ2MI-k

Gotta enjoy outdoor sipping while it’s nice!

Enjoying endangered gardens

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.

Sharing for my fedi-peeps. That’s a term, right?

Has the IndieWeb become discourse, again? https://martymcgui.re/2024/08/29/141602/

I recently read Has the IndieWeb Become Irrelevant from starbreaker.org.

The post does a great job linking to and summarizing a spate of posts that I will call “people being mad at the IndieWeb”, while also being one of these posts.

These posts accuse “the IndieWeb” of being elitist, exclusionary, overengineered, complicit, and unnecessary, among many other things.

There are some common threads I noticed among these posts:

• None of them mention micro.blog!
• They seem to attack a “straw person” version of the IndieWeb, where one is expected to read, follow, and implement over a decade of experimentation on the web.

Micro.blog is real

Folks that would like to try a turnkey website hosting service, where:

• you bring your own domain (or register a new one!)
• you can leave and take your content with you whenever you want
• requires no coding (and no plugins to configure, and no “files and folders”)
• offers mobile and desktop apps that let you post (and read) the kinds of content you want
• supports IndieWeb building blocks to let you follow and interact with other people via your own websites

I don’t see eye-to-eye with its creator Manton Reese about everything, but micro.blog is a great example of a real world service that makes use of IndieWeb building blocks in ways that customers benefit from without having to build anything!

The rest is wiki

I think many of other complaints, from being “overengineered” to (paraphased) “POSSE makes IndieWeb complicit with the corporate web”, come from misconstruing the IndieWeb wiki at indieweb.org as the entirety of “being IndieWeb”.

When I discovered indieweb.org (in maybe 2015?) I was intrigued and nearly instantly overwhelemed. Trying to absorb all the concepts there would be nearly impossible. Understanding and implementing all the techniques there is actually impossible.

That’s because indieweb.org is not a presciption or a cookbook or an exercise plan. It doesn’t tell you how to “be IndieWeb”. It’s a collective memory of experiments, some successful and some not, from a group of experimenters that has changed greatly over time.

For example, I find that criticisms like “f*ck the corporate web and f*ck IndieWeb for interoperating with the corporate web” don’t really hold up when a lot of that stuff doesn’t even work anymore.

On corporate complicity

Automatic POSSE, syndicating posts from your own site out to your profiles on social silos, only ever barely (and briefly) worked for Instagram, was turned off for Facebook a few years ago, and was all but destroyed for Twitter shortly after its last acquisition. backfeed - pulling comments and likes from these platforms to display on your own site - has similarly been blocked by technical measures.

These were experiments that worked for a time. People used them for a time. That time has passed and the people have moved on.

Some folks have replaced their Twitter usage with something like Mastodon, or Blue Sky, or Threads, and amazing people like Ryan have stepped up to help experiment with bridging personal sites and federated services.

There is no “the way”, only “your way”

People don’t have to move on for purely technical reasons. Even before Twitter closed their APIs, many in the IndieWeb community were shuttering their Twitter accounts and removing posts. They moved on from Twitter, despite all those documented pages on the IndieWeb wiki, because they didn’t want to use the web this way anymore.

And to me, this is actually what “being IndieWeb” or “doing IndieWeb” is about: using the web in ways that fit your wants and needs, being mindful of when (and to whom) you give up control over your stuff and your connections.

Figuring out how you want to use the web is a daunting task, to say the least! The IndieWeb wiki is full of interesting examples and ideas - but as a logbook of ways of using the web, it can be inscrutable. It was never intended that every way of using the web would be suitable for everyone. A collective memory is extremely hard to keep up-to-date and to signpost for navigation. Trying to rely on the wiki alone is a recipe for frustration.

I freely admit that the community has fallen into some serious prescriptive traps over time. Like with tools like indiewebify.me that offer a checklist of implementation details, without accompanying reasons why you might want these features.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, by any means, and it won’t be the last, but the criticisms of these tools and models do make their way back into the collective memory. (see: generations and IndieMark)

Talk with us

That’s why the IndieWeb chat exists. It’s a place where real actual people, who are working to use the web in ways that suit them, are ready to help in whatever ways we can. We love to share what is (and is not) working for us, what we’re trying, and so on. More importantly, we want to help you find ways of using the web that work for you.

Are you safely stowed away during eternal Caturday?

Are you giving it your all during eternal Caturday?

Are you a member of the 🕸️💍 IndieWeb Webring? Or have you wanted to be, but you couldn't sign in because it strictly required IndieAuth for sign-in?

I was recently gently reminded that the IndieWeb webring at one time allowed you to verify your identity using an alternative sign-in mechanism. For instance, by making bi-directional links between your home page and your GitHub account, you can delegate the step of "proving" that you are the person in control of your homepage to GitHub, and let them worry about storing and checking usernames and passwords.

This concept is called RelMeAuth (because it works by embedding links in your homepage let look like <a rel="me" ... >). The original version of the webring would first check to see if your site specifies its own IndieAuth provider and, if not, would fall back to using Aaron Parecki's indielogin.com, which handles checking for these rel="me" links to supported sites. It also supports sending codes to your email, if you prefer!

So it used to work?

Yeah! I, uh, broke it when I moved the site over to PHP some time ago.

But it works now?

It should! If your homepage has no IndieAuth server specified, but has rel="me" links to your GitHub or an email "mailto:" link, you should be able to sign in to the webring using those methods!

It was broken for how long?

😅 it was fixed within a day of someone telling me it was broken!

Please don't share any links to code-

Here are the updates I added today to enable indielogin.com support. Some of it is a little hacky until indielogin.com is updated to allow the full client_id URL for the webring, but it works OK!

Sigh, ok.

Okay that's it, for now! Thanks for reading, imaginary interlocutor! As always, feel free to reply to this post on your own site, or feel free to drop me a line in the #indieweb chat (I’m schmarty there)!

IndieWebbing requires fuel