#indieweb 2024-08-29

2024-08-29 UTC
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ruta123
i know very little about bluesky's software architecture, what is their selling point??
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Loqi
Homebrew Website Club - Pacific is starting soon! Join us! https://events.indieweb.org/pl5qy3HDEOhb
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[Joe_Crawford]
I am running late to get back to my desk. I committed to starting the HWC Pacific. I can still do that but likely 5-10 minutes late given traffic I find myself in.
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[snarfed]
ruta123, very short answer, Bluesky's selling point is that it's decentralized, kinda like Mastodon, but unlike Mastodon, it's still easy to use
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[Otto_Rask]
what makes mastodon hard to use? the initial choice of picking a server? because otherwise mastodon is as simple to use as any social app there is
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aaronpk
understanding how to follow someone not on your instance, understanding the difference between local and global timeline, understanding why when you click on someone’s profile only some things appear but not others, why hashtags don’t show all the posts everywhere, what is the difference between mastodon and the fediverse, I can keep going
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[Otto_Rask]
and how is this solved in bsky? wouldn't decentralization mean the same problems exist there?
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[Otto_Rask]
or does bsky do extra processing (i.e. add strain on servers) to make things identical between servers? or something similar?
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ruta123
[Otto_Rask]: i actually asked this same question to friends just 2 days ago, picking up a server seem very confusing to them... i tried explaining this part as in picking a email service provider, like between gmail or hotmail or whatever. but they still confused. bear in mind, they are all engineers
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sebbu
that's not what makes mastodon hard to use
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ruta123
sometimes i wonder if centralized services has done such success in marketing themselves, like making ppl think Gmail is so unique, to the point that overshadow the definition of email itself. So the action of picking a sever simply do not exist in most ppl's mind anymore. It's just picking Gmail or not Gmail.
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sebbu
you just pick mastodon.social or whichever instance you first encountered
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ruta123
sebbu: true... but that's what confused my friends
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sebbu
what makes it hard to use is that you register on your instance, follow some accounts, then you start browsing and end up on other instances... and you're not logged in anymore, because your on domain.tld/account instead of mastodon.social/account@domain.tld
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[Otto_Rask]
it has been a few years since the great twitter exodus and I'm amazed that mastodon/fedi people have not come up with a succinct explainer of what an instance is and what the decentralization means; I think bsky at least at some point supported smoother account migrations (i.e. transfer content, followers, etc.), as opposed to mastodon where that process moves only part of your stuff and the guides on it are messy and so on; proper migration
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[Otto_Rask]
tools would remove the anxiety when it comes to picking an instance on fedi
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sebbu
and then, some instances are federated together and some aren't
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Loqi
hey [Otto_Rask], sebbu: it seems like this conversation is more appropriate for #indieweb-dev (decentralization, federated)
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sebbu
some use different frontend that have different features (such as emoji for example, or post vs notes)
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sebbu
sometimes i even finds it hard to go back to my instance from another, the follow sometimes redirect me to my instance, sometimes it just ask my handle so that i can follow directly, sometimes it just errors
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ruta123
sebbu: idk, maybe if the design is different, it would help??? i used tuba, it doesn't show the user any of these part of confusing elements, or at least doens't have it.
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ruta123
actually im wrong... i forgot this discord is about website... mb
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ruta123
forget about the desktop app i mentioned... 😅
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sebbu
yeah, but what if you follow links in other's posts ?
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sebbu
or on irc/email/whatever ?
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sebbu
the links which obviously point to the instance the profile is on, not the one you have your account on
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Loqi
[preview] sebbu
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sebbu
(yes it's one of the two mastodon - nostr bridges)
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sebbu
(the other one seems to support more stuff, but is so slow it doesn't respond most of the time)
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sebbu
(yes i've been using both)
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lazcorp
I e gettng an "Could not find a syndication or category link for this entry to news.indieweb.org" error when trying to submit to IndieNews (but a syndication link exists in https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/nsfw-on-the-indieweb )
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lazcorp
that should start "I keep getting..." (new keyboard is not as sensitive as my old one)
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sebbu
i have similar issues on my own keyboard when the battery starts being empty, keys just skips
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sebbu
(or when my pc lag)
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sebbu
when i have a load average in the thousands, keys skips too
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lazcorp
great post, James
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lazcorp
capjamesg[d]++
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Loqi
capjamesg[d] has 65 karma in this channel over the last year (204 in all channels)
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[KevinMarks]
I signed up for threads yesterday and the experience was so bad (and took so long) that I wrote a huge essay for Christopher to pass on to Engineering there.
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jimw
ruta123: The models of federation for Bluesky and Mastodon/Fediverse are quite different. Bluesky feels a lot less decentralized. But I think a better explanation for the difference in momentum I was talking about was that the core Bluesky development is well-funded relative to Mastodon, and the Bluesky team is more focused on user experience and
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jimw
user safety.
