The Logos, Ethos, and Pathos of IndieWeb

Where is the IndieWeb?

Logos

One might consider the IndieWeb's indieweb.org wiki-based website and chat the "logos" of IndieWeb. There is a small group of about a hundred actove tp very active participants who hang out in these spaces on a regular basis, but there are also many who dip in and out over time as they tinker and build, ask advice, get some help, or just to show up and say hello. Because there are concrete places online as well as off (events) for them to congregate, meet, and interact, it's the most obvious place to find these ideas and people.

Ethos

Beyond this there is an even larger group of people online who represent the "ethos" of IndieWeb. Some may have heard the word before, some have a passing knowledge of it, but an even larger number have not. They all act and operate in a way that either seemed natural to them because they grew up in the period of the open web, or because they never felt accepted by the thundering herds in the corporate social enclosures. Many are not necessarily easily found or discovered because they're not surfaced or highlighted by the sinister algorithms of corporate social media, but through slow and steady work (much like the in person social space) they find each other and interact in various traditional web spaces. Many of them can be found in spaces like Tilde Club or NeoCities, or through movements like A Domain of One's Own, some can be found through a variety of webrings, via blogrolls, or just following someone's website and slowly seeing the community of people who stop by and comment. Yes, these discovery methods may involve a little more work, but shouldn't health human interactions require work and care?

Pathos

The final group of people, and likely the largest within the community, are those that represent the "pathos" of IndieWeb. The word IndieWeb has not registered with any of them and they suffer with grief in the long shadow of corporate social media wishing they had better user interfaces, better features, different interaction, more meaningful interaction, healthier and kinder interaction. Some may have even been so steeped in big social for so long that they don't realize that there is another way of being or knowing.

These people may be found searching for the IndieWeb promised land on silo platforms like Blogger, Tumblr or Medium where they have the shadow on the wall of a home on the web where they can place their identities and thoughts. Here they're a bit more safe from the acceleration of algorithmically fed content and ills of mainstream social. Others are trapped within massive content farms run by multi-billion dollar extractive companies who quietly but steadily exploit their interactions with friends and family.

The Conversation

All three of these parts of the IndieWeb, the logos, the ethos, and the pathos comprise the community of humanity. They are the sum of the real conversation online.

Venture capital backed corporate social media has cleverly inserted themselves between us and our interactions with each other. They privilege some voices not only over others, but often at the expense of others and only to their benefit. We have been developing a new vocabulary for these actions with phrases like "surveillance capitalism", "data mining", and analogizing human data as the new "oil" of the 21st century. The IndieWeb is attempting to remove these barriers, many of them complicated, but not insurmountable, technical ones, so that we can have a healthier set of direct interactions with one another that more closely mirrors our in person interactions. By having choice and the ability to move between a larger number of service providers there is an increasing pressure to provide service rather than the growing levels of continued abuse and monopoly we've become accustomed to.

None of these subdivisions---logos, ethos, or pathos---is better or worse than the others, they just are. There is no hierarchy between or among them just as there should be no hierarchy between fellow humans. But by existing, I think one could argue that through their humanity they are all slowly, but surely making the web a healthier, happier, fun, and more humanized and humanizing place to be.

http://oldavista.com/

Old'aVista, a play on the old Altavista search engine.

https://justinjackson.ca/webmaster/

-Justin Jackson

Huzzah! Kevin Marks for the win!

https://indieweb.org/this-week/2022-05-06.html

Lots of new folks joining recently. :)

https://ohmypizza.com/2022/05/shortcut-to-track-the-music-you-listen-to-using-lastfm.php

https://socialhome.network/

A Fediverse project that does both articles, notes, and photos.

Link to https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1522267857169653761

One's note taking is not only a conversation with the text or even the original author, it is also a conversation you're having with your future self. This feature is accelerated when one cross links ideas within their note box with each other and revisits them at regular intervals.

Example of someone who uses Roam Research and talks about the prevalence of using it as a "conversation with your future self."

This is very similar to the same patterns that can be seen in the commonplace book tradition, and even in the blogosphere (Cory Doctorow comes to mind), or IndieWeb which often recommends writing on your own website to document how you did things for your future self.

https://indieweb.org/this-week/2022-04-29.html

https://cagrimmett.com/thoughts/2022/04/26/why-blog/

A great essay on why bog!

