the IndieWeb, a group of hipsters with websites trying to take down THE MAN (aka the “corporate web”).

streak New posts for 52 consecutive weeks.

I want the patina of fingerprints, the quiet and comfortable background hum of a library.

If I’m in a meeting, I should be able to share a link in the chat to a particular post on my blog, then select the paragraph I’m talking about and have it highlighted for everyone. Well, now I can.

A news co-op is a news organization owned by its readers, whose membership fees pay for open access journalism – no paywall – usually organized as nonprofits (an IRS rule-change lets for-profit newspaper convert to nonprofits).

These newsletters are the most backed up pieces of writing in history, copies in millions of inboxes, on millions of hard drives and servers, far more than any blog post. More robust than an Internet Archive container. LOCKSS to the max. These might be the most durable copies yet of ourselves. They’re everywhere but privately so, hidden, piggybacking on the most accessible, oldest networked publishing platform in the world.

If I’m writing about newsletters, let me point at some that excite and delight:

Silence Here’s another, more subtle, point about the grace of email and newsletters: Creation and consumption don’t happen in the same space. When I go to send a missive in Campaign Monitor the world of my laptop screen is as silent as a midnight Tokyo suburb.9 I think we’ve inured ourselves to the (false) truth that in order to post something, in order to contribute something to the stream, we must look at the stream itself, “Bird Box”-esque, and woe be the person in a productive creative jag, wanting to publish, who can resist those hot political tweets.

I try to be deliberate, and social networks seem more and more to say: You don’t know what you want, but we do. Which, to someone who, you know, gives a shit, is pretty dang insulting.

Ownership is the critical point here. Ownership in email in the same way we own a paperback: We recognize that we (largely) control the email subscriber lists, they are portable, they are not governed by unknowable algorithmic timelines.3 And this isn’t ownership yoked to a company or piece of software operating on quarterly horizon, or even multi-year horizon, but rather to a half-century horizon. Email is a (the only?) networked publishing technology with both widespread, near universal adoption,4 and history. It is, as they say, proven.

Years ago, I helped build a storytelling platform called Hi (a simplification of its original name: Hitotoki, now shuttered and archived) and one of the things I’m most proud of our team having concocted is the commenting system. We had tens of thousands of users and almost no issues with harassment. You could comment on anyone’s story and your having commented would be public — a little avatar at the bottom of the page — but the comment itself would be private. This allowed folks to reap the public validation of engagement (“Whoa! So many comments!”) while simultaneously removing any grandstanding or attacks. It wasn’t quite messaging. It wasn’t quite commenting. It felt very much like a contemporary, lighter take on email, and in being so was a joy to use. Here’s what the bottom of an entry looks like: "Commenting" on Hitotoki

The only way to own my lamp was to pwn my lamp.

And it’s tempting for engineers to think decentralising the Web can be achieved with technology. But really, it’s people who will make it happen. Rather than staying put in our little filter bubbles, we can burst out of them — and be radically sociable, delinquent, and make a scene.

according to Hao, Mark Zuckerberg wants to increase the number of people who log into Facebook six days a week. I’m not going to get into whether this is good or bad here, but it certainly shows that what you are doing, and how you are doing it, is very important to Facebook.

And they are one of the reasons most digital services don’t come with a How To manual. Most of the time, we’re not expected to use them the “right” way; most of the time there is no right way, because most digital services bend to meet our needs.A

Can we occupy technology with love?

they have integrity, and integrity means something right now.

I just wanted a way to send out my irregularly-updated newsletter to a couple thousand subscribers without getting caught in a spam filter.

Q: So, this means you don’t value hearing from readers?A: Not at all. We engage with readers every day, and we are constantly looking for ways to hear and share the diversity of voices across New Jersey. We have built strong communities on social platforms, and readers inform our journalism daily through letters to the editor. We encourage readers to reach out to us, and our contact information is available on this How To Reach Us page.

What's more, watching the debates happening in real-time has really driven home that this approach doesn't just scale, it scales well. For a personal site, incremental improvement measured against real-world testing feels okay. For an industry-level protocol or specification, it feels like it should just collapse. Yet with the IndieWeb, not only is their work surprisingly resilient, it's far more adaptable as a result.

