#indieweb 2021-03-07
2021-03-07 UTC
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[chrisaldrich] !tell [Adnan_Onart] I spent some time tinkering with IndieWeb building blocks and TiddlyWiki. I'm far from a JS person, so I didn't get too far, but did manage to get a webmention.io to work with it. Happy to chat if you're interested.
[jeremycherfas], [Rob_Nugen], [tantek], [KevinMarks], shoesNsocks, [schmarty] and [Rose] joined the channel
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[schmarty] Welcome, Forest! Working on a project for your personal site?
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[Forest_Johnson] I was able to join via Slack it looks like
# [Forest_Johnson] I came here to ask about WebMentions and the upcoming indie website club meeting
# [Forest_Johnson] I also tried to join this channel via Matrix before i tried IRC -- my homeserver reported that it failed to join the room, however I do see a user in there named `forest[m]` so I'm not sure what happened. I'm willing to bet it's my homeserver's fault but I don't know
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# [Forest_Johnson] So, for a bit of context, I'm a semi-retired web-and-other-stuff developer, and I have maintained my own site for fun for a few years: sequentialread.com
# [Forest_Johnson] Its a ghost based blog + gogs/gitea as a self-hosted github replacement. Plus a couple apps I made myself. I came to ask about my blog comments app. I just did a bunch of updates to it. You can see it live here: https://beta.sequentialread.com/now-with-comments/#sqr-comment-container
# [Forest_Johnson] And see the source code here: https://git.beta.sequentialread.com/forest/sequentialread-comments
# [Forest_Johnson] I guess maybe I should be talking about this stuff in the indieweb-dev channel ?
# [Forest_Johnson] I guess I also just wanted to chat about webmentions with other people who use them -- I was thinking about building webmention support into my blog and/or my blog comments system
# [Forest_Johnson] So, my current understanding of webmentions goes something like this:
# [Forest_Johnson] The webmentions protocol is in a standards track, but the Big Boys (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Medium, etc) will never implement it because it's extra work for them that does not give them any benefit, in fact, it could hurt them because it works _against_ their interests to lock users into their platform.
# [Forest_Johnson] So, indiewebbers (and lobste.rs?) can send each-other webmentions, but if we want to get WebMentions from normies, we have to use a service like Bridgy.
# [Forest_Johnson] It sounds like "no one actually sends WebMentions" is the biggest barrier to adoption right now. It's hard to bootstrap a network effect.
# [Forest_Johnson] It sounds like bridgy tries to fix this by scraping users social media profiles and dutifully submitting webmentions for them.
# [Forest_Johnson] I'm sorry Loqi! I'm trying to keep this appliciable to everyone. Also why did you kick me from IRC on sight, you silly bot 🤖
# [Forest_Johnson] Anyway, my first question about Bridgy, am I correct in understanding that Bridgy can only send webmentions for social media posts it discovers from users who use bridgy ?
# [Forest_Johnson] So, if Joe Normie posts a link to my website on Twitter, it will not generate a webmention, is that correct ?
# [Forest_Johnson] Er, excuse me, specifically Joe Normie who does not use Bridgy
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KartikPrabhu yes. bridgy does not look at "all Twitter posts"
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[jeremycherfas] Bridgy turns responses on, eg, Twitter into web mentions that it then returns to your site. The tweet will have been syndicated from your site.
# [jeremycherfas] What is POSSE?
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Loqi POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content https://indieweb.org/POSSE
# KartikPrabhu Bridgy is for "backfeed" i.e. getting replies on twitter back to your own site
# [jeremycherfas] See ^^
# [Forest_Johnson] I understand the POSSE idea -- but I am talking about new posts that are not related to my POSSE posts
# KartikPrabhu no, Bridgy does not scan all of Twitter for links to your site
# [Forest_Johnson] My second question about bridgy, does anyone self-host it ? I guess maybe that
# [Forest_Johnson] maybe that's a question for #indieweb-dev
# [jeremycherfas] It is.
# [Forest_Johnson] I looked on the readme and there was a bunch of stuff about how to deploy it on google app engine. That doesn't really fit my definition of "self hosting"
# [Forest_Johnson] It sounds like most people simply sign up for an account on brid.gy
# KartikPrabhu yes. the most common use-case right now is to use it as a service
# [Forest_Johnson] thanks, ok, last question, does anyone else here use ghost? Are there any resources anyone would recommend for sending WebMentions with ghost ?
