#indieweb 2020-12-03
2020-12-03 UTC
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lostinthesauce hey
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# alex11 https://dweb.archive.org/details/home seems to be the real one?
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# alex11 also sorry if i'm annoying at all, i really don't know how to talk to people on the internet, i should maybe just stay muted
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# alex11 not really seeing people for months also does not help my social skills, thanks pandemic
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# [Emma_Humphries] I'm starting to play around with Gemini. I have an instance up, and I like the Lagrange browser.
# alex11 yeah, i'm using lagrange as well
# [Emma_Humphries] there's an emoji bug the maintainer is aware of, but other than that, it's nice
# [Emma_Humphries] and I was able to suss out the feed format which solderpunk advocated for
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petermolnar I honestly hope that those who decide to jump on gemini at least have the decency to honour gopher and run a phlog as well.
# petermolnar given it's nearly the same thing, except for tls
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# petermolnar across the past weeks I circled back to questions around the identity of indieweb itself and I may have finally distilled it into a question: is our main objective to liberate people from social media by allowing them to experience at least the same set of features, or is it to provide an alternative to social media, in which the features currently existing in social media are less important, than the features missing, such as personal
# petermolnar isation?
# [Raphael_Luckom] And, to prevent a "consensus" conversation, it might be useful to substitute my / your (individual) for "our" in that question
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jeremycherfas I think everyone's answer is going to be different. For example, I am not in the least bit interested in stories, so I watched the discussion unfold here with a sense of detached amusement.
# jeremycherfas I also don't care that much about preserving my tweets on my own site, because I scoop them up with pinboard.in.
# jeremycherfas But I do like webmentions going back and forth, and I would like to be able to POSSE to Instagram.
# petermolnar [Raphael_Luckom]: it is kind of a consensus question though: think the two ideas - focus on existing vs focus on missing - are, in a way, go against eachother.
# [Raphael_Luckom] my answer would be a little of both and neither. My goal has nothing to do with a particular set of features--it's to give people the same intuitive understanding of the internet that they have about their neighborhood--that when they see a technical decision, they recognize it as a human decision and not a physical law.
# [Raphael_Luckom] fair enough
# jeremycherfas Agreed, they go against each other, and there are powerful voices making themselves heard. But the conclusions aren't prescriptive.
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# petermolnar [Raphael_Luckom]: I mean no offense, but what you wrote is quite vague for me. Could you please give me an example?
# [Raphael_Luckom] from using a competing product. A human decision, not a physical law. We see decisions like that all over the internet, but I believe that most people don't recognize that they are decisions, and instead think that they are based on inherent technical limitations.
# [Raphael_Luckom] I think that most people I know, if they put a generic cartridge of ink in their printer, and the printer didn't work, they would think "this ink cartridge doesn't work in this printer" meaning "there is some reason based in physical reality why this is not a valid part of this system" my goal is that they would recognize in that situation that they are encountering an anticompetitive decision by the printer manufacturer to prevent them
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# [Raphael_Luckom] which two?
# petermolnar [Raphael_Luckom]: what you're writing isn't always true; for example one really shouldn't use dye based ink in pigment based printers
# [Raphael_Luckom] why do you think that is a useful objection to raise?
# petermolnar aaronpk: exclusive, no, but those card ideas from [chrisaldrich] yesterday (#indieweb-meta) got me thinking that what if certain approaches are not really based in reality. Say indieweb's current main focus is presenting an option to anything social media can do at the moment, so people could use their site without needing to sacrifice anything - but what if people keep using social media for some other reasons that we don't see?
# petermolnar Tonnes of features are completely new to social media - stories being one. Meaning that people who predate the feature never really relied on it, thus we replicating it might be futile in the eyes of trying to provide an alternative.
# petermolnar On the other hand, there are features nearly completely missing from most silos, such as basic themes, which might actually be a thing people feel the lack of, and could indeed drive them for other options.
# petermolnar (tell me if I'm becoming too meta.)
# petermolnar (it is also possible that I'm asking philosophical questions that can't ever be answered)
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[Murray] I've always thought of the main focus as simply being self-ownership and control over your own data. Part of that will be providing tools to enable digital behaviours that can currently only happen behind walls (i.e. silo features); part of that can be devising entirely new methods and functionality that people want
# jeremycherfas Th,e theme question, I think, relates directly to whether people perceive their presence on a social site as "theirs" or "the site's".
# jeremycherfas I'd be interested to know whether the post-MySpace generation has any idea that a place like Twitter could look different for each person.
# jeremycherfas micro.blog took a fair while to implement themes.
# [Raphael_Luckom] my gmail still has a ninjas theme from when I was like 18
# petermolnar jeremycherfas: re "theirs" vs "the site's": months ago a friend of mine sadly started to slide down the covid conpiracies road and asked me if I think it's ok that FB is censoring their post. She was completely stunned when I said: sure, yes. It's owned by someone else, it's not your site. In short: most people, at the moment, do think it's theirs all the time.