The second is that their approach of allowing standards to evolve through practical application, rather than highfalutin conjecture, is an incredibly powerful technique for problem-solving. The number of my ideas that have died on paper as I try to flesh them out are beyond count. It's the Goldilocks conundrum: the feeling that something needs to be just right before other people can see it. The IndieWeb methodology proves that this logic should just be thrown away.

the community is both endlessly creative and genuinely interested in solving big issues in meaningful ways. Whether it's their commitment to careful (and caring) community stewardship or their particular strain of techno-ethics, I have been consistently (and pleasantly) surprised at what I've seen during the last twelve months. I don't always see eye-to-eye with their decisions and I don't think that the community is perfect, but it's consistently (and deliberately) striving to be better, and that's a fairly rare thing, online or off.

I've also seen a lot of people take aim at the IndieWeb for simply copying silos like Facebook. I feel like this is yet another issue with the branding; another set of people missing the point. IndieWeb tools don't aim to copy silo functionality, they just aim to let people interact with one another in the same way that they would on a silo, only using their own website. That's a fine line and I see how it can appear blurry at times, but it's also a really important one and an aspect of the IndieWeb which I find particularly compelling.

A question on CSS or accessibility or even content management is a rare thing indeed. This isn't a community centred on helping people build their own websites, as I had first imagined[5]. Instead, it's a community attempting to shift the power in online socialising away from Big Tech and back towards people[6].

the point isn't to integrate all of the things into your website. It's to solve the problem you have with a solution that has been community tested, openly developed, and will likely have already planned for some of the edge cases you wouldn't ever think of.

Instead, the IndieWeb is a toolkit. A collection of ideas, technologies, and services that can help you solve some particularly tricky problems. If you're wanting to get involved in the IndieWeb, the first question you need to ask is: what problem do I have?

The IndieWeb is a Toolkit

That has helped me understand this cycle of adoption, defeat, and detachment, but it's also taught me that the IndieWeb isn't a thing. You don't join the IndieWeb or complete the IndieWeb. Attempting to do so will drive you mad 😂

When I first read about the IndieWeb it felt like a lot. I've written about this before, but the sheer weight of jargon in the space is frankly terrifying.

SquareWheel 4 hours ago [–] I agree, but I think it's also worth learning from past experiences. Pingbacks do create a significant spam problem. How does Webmention.io cope with that?

I'm stoked about the strangers on the internet again.

Why can’t you just email the web?

Since “Sexy Times With Wangxian” became a whole Thing, it has spawned memes, spinoff fics, and a frankly fabulous fic prompt generator that scans all of the STWW tags and chooses some at random for you to write fics around. Just now I got the tags, “Foursome – M/M/M/M,” “I’m Bad At Summaries,” “Cryptography,” “Body Dysphoria,” and “Organs.” Outstanding.

Liked the post? Click the beard a few times.

They cannot simply put this article online on their blog: to be recognised as research work, it must be published in a respectable peer-reviewed journal.

In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing.

“Media companies were investing a huge amount of time, money, and effort in building out these huge audiences on social media…but at the end of the day, they’re renting those audiences from social media [companies], as opposed to owning those relationships,” Donoghue said.

Because the mainstream social networks have been designed by a tiny number of people, we have been prevented from experimenting and creating new knowledge about what sustainable community management online looks like. Start erasing the line between operators, customers, and community members and squint; you begin make out the shape of a group of people who can build for themselves and determine their own path of development.

These new paid communities largely live on invite-only Telegrams, Slacks, Discords, and Facebook groups, raising the question: could there be applications more suitable to these networks? Indeed, the growing popularity of paid communities has been noticed by a bunch of new venture-funded companies such as such as Genevachat, Mighty Networks, and Circle, all of which want to become “the platform for communities.”

Transclusion would make this whole scenario quite different. Let's imagine this again...

Eternal September or the September that never ended[1] is Usenet slang for a period beginning in September 1993,[2][3] the month that Internet service provider America Online (AOL) began offering Usenet access to its many users, overwhelming the existing culture for online forums.

