#dev 2022-01-16

2022-01-16 UTC
typ1cal_c0ffxe3 and aspenmayer[d] joined the channel
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lagash [KevinMarks]1: has this little SEO "hack" been corrected since?
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GWG Is anyone using the Web Share Target API to share to their site?
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[tantek] great question
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capjamesg[d] edgeduchess[d] I saw this and thought you might like it: https://css-tricks.com/jumping-into-webmentions-with-nextjs-or-not/
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capjamesg[d] I would still love to make something with Next.js for the IndieWeb but I'm out of ideas right now 🙂
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capjamesg[d] [James_Van_Dyne]++ for all of the indieweb-utils contributions!
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Loqi [James_Van_Dyne] has 2 karma over the last year
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capjamesg[d] [James_Van_Dyne] Good question. I am not sure.
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capjamesg[d] I wonder how feed readers usually treat sites with multiple alternative feeds.
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capjamesg[d] I could add the autodiscovery tag to my posts. And another one to my likes page, etc.
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[James_Van_Dyne] capjamesg: For sure. Happy to lend a hand. Thank you for taking the initiative to make a repo and get the project rolling 🙂
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[James_Van_Dyne] also a nice change of pace from Tanzawa
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capjamesg[d] No worries! I am learning a lot from your contributions 🙂
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capjamesg[d] How is Tanzawa going?
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Zegnat capjamesg[d]: pretty sure my feed reader gives me a list of toggles when it find multiple feeds, so it lets me select any one or more of them to subscribe to
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capjamesg[d] So I could add my alternate links on all pages?
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Zegnat Yes
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Zegnat According the the HTML spec, when you have rel-alternate with types atom or rss, it does "not necessarily syndicating exactly the same content as the current page", so you can put all of your sites feeds listed out on a single page. Or indeed on every page.
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Zegnat what makes sense for your website is ofcourse another story
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[tantek] Except all of this “multiple feeds to choose from” is absolute crap for typical usability
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[tantek] It's also frankly an obsolete early 2000s model of “how people want to follow/subscribe”
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[tantek] People want to follow people for the most part, not abstract “feeds”
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[tantek] Then let them dial-in and adjust who or how much to mute or unmute accordingly
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capjamesg[d] That is an excellent point tantek.
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capjamesg[d] How would you balance this?
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capjamesg[d] I have a feed for likes, bookmarks, notes, and posts.
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capjamesg[d] I actually think I'm going to aggregate notes and posts, leaving three different types of feeds.
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capjamesg[d] I agree that people want to follow people. Ultimately, I wouldn't offer a likes / bookmarks feed if it meant people found it much harder to subscribe to my notes and articles. But that is just me. I personally like being able to follow certain types of content.
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capjamesg[d] Arguably, this is the sort of thing a feed reader is best positioned to address. But I am not sure most feed readers have a rich ecosystem around blocking keywords / muting certain content types in a feed.
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capjamesg[d] For instance, if I could publish everything in one feed ("follow me online") and know that feed readers would enable people to discard likes, I'd love that.
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capjamesg[d] My ideal feed reader might say "Follow James'... [] Likes [] Bookmarks [] Notes and Articles" rather than asking people to follow separate "feeds" and make a choice between them.
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sknebel right. different feeds works with any reader. as long as it is only a few it's IMHO the solution to go for as publisher right now
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[tantek] I'd say if a reader is showing *everything* from a feed like a mail reader then it's not really a modern social reader, it's an email/netnews client that happens to support a new format
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[tantek] at a minimum a social reader must treat replies/reactions differently than original posts
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[tantek] there should be no downside to publishers for "simply" offering one feed of everything
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sknebel why is your "modern social reader" concerned with RSS feeds?
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[tantek] who said RSS?
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sknebel the entire discussion was about marking up alternate links to feed files?
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[tantek] because the same discovery mechanism is used for h-feed. "when you have rel-alternate"
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[tantek] legacy feed files and readers can barely handle presenting notes & articles, much less reactions/responses e.g. "likes, bookmarks"
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sknebel also the assumption that because we've made up a definition for a modern social reader everyone now uses one of those and other users arent worth considering is kind of annoying. it's a good goal, and if you design a new or improve an existing reader for sure take it into account, but today not everybody uses them
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[tantek] users are worth considering, trying to support an old user-model which has been largely abandoned is not
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[tantek] like we really don't need to go back attempting to rationalize pre-social-media reader UX
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sknebel there's orders of magnitude in user numbers between any of our "modern social readers" and the "largely abandoned" traditional readers
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sknebel and not in our favor
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[tantek] there's orders of magnitude in user numbers of social media "readers" than pre-social-media readers
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sknebel (I personally also happen to use one, because I couldnt get anything else to work for me and dont have time to fix one for my own use. and it works just fine, and yes I do selectively follow e.g. peoples bookmark feeds)
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sknebel sure, but social media use isnt really relevant for the question of "what feeds do I offer on my site"
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[tantek] which is why I still offer an AS1 Atom feed, though I exclude responses from it
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[tantek] s/offer/publish
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sknebel (and following social media feeds isnt also really an alternative, given that filtering there also is very lacking usually)
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sknebel urgs, word order.