—Maria Popova, on choosing a new name for her website.

Oded Shenkar's three step process for effective problem solving using imitation: - Step 1. Specify your problem and identify an analogous problem that has been successfully solved. - Step 2. Analyze why the solution was successful. - Step 3. Identify how your problem and circumstances differ from the example problem and figure out how to best and most appropriately adapt the original solution to the new context.

The last step may be the most difficult.

The IndieWeb broadly uses the idea of imitation to work on and solve a variety of different web design problems. By focusing on imitation they dramatically decrease the work and effort involved in building a website. The work involved in creating new innovative solutions even in their space has been much harder, but there, they imitate others in breaking the problems down into the smallest constituent parts and getting things working there.

Link this to the idea of "leading by example".

Link to "reinventing the wheel" -- the difficulty of innovation can be more clearly seen in the process of people reinventing the wheel for themselves when they might have simply imitated a more refined idea. Searching the state space of potential solutions can be an arduous task.

Link to "paving cow paths", which is a part of formalizing or crystalizing pre-tested solutions.

As open source as Hypothes.is is, I do wish that it had some additional open IndieWeb building blocks to keep it from being a silo.

Sadly, I've never had the time, nor the technical expertise and facility with their code to implement the pieces, but I have outlined a bit of what might be done to make the platform a bit less silo-like: https://boffosocko.com/2019/04/08/ideas-for-indieweb-ifying-hypothes-is/

Fortunately it is open enough for me in other respects that I can bend portions of it to my will and needs beyond what it offers a la carte.

https://werd.io/2022/my-indieweb-real-estate-website-part-one

Gall's Law: Working complex systems invariably evolve from simple systems which actually worked.

It is rare to find working complex systems designed from scratch. They rarely work and are incredibly difficult to patch to make them work.

https://dev.authorbuzz.co.uk/2022/03/28/is-indieweb-coming-to-author-buzz-uk/

https://www.ionos.de/newsroom/news/rueckblick-auf-den-cloudfest-hackathon-2022/

https://movement-ontology.brandazzle.net/docs/introduction/#how-do-i-use-it

Built using Markdown text files and PDFs using Obsidian, versioned through GitHub, and connected to a website through Netlify and Peter Yuen's Zola site project.

See also: https://github.com/ppeetteerrs/obsidian-zola

https://castopod.org/

Open source software for podcasting.

https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-can-t-thrive-without-friction-6cb38fd3

https://indieweb.org/this-week/2022-03-18.html

A real shame for what it’s now become, I’ve stopped uploading a while ago and stopped paying when they doubled the price - I wasn’t getting any value out of it. I need to #indieweb my photos though

— Serdar Kiliç (@serdar) March 18, 2022

Use of IndieWeb as a verb in the wild.

The only older use I can think of is "indiewebify" stemming from the website https://indiewebify.me.

Anything’s a CMS if you indieweb it hard enough!<br><br>This is super cool.

— MWDelaney (@MichaelWDelaney) March 19, 2022

Use of IndieWeb as a verb in the wild.

https://search.marginalia.nu/

A search engine for IndieWeb sites.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTSEr0cRJY8

Starts out with four and a half minutes of anti-crypto and Web3 material. Presumably most of her audience is in the web3 space.

http://youvegotkat.neocities.org

Neocities: http://neocities.org

The Yesterweb: http://yesterweb.org

Marginalia Search: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random

It [the IndieWeb] is so so queer. Like it's super gay, super trans, super good.

The indie web also questions tech solutionism which often attempts to solve human problems by removing the human element. But easily the most remarkable and powerful thing about the internet is the ability it has to connect us with one another.

https://web3.14159.site/

https://sanlive.com/quiet-web-obsessions/

It's depressing to see that this fundamental problem of the early web seemingly has seen almost no progress in almost a quarter of a century.