# jeremycherfas And yet, they can't make it look like anything of theirs, apart from paying with a banner image.
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[chrisaldrich] What is plurality?
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Loqi Encouraging a plurality of projects with a self-motivated incentive to interoperate is a key principle of the indie web, in contrast to monoculture efforts which require or even encourage everyone to install the same software, or use the same online service, in order to interoperate https://indieweb.org/plurality
# [chrisaldrich] Plurality covers portions of the question. It's not going to be the case that everyone has the same needs/wants/desires. How can you design a system that works for everyone?
# [chrisaldrich] One of the biggest values I see is that of a common "dial tone" that can potentially connect everyone regardless of the particular design or specific functionality they need.
# [chrisaldrich] I carry an unnecessary amount of cognitive load trying to remember which of 50 services a particular friend is on to check in and say hello. If the cost to the person on the system was as high as it is for having a phone and a phone connection, all the social media services would interoperate.
# petermolnar plurality, while I agree with it, in this context, really sounded like "we are everything and nothing" which is very zen, but doesn't provide anything to grasp either :). The common "dial tone" is an interesting analogy, which I'd love, but I know that the dial tone is different per country - when I'm calling from the UK to Hungary, it quite obviously changes.
# petermolnar OK, so more details on the why I'm asking what I'm asking: if one reads our wiki, on first read it looks anti-silo - hence the brushing with, for example, aral's followers, for whom our ideas turn out to be not radical enough on second read, at which point they find the excessive documentation on silo features. While I understand the benefit of this, I keep wondering if it's worth it, instead of focusing on the solutions done by someon
# petermolnar e on their site, that is missing from most silos, showing it as a case that this is only possible with your own site. Am I making any sense?
# petermolnar compare /theme vs /story
# [chrisaldrich] Perhaps a hot take, but I wouldn't be anti-silo if they'd interoperate.
# [chrisaldrich] If they interoperated, then people would be presented with a better set of choices and competition for their eyeballs would result in a better system overall.
# [chrisaldrich] Aaron saw right through my ruse... 🙂
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# [chrisaldrich] It may take a while, but I think that focusing on functionality and ease-of-use will eventually bring more and more people into a healthier ecosystem. By providing a better experience and more flexibility, we'll get to a tipping point where IndieWeb solutions are more mainstream and become the default. It may not completely kill the silos, but it will dramatically marginalize them. Aral and the all-or-nothing crowd never have a chance to get
# [chrisaldrich] to a tipping point because without interoperability they're too limited in service and flexibility to gain more than a minority of adherents.
# petermolnar if we embrace plurality, doesn't that mean that we also need to accept that people with certain affinity will just stay with silos?
# jeremycherfas Why shouldn't they?
# [chrisaldrich] Yes.
# [chrisaldrich] They'll have the choice to do so. I suspect many will stay there just out of sheer inertia.
# [Murray] FYI that's what I meant by it being a "trap"; if you're sole focus and purpose is to drive the silos out, you'll never win, because there will always be people that prefer them. Agree with chrisaldrich, provide the tools and at least the _option_ of doing it yourself and hopefully people will migrate 🙂
# alex11 it's just annoying when silos *start* being silo-y
# alex11 if things were locked down from the start, it's one set of expectations
# alex11 but when they change behavior everyone is forced to visit the silos more often
# [chrisaldrich] One day the potential of webmentions to be a vector for spam will diminish dramatically and a large platform like WordPress will put them into core. That is going to be a really sad day for the silos whether they notice it or not.
# [chrisaldrich] I've always looked at "bridge all the things" as the Trojan horse to get us across the bridge of silo dominance.
# petermolnar aaronpk: maybe, again, wrong wording; should have been "just stay only with silos". I know abolish silos is not part of our goals, but it kind of is to make people use silos as well as their site, no?
# alex11 what's interesting is jack dorsey himself bringing up that twitter interoperability project or whatever it's called
# alex11 whether zuckerberg is ever interested in the same... who knows
# [chrisaldrich] aaronpk is right about this
# jeremycherfas People do sometimes seem to lay down the law about what is and is not acceptable though.
# [chrisaldrich] Given the resources Twitter has, I suspect Jack's interoperability play is mostly lip service for an antiregulation play that he sees lingering on the horizon. He's also sitting on a well-valued company that is generally stagnant, which is never good in the eyes of stockholders. He's also faced with the pressure of chasing Facebook.