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[tantek]
it's not clear which is more well-funded because Mastodon also brings in a ton of donations. also not clear which is more sustainably funded, as Mastodon has more recurring smaller donations AFAIK, whereas BlueSky got a big initial investment but I'm not sure how much recurring (or from how many people) donations/investment they are receiving
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jimw
Fair. Mastodon also exists in the context of a broader Fediverse so they don't have the same control over their own protocol and other servers and clients that the Bluesky folks do. (Although I'm sure that's changing for Bluesky.)
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[mattl]
I think it's untrue that Mastodon doesn't have control over the protocol. I'd say its maybe even the opposite: Mastodon has bigger control over ActivityPub than anything/anyone.
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[mattl]
If Mastodon doesn't implement something, it doesn't exist for the majority of users of the network
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Loqi
hey [mattl], we try to keep dev talk (ActivityPub, protocol, implement) out of this channel, can you move to #indieweb-dev?
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jimw
I'm not saying Mastodon don't have any control, they are the biggest elephant in the room. In comparison, Bluesky is pretty much the only elephant in the room when it comes to the AT protocol. (But I assume that is shifting now that they're actually federating.)
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btrem
I think bank websites might be the most user hostile. And absurd.
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jimw
Banks (and government sites) are always the worst when it comes to doing bizarre things to the login process that make it harder to use things like password managers or good 2FA.
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jimw
But I don't think anyone will ever top the old system for buying T-bills online that made their own virtual keyboard for entering passwords.
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[mattl]
If you think bank websites are bad, check out small credit union websites. They're still using stuff they bought a while back or made in house and its very difficult to use.
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jimw
Thankfully the CUs that I use seemed to have leapfrogged from unassuming username/password to reasonable login systems without doing anything particularly terrible in between. Can't say the same for US Bank, which used to have a login form on the home page that didn't work with Safari.
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btrem
jimw that system still exists. At least it did when I bought t-bills a year ago.
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jimw
btrem Oh, I thought I had read that it finally got replaced recently. It's been a long time since I used it.
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aaronpk
say that gives me a great idea for a joke website
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btrem
The number of stupid things I've encountered. I just set up a new account a couple of days ago, and logged in for the first time today. It made me enter my cell phone number for (terrible) 2FA. When I pressed the "continue" button, I got some sort of generic error message ("Sorry we can't continue at this time").
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btrem
I thought maybe I was blocking the wrong script. So pressed the back button on my browser. But instead of returning to the previous "enter phone number" screen, it just logged me in. !!
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btrem
Nice security.
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jimw
Yikes.
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btrem
To think some company/bank division actually made this, and thought, look what we made.
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btrem
But not in a horrified way. Like presumably they were proud of what they had done.
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jimw
Yeah, Alex Russell's series on the failures of front-end JavaScript kind of covers how this goes off the rails for government projects. https://infrequently.org/2024/08/the-landscape/
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Loqi
[indienews] New post: "Has the IndieWeb become discourse again?" https://martymcgui.re/2024/08/29/141602/
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[schmarty]
👋 😄
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aaronpk
brb bookmarking this post so i can send it to everyone who makes these ridiculous arguments from now on
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[schmarty]
i had to rewrite it because i posted the first version from my untested "reply" tool in Banter and it just didn't send the content 😂 😭
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[schmarty]
might be saltier the second time around
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aaronpk
it may be salty but it's not _too_ salty!
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aaronpk
well-seasoned
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[tantek]
capjamesg[d], on the topic of "edit suggestion" posts (user-friendlier renaming/reframing of "pull request"), which the original author could "accept suggestion" (e.g.f for fixing typos etc.) I did write this over a decade ago: https://tantek.com/2011/174/t1/read-fork-write-merge-web-osb11
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Loqi
[preview] [Tantek Çelik] The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web. #osb11 lunch table. #diso #indieweb
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[tantek]
inspired by IRL asking [KevinMarks] to fix mistypings of what I demo'd at IWC PDX when he was live-tooting the demo session
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[tantek]
what if I could have done those with "edit suggestion" responses on my own site
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[snarfed]
good post [schmarty]!
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[schmarty]
tyty 🙏
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[tantek]
to his posts, which then only he and I by default could see, until he did an "accept suggestion" on my response, which then edited his post automatically, and recognized the contribution in the edit history of that post?
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[snarfed]
http://micro.blog - with its built in domain registration and automatic DNS that users don't have to see - may be the best response right now
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[snarfed]
the other one is that "IndieWeb requires microformats, webmention, etc" is totally wrong
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[snarfed]
...but is obviously still a common misperception, despite our best efforts
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[snarfed]
so I guess we need to keep saying that loudly
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[snarfed]
if you have your own web site, on your own domain, you're IndieWeb. everything else is gravy
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[schmarty]
ty for reminding me http://micro.blog can register domains! updated my post.
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[schmarty]
and yeah, pretty much agree on the all-else-is-gravy thing.
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[schmarty]
haha omg someone followed my site on bluesky via bridgy fed
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[schmarty]
snarfed++ bridgyfed++
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Loqi
bridgyfed has 2 karma in this channel over the last year (10 in all channels)
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Loqi
snarfed has 33 karma in this channel over the last year (101 in all channels)
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[snarfed]
love it! the dream!