Given these criteria for requisite tools of a genex, I can certain create a case that the IndieWeb community is doing most of these fairly well with respect to their domain of interest.

https://indieweb.org/this-week/2022-03-11.html

https://www.amitgawande.com/2018/07/18/223800.html

Details for adding date/time microformats to Blot.im.

https://www.amitgawande.com/2018/07/17/195200.html

Amit Gawande outlines some of his work to IndieWebify his Blot.im website.

https://github.com/am1t/blotpub

Blotpub, a self-hosteable Micropub and media endpoint for blot.im and Dropbox.

https://www.amitgawande.com/2018/08/02/164900.html

Overview of thinking about beginning to IndieWebify a Blot website.

https://kiriska.com/blog/2022/your-website-is-useless/

Some general discussion about the value of having a portfolio on your own website in a social media driven world. Touches on the ease of use and user interface problems that are out there.

https://indieweb.org/this-week/2022-03-04.html

https://brainbaking.com/post/2021/10/are-digital-gardens-blogs/

We definitely need better definitions of digital gardens (public or otherwise) to delineate them from blogs, zettelkasten, wikis, social media, and other forms of information exchange.

Wouter Groeneveld describes some of his thoughts here.

Link to notes from https://collect.readwriterespond.com/are-digital-gardens-blogs/

https://rusingh.com/why-think-webmentions-complex/

https://macwright.com/2022/02/24/indie-bookshelves.html

😍

https://indieweb.org/this-week/2022-02-04.html

Gerben and Brendan Howell created PenPub which connects with a Moleskine/Neo smartpen via bluetooth, turns the lines into an SVG file, uploads that to a static web server, and thereby creates a ‘paper website’ that is a live reflection of your notebook (with a few seconds delay)

• Example page: http://penpub.ink/page38.html
• PenPub code is available at: https://gitlab.com/bhowell/penpub

syndicated copy

Caveat emptor. A lot of these "influencer" methods are leaving 30% or far more of their value with the platforms they're using for distribution. A better path is to build and promote your own platform and have a direct relationship with one's readers (in newsletter spaces, it's about "owning"/having your reader's email address). Some other newsletter options can be found here: https://indieweb.org/newsletter as well as methods for building and owning your own technology stack across its site. If nothing else, consider having a website where you can have a portfolio/archive of your work.

Careful watchers of the newsletter space will notice that almost all of the highlight examples on these services are established big names with pre-existing platforms and audience. Where are the stories of the other 99.9% and how well they're doing? Who is actually making a full time living doing this without a significant leg up to start? As examples, look for major writers leaving the New York Times to set up newsletters, or people like Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg leaving The National Review to set up The Dispatch (as a newsletter platform)—it's a good bet that they're getting a better deal from Substack than the average person. The NiemanLab has some relatively good coverage of some of this space. (Their annual predictions series also has solid forward looking coverage of the journalism/technology space: https://www.niemanlab.org/collection/predictions-2022/.)

(Apologies for lurking... 😅, but happy to chat technology/publishing with anyone interested.)

Needed.

Who says the link in bio needs to go to a company's homepage? Why couldn't it be a custom landing page geared toward the social media site the link is placed on?

The reasoning here is completely false.

https://github.com/tegon/traktflix

Code for making a Trakt.tv scrobbler for Netflix.

https://webmention.io/api/mentions.jf2?target=https://indieweb.org

Link for mentions of the IndieWeb wiki. Ought to dump this into into Fluffy's webmention.js (https://github.com/PlaidWeb/webmention.js/) to provide a better experience.

https://johannesklingebiel.de/2021/03/10/new-website.html

I know that Johannes has a digital garden, but I didn't expect his post to take the turn it did! What a lovely little piece.

I love that Johannes Klingbiel highlights having his own place on the Internet as a means to learn. While I suspect that part of the idea here is to learn about the web and programming, it's also important to have a place you can more easily look over and review as well as build out on as one learns. This dovetails in part with his third reason to have his own website: "to build". It's much harder to build out a learning space on platforms like Medium and Twitter. It's not as easy to revisit those articles and notes as those platforms aren't custom built for those sorts of learning affordances.

Building your own website for learning makes it by definition a learning management system. The difference between my idea of a learning management system here and the more corporate LMSes (Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, etc.) is that you can change and modify the playground as you go. While your own personal LMS may also be a container for holding knowledge, it is a container for building and expanding knowledge. Corporate LMSes aren't good at these last two things, but are built toward making it easier for a course facilitator to grade material.

We definitely need more small personal learning management systems. (pLMS, anyone? I like the idea of the small "p" to highlight the value of these being small.) Even better if they have social components like some of the IndieWeb building blocks that make it easier for one to build a personal learning network and interact with others' LMSes on the web. I see some of this happening in the Digital Gardens space and with people learning and sharing in public.