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[tantek] very few things here are "singular", Code of Conduct and /principles being two of them which are the results of LOTS of community discussions and finding consensus over the years, especially by frankly, primarily the "doers" (rather than "talkers), the folks that have shown up and positively contributed, both virtually, and to IWCs in person
# [tantek] the building blocks are a combination of emergent and means to implement and live the /principles
# [tantek] if you care about themes, great, implement themes on your own site, and it would be nice if you could document your work accordingly on /theme etc. those are both directly from /principles 3 & 5
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# [Raphael_Luckom] I think that as a tangential conversation, it's worth thinking about how to best enable a plurality. One of the things that I see as important in that respect is to work on lowering barriers to comprehension. Because I can't know what's best for anyone besides me, but they also can't articulate what they would find best unless they have some familiarity with what's an option vs what's a fact of (computing) life.
# [Raphael_Luckom] is it the case that people who can't or don't want to build also deserve a say?
# [Raphael_Luckom] that makes sense
# [chrisaldrich] [Raphael_Luckom] They deserve a say, but without the expertise to build something for themselves, they're stuck waiting for businesses/services that can help them do what they want. https://indieweb.org/Quick_Start provides a place for them to start. Competition for services will eventually give them lots more choice in the long run.
# [chrisaldrich] That page also doesn't include some lower-level services like WordPress.com or Tumblr that allow you to bring your own URL to them.
# [Raphael_Luckom] I'd like to offer a clarification, because I suspect that the distinction I'm making is less controversial than it sounds. When I say "do people who can't build deserve a say" I'm talking about people's requests _for themselves_. Like for instance, if someone came here and said "hey I have a cognitive disability and there's this specific indiieweb thing that isn't accessible" I have _no doubt_ that people here would take that seriously.
# [Raphael_Luckom] That's what I mean by helping people understand the options--doing things that enable people who want to participate to participate (even if those people aren't building themselves. These are the requests that I describe as requests _for themselves_. There's another type of request that I think is what [tantek] was referring to that I would describe as an "I think you should" request. Like "I think you should do X to stick it to silos
# [Raphael_Luckom] because f silos". Those requests are ignorable.
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[KevinMarks] part of the point of focus on user experience in silos is that they have often iterated those experiences with a large number of users, and there is a degree of convergence between silos for similar reasons. Does that mean we should replicate them? Not necessarily. They have different goals and site metrics than us. We aren't generally trying to pump engagement to sell ads.
# petermolnar isn't replicating it on purpose means implicit approval?
# [tantek] no it means /plurality is one of our principles
# [Raphael_Luckom] I also think that plurality is just straigh up hard to grasp. "Do you support that person?" "Yeah!" "Do you think that the thing they're making is good?" "No!" "Don't those answers conflict with each other?" "No!"
# petermolnar [tantek]: you keep reffering to /plurality, but the wiki, as it is, contains a lot of indieweb examples, and an astonishingly small amount of criticism, so it leans towards a point where many silo features look approved, or at least in my read.
# petermolnar had we written this down anywhere, that our wiki is strictly impartial, and only exists for documentation? While for those familar with the origin of a wiki this might be obvious, for the many, I'm fairly sure, that in case of a community wiki, it is not.
# petermolnar no, I'm not going to -meta. It'll cut the discussion in half, as always.
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# [chrisaldrich] A good example of some of the above: I've had the experience of experimenting with things on my own website (having seen them on the wiki or in conversations) and ultimately realizing I either didn't like them or they weren't as useful as I'd hoped, so I was able to remove them.
# [chrisaldrich] hopes that I went back and documented those reasons (on my own site or the wiki)....
# petermolnar I tried to make a conversation about "all of it": the wiki, the community, the "why am I complicating my site with this?", etc. It's not as simple, as cutting it into pieces; if so, it falls apart. It was triggered by criticism, coming from multiple angles, with various problems, including http://dissertation.jackjamieson.net/#x1-710005.1.1 - a table showing that a mere 4.42% of our chat users stay active after a year. Ultimately I'm t
# petermolnar rying to raise the question: is what we're doing, how we're doing it, aligned with that we want to be doing or achieving? Is there even such a thing? At the moment, it seems like the answer is simply /plurality, and thus, there is no common goal, just temporary common interest.
# [KevinMarks] the longer answer is going to be how any kind of group keeps going, which is people making the effort to do so, which reminds me a bit of https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownworstenemy.pdf
# petermolnar I'm going to read this, [KevinMarks], thank you!
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# schmudde [chrisaldrich]: I dig your adverts (https://boffosocko.com/2020/12/01/indieweb-advertising-cards/). Have you thought about a clever way of ummm... pinning them up around the web?