# KartikPrabhu what is ghost?
# Loqi Ghost is an an open source blogging software project written in node.js, and also a hosted silo at https://ghost.org https://indieweb.org/Ghost
# KartikPrabhu unfortunately I don't see many webmention things for Ghost on there
# [Forest_Johnson] https://forum.ghost.org/t/support-for-webmentions/2077/11
# [Forest_Johnson] Looks like users have requested it and the project owners have complained that there aren't any great open source implementations (presumably written in node.js) that they can copy and paste from
# KartikPrabhu well there are many open source implementions
# KartikPrabhu I am not sure why they expect someone else to write an implementation for them
# [Forest_Johnson] This was sort of my reaction as well when I started reading about webmentions.
# [Forest_Johnson] I guess my problem was I wasn't willing to go into PHP-land to learn about it. But also, I am still relatively ignorant of what's out there, hence why I'm here
# [Forest_Johnson] > This sounds really great! but where's the code?
# KartikPrabhu not just PHP. there are python versions too
# KartikPrabhu I wrote my own for my website. but if someone says "can you write it in Node.js for me" I would 'eh no'
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petermolnar > I am not sure why they expect someone else to write an implementation for them - because this is the internet. We want it free, open source, and ready shipped for my specific needs.
# [Forest_Johnson] > why they expect someone else to write an implementation for them
# [Forest_Johnson] Why wouldn't they? this is typically how things work in opensource land. doing your own implementation is typically seen as a bad idea, risky, wasteful, etc.
# petermolnar > this is typically how things work in opensource land - ??? No.
# KartikPrabhu open source does not mean someone has to implement it in your language/platform of choice
# petermolnar the only exception where you'll hear that is cryptography, but even that it isn't always true.
# KartikPrabhu https://indieweb.org/Webmention#Publishing_Software here is a list
# [Forest_Johnson] I guess what I mean is, ghost is in the business of blog/CMS. not in the business of webmentions. They are also very "professional" they want everything to be perfect, 100% test coverage, the whole 9 yards
# petermolnar https://indieweb.org/Webmention-developer#Libraries - php, ruby, python, perl, go, nodejs, elixir .
# [Forest_Johnson] so for them to do WebMentions in that way, it would be a lot of work for them far outside of their focus area
# [Forest_Johnson] they would rather have someone else whos focus area is webmentions do the hard work of writing all the tests, maintaining the project, etc etc.
# petermolnar Indeed. So get someone who extends the code, and gets them to merge, on a volunteer basis.
# petermolnar _that_ is open source.
# KartikPrabhu yup. *volunteer*
# KartikPrabhu it looks like no one has volunteered and they can use that as "there is no open source code"
# KartikPrabhu there is a lot of open source code which people have written and other people use
# [Forest_Johnson] Well. I can probably build WebMentions into ghost in a fork
# [Forest_Johnson] and use it on my own site
# KartikPrabhu exactly!
# KartikPrabhu https://github.com/glennjones/webmentions seems to be Node.js right?
# [Forest_Johnson] thx. I will check out some of these links in a bit
# petermolnar > and use it on my own site - once that's done, you can start discussions with the ghost devs to merge your changes.
# KartikPrabhu [Forest_Johnson]: and if you choose you can make your implementation open-source and send it to the Ghost people
# [Forest_Johnson] so, I guess I already said "last question", maybe I lied. I have one more about architecture for WebMentions on the sending side , not the receiving side.