[[Flancian]]'s Anagora.org is a good example of this type of public learning space that is taking the individual efforts of public learners and active thinkers and knitting their efforts together to facilitate a whole that is bigger than the sum of it's pieces.

https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Miraheze

https://www.ethicalads.io/

https://jamesg.blog/2022/01/17/social-readers/

https://gregorlove.com/2020/04/represent-the-indieweb/

What an awesome little site. Sadly no RSS to make it easy to follow, so bookmarking here.

I like that she's titled her posts feed as a "notebook": https://telepathics.xyz/notebook. There's not enough content here (yet) to make a determination that they're using it as a commonplace book though.

Someone in the IndieWeb chat pointed out an awesome implementation of "stories" she's got on her personal site: https://telepathics.xyz/notes/2020/new-york-city-friends-food-sights/

I particularly also like the layout and presentation of her Social Media Links page which has tags for the types of content as well as indicators for which are no longer active.

This makes me wonder if I could use tags on some of my links to provide CSS styling on them to do the same thing for inactive services?

https://y.yarn.co/d4aa882e-7143-4163-869b-458fa1519cbb_text.mp4

https://memes.yarn.co/yarn-clip/d4aa882e-7143-4163-869b-458fa1519cbb

IndieAuth: My Website is my passport. Verify Me.

https://status.cafe

status.cafe is a place to share your current status.

https://jon.bo/posts/can-blogging-be-simple/

Syndicated copy: https://twitter.com/jondotbo/status/1475581785874612234

Has some hint of the IndieWeb space here. My first thought is of micro.blog---for a reasonable subscription price it's relatively easy for folks to get started and allow customization and flexibility if they want/need it.

It also tries to meet users where they're at, so if you've already got a site you can still participate and it can provide services one may not want to self-host like a social reader, webmentions, micropub, etc.

To encourage people to write its UI starts out with short Twitter like notes, and if you keep writing, it provides you with a "title" field to turn a post into an article.

https://snarfed.org/2022-01-08_happy-10th-birthday-bridgy

Congratulations Ryan! Thanks so much for all your work on Brid.gy and for/on behalf of the bigger community. I'm sending my reply directly from my own website to underline some of your point, but I'm going to have send a like using Twitter with hopes that it feels some of the love as well. 😁

Thanks again!

People have begun serializing their novels using newsletters. This allows them to sell directly to fans without allowing middleman companies like Amazon, Patreon, or Wattpad to disintermediate them.

https://maya.land/responses/2021/09/17/altweb-indieweb-squabble.html

This week on soap operas in the small web....

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/jan/05/text-appeal-ceefax-recreated-by-20-year-old-northern-irish-man

https://hypertext.monster/2022/01/05/i-was-entertained.html

First Wordle post I've seen on a personal website instead of on Twitter.

https://www.manton.org/2022/01/05/ive-updated-microblogs.html

I've been waiting to see plugins appear for micro.blog!

https://jamesg.blog/2022/01/04/simple-taxonomies/

Keeping things simple is a useful thing, particularly when there aren't any consuming applications that use that sort of complexity. A simple note with some tags can be incredibly versatile.

https://cogdogblog.com/2021/12/claiming-reclaiming-pbwiki/

https://legacy.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.php?t=28963

https://indieweb-search.jamesg.blog/about

https://tracydurnell.com/2021/12/01/homebrew-website-club-dystopia-and-indieweb-gifts-and-commitments/

Why is dystopian sci-fi seem more ubiquitous than optomistic sci-fi?

https://artlung.com/blog/2021/12/23/unknown-pleasures-as-blog-visualization/

https://thewebisfucked.com/

https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/hey-gramps-how-did-you-use-yahoo-pipes

https://marksuth.dev/renaming-indigenous/

https://web.archive.org/web/20010805195949/http://www.uzine.net/article63.html

While this indie web manifesto rails against vanity, it would seem that so much of social media is about exactly vanity and creating some sort of mythical online identity for others.

https://indieweb.org/this-week/2021-12-17.html

https://jamesg.blog/2021/12/16/advent-of-bloggers-16/

😊

https://pento.net/2021/12/10/wordpress-and-web3/

From the jump, I can't help but think that it sounds like he's looking for a niche within the IndieWeb space.

https://samwilson.id.au/P25077

http://boris.libra.re/library/ Made apparently using Calibre.