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[schmarty] 🦆 🦆
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# [tw2113_Slack_] don’t be a quack snarfed
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# [schmarty] make a micropub client 😄
# [schmarty] kapowski might be a good starting point 😂 https://glitch.com/edit/#!/garrulous-smile
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@joetclarke @TommySiegel The answer to both of your questions is yes https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EoUpVPAXcAElVtL.jpg (twitter.com/_/status/1334518313918095362)
# lahacker i feel like site interoperability in general is a self-perpetuating long-term goal and that expanding the breadth (users) and depth (specs/features) of interop is our short-term goal
# lahacker and i wonder if "don't pave the cowpaths" plays any role here
# lahacker but i'm curious, petermolnar why don't you accept homepage mentions?
# petermolnar Main root page is basic and personal info, meaning there isn't anything on the site that could be commented or reacted on. For chat/talk/communication, I prefer other methods.
# petermolnar a notification I'll receive through webmention.io, but I'm not storing anything that pinged the homepage
# lahacker you could send yourself an e-mail ;)
# lahacker point is, using your own site is like step one but you're still an island; using your site to communicate with another site requires the "IndieWeb" to exist
# petermolnar that is exactly what happens: the webmention.io calls a zaiper webhook which sends an email.
# lahacker so then you do accept homepage mentions you just don't display them
# petermolnar that depends on the definition of accept; given it's a throwaway notification, compared to parsed, saved, processed on the rest, I've defined the latter as "accept"
# lahacker we mention each other in chat to great effect all the time yet most often i hear of people rejecting their homepage mentions
# lahacker is it because this public, logged chat room is more private?
# petermolnar I'd like to respond with a counter question: what should I do with such a mention to my homepage?
# lahacker see it and respond to it?
# lahacker otherwise i have to come to chat and say hey petermolnar check out the post i mentioned you in: https://ange...
# lahacker and if you and I and we become dependent on homepage mention-based discussions then we *need* to perpetuate the IndieWeb technologies and the community around them
# petermolnar there are multiple steps involved in how I handle webmentions. In webmention.io, there are no filters, so even the homepage will receive them. That means that I will indeed get a notification in form of an email. However, I see no reason to display those kind of notifications on my front page, meaning I also don't want to store them.
# [chrisaldrich] schmudde, thanks! I was hoping that pinning them up on my website and CC0'ing them for others to download and use was a good start.
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# [jackjamieson] petermolnar: I’m just chiming in about the 4.42% stat. I want to add a caveat: ~95% of people who ever post to chat do so for fewer than 12 months, but I have no idea (and it’s difficult to track precisely) how that translates to the way people use their personal website. I also don’t think it’s such a bad stat overall, seems pretty in line with the 1% rule - the more I thought about this, the less surprised I was by the small size
# [jackjamieson] IndieWeb’s core - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
# [jackjamieson] That said, I think you’re raising an important point. For the challenge of balancing plurality with UX/growth/“lowering barriers to comprehension” is a pivotal piece of IndieWeb, and what makes it different from many similar endeavours. I agree with aaronpk that IndieWeb does not have a singular goal and that’s okay. But, that definitely can be a barrier for some.
# [jackjamieson] I summarize my thoughts about this toward the end of my dissertation (albeit from a different angle). If interested, see section 8.4 at http://dissertation.jackjamieson.net/#x1-1240008.4 (and particular 8.4.1).
# Loqi person mention is a homepage webmention sent to a person's homepage https://indieweb.org/homepage_mentions
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# [jackjamieson] ^^ I was going to try to summarize my argument in a couple lines, but to be honest it’s first thing in the morning for me and I want to get a coffee before I can really think clearly. I might try to write up a post later, since I think this is an interesting debate
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@510home The Totoro scene by @Lady_Ada_King is what made @aframevr click with me. I abandoned game engines and focused on webVR. From there learned about net neutrality, the values of the open web, etc. I guess I got radicalized on @glitch ? https://twitter.com/glitch/status/1334615032693469198 (twitter.com/_/status/1334619582078754817)
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# petermolnar aaronpk, lahacker: so far none of the usecases of a homepage mention really manifested for me, as in I haven't received any useful mentions like that. If this changes, and storing homepage mentions become reasonable, I'll change my methods. Until then, I'm refusing to store data on the notion of "this might be good some day for something."
# petermolnar is my code editor a UI?
# lahacker well it all started with me going to petermolnar's homepage to look up contact info: email or ... webmentions! "This site also accepts webmentions, but only on the entries themselves." well.. let's see if he's posted a note about this topic re: "across the past weeks I circled back to questions around the identity of indieweb itself"
# lahacker and it made me realize that homepage mentions make interaction bidirectional
# lahacker further, cultivating and encouraging rich discussions on your own site heightens dependency on the existence of the IndieWeb
# lahacker one-to-one can quickly become a group of three or more
# lahacker and, crucially, no one will ask you to take it to another room
# lahacker i think the fact that you wanted to keep the discussion in the main room clearly points to an audience issue which makes me wonder: have we wired this chat properly to encourage posting on your own site first?
# lahacker i hope you don't mind me singling you out petermolnar; you aren't doing anything wrong!
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