#indieweb 2023-06-13
2023-06-13 UTC
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bkil capjamesg: How do you see billions of normal people each individually renting (registering) domains, hosting and operating their own platform for themselves?
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# capjamesg bkil I didn't say anyone needs to register a domain or host their own platform.
# capjamesg A personal website can exist in many places: on WordPress, on your own server, on GitHub, on micro.blog, on Squarespace, or any of the other myriad platforms out there to host one's site!
# capjamesg Also, "normal people" is an unhelpful distinction. "Limited web experience" may be more prudent. If a solution is too technical, the onus is on developers to make it more approachable to people with limited web experience who want to express themselves online.
# bkil s/limited web experience/one who doesn't want to gain web experience at all/
# bkil I.e., I don't see how billions of people would want to turn into web developers eventually. I understand that it is a noble goal to be inclusive to novice web developers though, but that would only gain like up to a million users tops.
# bkil Or maybe 100k, not sure how many web devs live around the globe.
# capjamesg Again, I didn't say anyone had to write any code. The web is for _everyone_.
# bkil If we are talking a hosted shared service, I feel The Fediverse or the Tildeverse to be a better model for this. I always thought that Indieweb was more catering to ones who wanted to deep dive bare metal.
# bkil We've reached the peak of web dev penetration around the 90s. Everyone else who got in through MySpace et al are usually not interested in plumbing or web sites per se, but just want to get their thoughts through.
# capjamesg The IndieWeb community definitely errs toward people with a greater degree of technical experience (unfortunately). With that said, everyone is welcome here. Hence Loqi is in this channel to tell people who bring up explicitly technical topics to go to #indieweb-dev. We can definitely do better at reaching out to people; it is a hard problem and we are always open to more ideas on growing the community!
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# [snarfed] bkil I definitely commiserate with the "have your own web site means you have to admin a server and write code" concern! fortunately it's entirely obsolete and not true any more. people with Facebook and Twitter have their own web pages/sites, in a broad sense, they just don't have much/any ownership over them
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petermolnar > we want it to be just that easy
# petermolnar I don't :P (see my previous comments on no work put into it will result in no worth seen in it, even for the owners)
# petermolnar the rest, yes
# [snarfed] http://micro.blog is our current best of breed example here, entirely IndieWeb enabled, built in POSSE to many other social networks, builds domain registration + DNS into the signup so that it's literally as easy as signing up for a new Twitter account
# petermolnar 20 years ago I had to send a copy of my ID to get a domain in Hungary - things have most certainly changed
# [snarfed] and petermolnar yup I get your quality concern, but it's true everywhre. Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. many personal web sites may already be crap, the fraction may go up much higher if we see broader adoption, and I *still* want as many people to have their own web site. that accessibility is much more important to me than maintaining "quality" somehow
# petermolnar it's not about quality, it's about people valuing their things: their writings, thoughts, photos taken with a camera, etc. I see too many people with complete throwaway mindset, never looking back, always taking more pictures, and so on. Quality, while sometimes measurable, is closer to beauty, which is heavily subjective, so no, it's not about quality. (I'm realising this might tie into the stream vs garden discussion.)
# petermolnar (somewhat related: years ago I sent one of my friends his own entry (!!!) he posted on Facebook; his topic was about self-reflection; his reaction was "wow I have been looking for this for over a year!")
# petermolnar we're getting to more philosophical waters, but what value do you think throwaway content on the open internet brings?
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[Murray] depends what you mean by "throwaway" content. If we're talking about stuff like tweets, notes, photos, snaps etc. (the kind of thing social media excels in) that are intended to be shared _now_ for the audience _here_ then I think there's a huge amount of value in that kind of content. It's how conversations happen and communities grow
# [Murray] I think one of the big issues is that its not often easy _in the moment_ to always distinguish something that is actually ephemeral versus useful. I don't need to remember _every_ conversation I've ever had, but there are definitely some I wish I had recordings of. Still, that's just part of being human in my eyes 🤷♂️ Half-remembered truths are kinda baked into this whole experience
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# petermolnar [Murray]: you just demonstrated what I'd classify as valued. What I meant as throwaway is stuff people don't care about after the "now" has passed: never checked, probably not even remembered, if lost, meh.