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[tantek] yes the only decent example there is IG and it's pretty minimal
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[tantek] so much more potential to do better at that in an indieweb social reader
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capjamesg[d] This is an interesting discussion.
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capjamesg[d] I don’t want to provide a lower quality experience to those using RSS just because I myself use a social reader built on Microsub.
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capjamesg[d] An aggregate feed would not deliver a positive experience to most readers.
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[tantek] you can't help it. RSS is a lower fidelity format. Atom at least as AS1 extensions which can help a bit.
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capjamesg[d] The ratio of likes and bookmarks to articles could be 7-10:1.
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capjamesg[d] Whereas if I mainly advertise my articles feed, I’m happier.
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[tantek] yeah it's a waste of time to publish responses (likes, bookmarks etc.) in RSS, and IMO even Atom
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capjamesg[d] I offer likes and bookmarks feeds but I wouldn’t expect most people to subscribe to them:
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capjamesg[d] And don’t consider them primary content.
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capjamesg[d] I love the idea of likes / bookmarks as a discovery mechanism though:
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[tantek] they're only in my h-feed
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[tantek] *main h-feed
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capjamesg[d] I have been thinking about this a lot and I think what would really drive the IndieWeb social reader idea is a world-class UX that completely abstracts from most of the standard language.
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capjamesg[d] Something that feels as easy to use as Instagram but without all of the rubbish / “algorithm” / etc.
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capjamesg[d] Because that is the sort of experience people are used to, it is likely that one would need a great product to get lots of people in the ecosystem. But that is a long term view, not what I think is needed right this very moment.
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[tantek] This: "feels as easy to use as Instagram" is possible, and is not only long term, but right now
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[tantek] Like instead of building a UI to choose from feeds and manage feeds, follow a *person* (i.e. their domain), and then after parsing their feed, have a smart default and allow them to mute different types of content.
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capjamesg[d] https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/866577430886350869/932377123564437514/IMG_2570.png
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capjamesg[d] Here is my reader on mobile:
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[tantek] e.g. a decent default would be "articles, notes, photos" and mute everything else
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capjamesg[d] I have been trying to build something that abstracts from standards. I have best achieved that in the feed. The rest of the application has a lot of work to do.
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capjamesg[d] But I still have a lot of work to do haha.
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capjamesg[d] I love the idea of following people and then having a smart default.
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capjamesg[d] That smart default can look for signs of a reaction (I.e. a certain property) and mute accordingly.
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capjamesg[d] Visitors could overwrite the default behavior. And indeed completely reimplement it in a fully interoperable ecosystem.
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[tantek] either way, the first thing after asking to follow a person (a domain) should NOT be, "pick from these feed files"
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[tantek] so for that reason I think it's actually a bad idea to publish multiple feed files for discovery because it encourages a bad UX
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[tantek] the reader should figure out which is the primary/main/comprehensive feed, and if anything show a preview of entries before the user confirms yes this is the person
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[tantek] then all the mute or not UI can follow
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[tantek] sknebel, I believe we have to speak plainly and critically about RSS's limitations and old mail/news style reader limitations because we still keep seeing people saying "Why can't we just go back to RSS?" whenever the larger debates about silos vs decentralization etc. happen
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[tantek] there's this odd nostalgic romanticizing of RSS pretending that it solved problems that it didn't, and ignoring all the reasons people got tired of it and left (the unbearable burden of unbolding etc.)
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[tantek] maybe that should be a blog post title: The Unbearable Burden of Unbolding / or Why That RSS Reader You Fondly Remember Wasn’t Actually Enjoyable
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[tantek] also remember how you used to have to actually *click* on each person one at a time to read their posts? instead of "just" scrolling?
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sknebel dont remember ever using a reader that required that, no.
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capjamesg[d] I love being able to just scroll in my reader.
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capjamesg[d] All my posts appear in one channel. They are tagged in multiple channels but there is a single one that aggregates them.
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capjamesg[d] Thus, I can get the latest on everything without having to go to another page. And I can react, and leave comments to all the posts I see.
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capjamesg[d] tantek I might write about social readers on my blog to solidify some of my thoughts.
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capjamesg[d] Good point re: romanticizing RSS.
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capjamesg[d] Technologies should be talked about because they enable you to do something you want to do.
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jamietanna GWG I've looked at the Web Share API before, but Firefox didn't support it at the time i looked so I didn't do anything about it
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GWG jamietanna: I think it does on Android
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