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# [Nuno_Donato] hi folks! is there any blogging platform that is aligned/based on indieweb? (out-of-the-box implementations for microformats, webmentions, etc)
# KartikPrabhu what is known
# Loqi Known is an open publishing / community platform project https://indieweb.org/known
# KartikPrabhu [Nuno_Donato]: perhaps that ^
# [Forest_Johnson] yeah, you can look at a list of projects here https://indieweb.org/projects
# KartikPrabhu there are also plugins for wordpress
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# Loqi Micro.blog is a website and social service started by Manton Reece, which natively supports IndieWeb building-blocks like microformats2, Webmention, and Micropub https://indieweb.org/Micro.blog
# [Nuno_Donato] i know about micro.blog but it can't be self-hosted, right?
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# [Nuno_Donato] thanks
# [Nuno_Donato] known seems interesting.. but too complicated
# [Forest_Johnson] [snarfed] whoa, how does it do that ? you get a wholesale feed from twitter and reddit !?
# [Forest_Johnson] oh.. so it polls the search for your domain then ?
# [Forest_Johnson] thats kinda cool
# KartikPrabhu oh! my bad then I didn't know/had forgotten
# [Forest_Johnson] so, regarding the architecture for sending webmentions, does it make more sense to build the webmention support into Ghost? Or would my time be better spent building an addon?
# [Forest_Johnson] For context, folks have been asking the ghost project to implement comments within the platform itself for a long time. They have resisted, and I think for good reason: everyone wants something different out of comments, one size does not fit all.
# [Forest_Johnson] So I decided to simply build my own comments system that is its own separate app -- it doesn't depend on ghost. you can put it on any page
# [Forest_Johnson] Why not do the same thing for webmentions?
# KartikPrabhu i suppose an addon is a nice place to start. If there is interest they could add it to actual Ghost then
# [Forest_Johnson] I can see a strong argument for a simple easily-self-hostable server which you can run and then plunk its script tag onto your site to enable publishing webmentions
# [snarfed] [Forest_Johnson] yup lots of those: https://indieweb.org/Webmention#Publisher_Services
# [Forest_Johnson] thanks, I will check it out .
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# [chrisaldrich] Another model for this sort of service [Forest_Johnson] would be Disqus, but built on Webmention. One could potentially build it into lots of sites not just Ghost.
# [Forest_Johnson] Yeah thats kinda what I'm thinking about building
# [Forest_Johnson] But oriented around self-hosting first, rather than service
# [Forest_Johnson] I guess right now I'm looking at self-hosting
# [Forest_Johnson] https://github.com/aaronpk/webmention.io (incoming) /
# [Forest_Johnson] and https://github.com/remy/wm (outgoing)
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[KevinMarks] Well, you can self host several of these - webmention.herokuapp.com too I think can run without Heroku
# [Forest_Johnson] and then for my comments system, I would just build in webmention.io API support so when you turn it on it will display a "mentions" section above the comments
# [Forest_Johnson] Yeah you are right loki
# [Forest_Johnson] I'll post about it here once I get this stuff working
# [Forest_Johnson] sorry to be a pain, but, is this supposed to happen? as soon as I said anything in the IRC channel I was instantly kicked by your chatty robotic resident, Loqi
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# KartikPrabhu [Forest_Johnson]: I don't think you should be kicked out. Just a reminder to take very development heavy topics to the dev channel
# [Forest_Johnson] this was teh 1st message I ever sent
# [Forest_Johnson] All the messages you see from me in this channel are from slack
# [Forest_Johnson] I went to slack because I was instabanned from IRC just for saying hi
# [Forest_Johnson] I tried to join via matrix too, but my matrix homeserver could not join the channel for some reason. Still debugging that one ...
# KartikPrabhu aah not sure what happened there
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# [chrisaldrich] It may be that the recent run of IRC spam had Loqi on high alert which can mean that joining the room and saying something immediately triggers the spam mechanism. Sorry this happened [Forest_Johnson].
# [chrisaldrich] Thanks for persevering. Glad to have you here.
# [Forest_Johnson] Thats too bad. I will say that perhaps in the future if this happens, loqi should warn the users that IRC is under attack and they must use a different platform
# [Forest_Johnson] Like, maybe that string could be introduced in to the kick reason? "IRC is under attack, please try slack or matrix instead" something like that
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[tantek] This reminded me of the conversation about domains and having to pay to own your website: https://twitter.com/sthenc/status/1348384424702869504
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