Found via https://forum.obsidian.md/t/calibre/7981/8

--Ray

https://archivebox.io/

https://david.shanske.com/2021/11/24/5364/

I've been thinking about how to best do photo uploads myself. I've got something quirky right now myself, but want something more solid with less after-the-fact work.

I find something very appealing about this user interface as a way to create a website: https://paperwebsite.com/.

A micropub client that could do this would be fascinating...

https://collect.readwriterespond.com/antennapod/

I feel your pain here Aaron.

Perhaps it helps, perhaps not, but I've been using AntennaPod for a few years now. In particular I love it on Android because I can use the share functionality to share to a custom email address which posts to reading.am for an account that aggregates everything I'm listening to. Then I port the RSS feed of that back into my site. It's a stupid amount of manual work, but it mostly works.

Alternately you could share material you listen to to Huffduffer and pull data out that way as well. My problem here is that Huffduffer is more of a bookmark service than a "listened to this" sort of service, though you could always add a "listened" tag to the things you've heard in the past.

The tougher part of all this is that podcasts have "canonical" links for the podcast episodes (sometimes) and an entirely different link for the audio file which has no meta data attached to it (presuming you can even find the URL for the audio file to begin with.)

AntennaPod allows you to pick and choose what you want to share, so usually I default to the audio file to get that in to the workflow and finding/adding the data for the particular episode is a bit easier.

I will say that this is one of the ugliest and most labor intensive workflows I've got for social posts, so I'm usually only doing it and posting publicly for things that I really think are worth the time that make for interesting notes/observations that go along with the post.

I'm curious to see what others come up with for this workflow.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29115696

Read through comments for the fun of it.

Nothing beyond the extraordinary here.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/logging-off-facebook-what-comes-next-tickets-201128228947

Not attending, but an interesting list of people and related projects to watch.

https://indieweb.org/this-week/2021-11-05.html

I love this sentiment.

It's an analogy that reminds me of a quote by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington:

Suppose that we were asked to arrange the following in two categories– distance, mass, electric force, entropy, beauty, melody. I think there are the strongest grounds for placing entropy alongside beauty and melody and not with the first three.

https://blog.remark.as/introducing-private-letters

https://penguinscreative.com/2019/09/18/13-reasons-why-i-love-using-a-hobonichi-techo/

How can we compare the Hobonichi community to the IndieWeb community in terms of practice, creativity, and growth?

What can IndieWeb gain from looking at some of the practices?

https://againstthefuture.net/2021/10/09/impressions-of-my.html

Shared by Ru Singh in an article, “A new microblogging strategy.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhh-AhI7rro

Social Media is NOT Your Portfolio!!

Tres IndieWeb!

The conversation here makes me wonder about the idea of a more humanist web following onto the humanist movement in the 1400-1500s.

https://tracydurnell.com/2021/09/26/gardens-and-streams-ii/

This is definitely the harder part of the practice, but daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reviews can definitely help.

To start I primarily focused on 3-5 broader sub-topics of things I felt were most important to me and always did those first. This helps to begin aggregating things and making a bigger difference. The rest of my smaller "fleeting" notes I didn't worry so much about and left to either come back to later or just allow them to sit there.

I think Sonke Ahrens' book How to Take Smart Notes was fairly helpful in laying this out.

Incidentally the spaced repetition of review is also good for your memory of the things you find important.

My work here is done! 😁

https://tracydurnell.com/2021/09/26/getting-more-women-involved-in-the-indieweb/

Some great questions here and it's a difficult problem.

My personal solution is to do my best to provide personal invitations to people I think would enjoy participating and then trying to provide some space and support for them once they've arrived.

I do remember a self-named DrupalChix group of women around 2008 who banded together and created their own space within the Drupal community. Their leadership from within certainly helped to dramatically move the needle within Southern California. (cross reference: https://groups.drupal.org/women-drupal)

Most of the advanced researchers I seen on these topics are almost all women: Safiya Umoja Noble, Meredith Broussard, Ruha Benjamin, Cathy O'Neil, Shoshana Zuboff, Joan Donovan, danah boyd,Tressie McMillan Cottom, to name but a few.

The tougher part is that they are all fighting against problems created primarily by privileged, cis-gender, white men.

Alasdair Ekpenyong's Digital Garden

Alasdair is an academic in the area of library science.

https://www.zachleat.com/web/indieweb-avatar/