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# petermolnar freedom of speech in most of Europe is limited by law, which is a good thing, given history, but that's tangential, given I never said no content should be allowed. I only said the IKEA effect is important, and smooth, seamless, instant publishing possibilities rarely enables the kind of content the creators themselves will cherish. However, [Murray] had a good point with the "here and now" part, that looking back it could be valuable;
# petermolnar I miss partyphotos from dead community sites, for example, but even thos
# petermolnar e were organised, selected, and published after the event, not during, so I'm back to my square one.
# petermolnar Maybe my problem is indeed with the here and now publishing.
# petermolnar (for the sake of logs, correction: nazi symbols, for example, are banned in most of Europe, communist symbols in a lesser amount of countries, so when it comes to freedom of speech in terms of displaying/saying certain things, Europe has limits)
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[Jo] Depending on the level of interactive features one would put on their site I think the risk of "throwaway content" isn't all that big. As I see it most of those sort of thoughts are expressed on social plattforms to start a conversation but as blogs are somewhat onesided I don't think there's much to worry about random thoughts someone immediately forgets (because if the interaction is limited there's not really any reason to publish it).
# petermolnar many sites are non-blog based, especially, especially streams
# petermolnar what is stream?
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Loqi A stream refers to a collection of posts, typically time-ordered, similar to a feed, and often updated in real-time, with updates propagated via a notification-based protocol like WebSub, and published as HTML (h-feed/h-entry) https://indieweb.org/stream
# [Jo] I agree that streams aren't necessarily valuable but I also see that someone might take comfort in owning their own stream of thoughts rather than having it hosted on silos. I guess since they've already become such a big thing it's only natural that people on the personal web want to take it with them or add it to their site.
# [Jo] I definitely agree with [snarfed] on the whole 'do we really need this on the internet' question. I personally don't think we can really make a good judgement on what is valuable to add to the Online; as long as the creator values it (which to me might be as much or as little as 'i had fun sharing this' or 'it was important o get this thought out there') it has a raison d'être
# [snarfed] there are maybe consent/legality questions, but they're arguably the same as for backfeed, not new or different? https://indieweb.org/backfeed#Discussion
# [snarfed] I did it informally just today for someone else's reply, fediverse => Bluesky, https://bsky.app/profile/snarfed.org/post/3jy2qjoaeok2n
# petermolnar so... social salmentions?
# petermolnar what is salmention?
# Loqi Salmention is a protocol extension to Webmention to propagate comments and other interactions upstream by sending a webmention from a response to the original post when the response itself receives a response (comment, like, etc.) https://indieweb.org/Salmention
# petermolnar brings in a lot of ethical and legal dilemma though, given the ToC of networks
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[KevinMarks] There's a bit of overlap in intent but not fully by protocol, maybe with the original Salmon which was about bridging
# [KevinMarks] I think some of the motivation came from the Google Friend Connect and Buzz bridging where multiple activity streams were connected
# [KevinMarks] The signing and other cruft was a mistake, but the goal was effectively that of webmentions in a social reader
# [KevinMarks] “Conversations are becoming distributed and fragmented on the Web. Content is increasingly syndicated and re-aggregated beyond its original context. Technologies such as RSS, Atom, and PubSubHubbub allow for a real time flow of updates to readers, but this leads to a fragmentation of conversations. The comments, ratings, and annotations increasingly happen at the aggregator and are invisible to the original source.
# [KevinMarks] The Salmon Protocol is an open, simple, standards-based solution that lets aggregators and sources unify the conversations.” http://www.salmon-protocol.org/salmon-protocol-summary (it's not simple)
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[tantek] I'd still like to encourage discussion of bridging, protocols, etc. across heterogeneous networks to please go to #indieweb-dev. Yes it has "user impacts" but it's not something users with their own websites should have to care about, like users of phones don't have to care about how different phone networks bridge across the planet.
# benpate[m] Yeah. That's a fair assessment, though it's an artifact of the (absolutely horrible) branding of "the Fediverse". Nerds on Mastodon are up in arms that the tech press is calling it "the Mastodon Network" because there's no good, human-friendly name to describe this cool new tech thing.
# bartekzech2 The fediverse sounds like the name of a website covering politics.
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# [tantek] the aspect of all this that makes it different from the "web" are the temporal nature (roughly FIFO, nevermind the diversion into manipulative algorithms), and the expectation of somewhat "fresh" or "recent" posts / content (in stark contrast to search engines returning years-old things in their results)
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epoch what about something related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artesian_well ?
# [tantek] yes, The WELL was a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL
# [KevinMarks] The flow
# [KevinMarks] Though it is a bit close to artisan
# [tantek] [KevinMarks] streams do flow so I see the appeal there. However the common use of "stream" is much more likely to be a noun (vs jargon verb use), and "flow" is much more likely to be a verb in common use (vs its noun usage being either more jargony, except for its likely most common non-jargon use of referring to menses)
# [KevinMarks] There's a Dutch word "kwell" for the water flow you get when you're below sea level, so it's not so much a seepage or trickle as a high pressure emergency. Which is what happens when you have an activity stream and it gets connected to a high pressure silo.
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# [KevinMarks] That was part of the reason for the Activity Streams logo
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