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[schmarty]
now i exist twice on bluesky 😱
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[snarfed]
lmk if you want me to remove the bridged one 😆
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[schmarty]
haha, thanks! i haven't chosen how i wanna use bluesky so it's fine! great, even!
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[tantek]
[schmarty]++ great summary post of the situation
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Loqi
[schmarty] has 3 karma in this channel over the last year (22 in all channels)
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[tantek]
inspiring me to make the We Should Improve Society Somewhat meme equivalent/shorthand
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[tantek]
so I can embed it on this page:
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[tantek]
what is corporate?
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Loqi
The corporate web is perhaps more critically explained as the capitalist web, where people are the product, and their time, attention, and clicks are seen as a natural resource to be extracted and sold to the highest bidder https://indieweb.org/corporate
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epoch
"attention capital"?
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gRegor
[schmarty]++ great post! small typo "freely admin" instead of "freely admit"
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Loqi
[schmarty] has 4 karma in this channel over the last year (23 in all channels)
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gRegor
unless... offering to admin our sites? :D
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Loqi
[preview] [[tantek]] "We should improve the indieweb somewhat." "Yet you participate in the corporate web. Curious! I am very intelligent!"
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[schmarty]
gRegor++ thx for the typo fix. my days of sysadmining for free are... certainly at a middle.
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Loqi
gRegor has 14 karma in this channel over the last year (125 in all channels)
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[tantek]
[snarfed] "everything else is gravy" is also not really accurate/helpful, as people think of say, having a Blogger and having a Mastodon as two categorically different things, rather than "gravy"
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[tantek]
and that's essentially the additional features/UX you get on your website when you have a good implementation of those standards. your personal site becomes something that can replace not just your Blogger, but also your Mastodon
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[tantek]
so no, I'd disagree that that difference is "gravy" — and it's unnecessarily self/community-deprecating
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[snarfed]
sure! I don't think we're disagreeing
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epoch
some types of gravy taste better than other types of gravy
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[tantek]
I think it's potentially actively harmful to do such minimization. Calling it "gravy" also does a disservice the way calling something "simple" does
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[snarfed]
...but also the mindshare around microformats and webmentions has clearly led some people to believe that we "require" those of anyone who wants to participate in the IndieWeb, to our detriment
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Loqi
friendly reminder [tantek] [snarfed], can you move the tech talk (implementation, Microformats) to #indieweb-dev to keep this channel more inclusive and inviting?
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[tantek]
ah! implementation is borderline, I tried so hard
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to2ds
What is IndieMark?
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Loqi
✅ IndieMark is an in-progress developer guide that organizes IndieWeb features into related clusters based on implementation trends within the community https://indieweb.org/IndieMark
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[tantek]
it's something I need to sit down and spend a day or two re-organizing into user / developer tracks and rewriting big portions accordingly
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[tantek]
I made the error of conflating too many user-level features and plumbing implementations thereof that ended up confusing too many people, and giving a misperception of focus on plumbing which is certainly the opposite of what we want
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to2ds
I thought some type of leveling would make sense and found IndieMark in the wiki.
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[schmarty]
it's really difficult to separate things well (and keep them that way)
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[tantek]
I'm still convinced it's doable
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[tantek]
acknowledging that yes, it is hard to do it well (hence "sit down and spend a day or two")
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[schmarty]
i think so, too! but really hard. and it will go stale. and etc. but this is the work. :}
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[tantek]
ok I will think more about that. but first, "suggest edit", "accept edit". I want to make that a thing on the IndieWeb (backed by our usual formats)
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[KevinMarks]
We have done it via github for my site before, if you want a example
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to2ds
If level 0 consisted of registering a domain and posting content, that would be a huge accomplishment in and of itself.
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[KevinMarks]
Also there are verbs for that in Activity Streams, as Jira implemented them in AS1 if you want more silo examples
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[mattl]
I'd love to see a much simpler version of "getting started" that's completely beginner friendly... such that you can buy a domain name and you instantly get a basic one-page site that's just... good to go.
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[KevinMarks]
The omg.lol is close there, though it is a subdomain
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[tantek]
KevinMarks yes, please take the AS talk to #indieweb-dev
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[tantek]
[mattl] that exists on the present Getting Started page as its own section
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[tantek]
if you are arguing for different wiki sections vs pages, let's take that to #indieweb-meta
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[mattl]
Yeah, big fan of omg.lol -- I *think* you can just use your own domain name there now too.
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[tantek]
what is level 0
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Loqi
It looks like we don't have a page for "level 0" yet. Would you like to create it? (Or just say "level 0 is ____", a sentence describing the term)
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[tantek]
to2ds, level 0 is literally that "general theme of *owning your own domain* and *publishing some of your own content* there." (*emphasis* in original)
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to2ds
I was confused as it seemed IndieMark only applied to developers.
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[tantek]
right, that's part of the existing confusion I mentioned which needs improvement.
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