I can even imagine a distant future where governments might sponsor e.g. social networking as a social service. I know many people don’t trust their governments, but when it comes down to it they’re more likely to be working in people’s interests than a group of unelected tech barons responsible only to their shareholders at best, or themselves in the cases where they have dual class stock with unequal voting rights, or even their families for 100s of years.

Essentially, we study culture at an "on the ground" level – looking for the individual stories, rich details, particular nuances, and thick description you can only find by spending extended time with people in their daily lives.

But while we can all agree that tech has a moderation problem, there's a lot less consensus on what to do about it. Broadly speaking, there are two broad approaches: the first is to fix the tech giants and the second is to fix the Internet.

We used the systems thinking iceberg as a tool for understanding more deeply how race and racism affect our programming, goals and approaches, and for thinking strategically about where to intervene for the highest leverage impact. Systems thinking guides us to shifting mental models as the highest leverage way to change a system. That’s why work connecting unconscious bias and structural interventions by john a. powell and others is so important. And, it’s why it’s so important to make sure we have the people who are most affected by our work at the table when we design and evaluate it. Their voices and perspectives are essential to make sure we’re challenging both mental models and practices that hold inequities in place.

In the wake of Charlottesville, corporations grappled with the role they played in supporting white supremacists organizing online (Robertson 2017). After the attack in Charlottesville and another later in Pittsburgh in October 2018, in which a gunman opened fire on the Tree of Life synagogue, there was a wave of deplatforming and corporate denial of service (Koebler 2018; Lorenz 2018), spanning cloud service companies (Liptak 2018), domain registrars (Romano 2017), app stores (O’Connor 2017) and payment servicers (Terdiman 2017). While some debate the cause and consequences of deplatforming specific far-right individuals on social media platforms, we need to know more about how to remove and limit the spread of extremist and white supremacist websites (Nouri, Lorenzo-Dus and Watkin 2019).

paginas := folder children select: [ :each | (each basename endsWith: 'md') and: [ (each basenameWithoutExtension = 'enlaces') not ]].

Tus artículos y mensajes de estado pueden transmitirse a todos los servicios, no solamente uno, y permitir así que te relaciones con todo el mundo. Incluso las réplicas y los "Me gusta" en otros servicios pueden regresar a tu web: de esta forma están todos en un único sitio.

The web’s existing logic tells us that social platforms are free in exchange for a feast of user data; that major networks are necessarily global and centralized; that moderators make the rules. None of that need be the case. We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now.

Facebook has acted as a force for digital colonialism, attempting to become the de facto (and only) experience of the internet for people all over the world.

I am currently working with a Wordpress development team to move The Scholar's Stage to a more professional domain, complete with a suite of additional features. (Soon I will be releasing some Scholar's Stage polls to discover a bit more about what features and content my readership would most like to see on the revamped site, and what sort of things might induce them to contribute to my Patreon).

Substack, viewed as a blogging platform, is a lot like Medium — a would-be walled garden, though run by less unscrupulous folks than own the big social-media platforms. I’m temperamentally suspicious of them, as I am of any platform that is, ultimately, subject to the whim of a proprietor. So although I use both Medium and Substack, everything I write therein is also published verbatim on my ‘live’ blog, which is completely under my control, and for whose hosting I pay with my own money. For me, Substack provided merely a convenient and reliable way of sending out the email version of what really matters — the live blog on the open Web. Both Substack and Medium have fairly honourable business models and have facilities whereby writers can get paid, if they wish to be. (I don’t.) And that’s a good thing (though it leads to the power-law outcome that Greer mentions). But it also has the downside in terms of the public sphere that, ultimately, their writing exists mainly inside a walled, members-only, garden. A genteel garden, but still a private garden. That’s why I’ve always followed Dave Winer’s lead: write wherever you like, but always make sure your stuff is also published on the Web.

these platforms aim to provide experiences “that people want to use that works as much as possible as they expect, but which is backed up by better values and technology.”

While there have always been server listings on joinmastodon.org, this is a break from our previous practice of listing servers. Before the Server Covenant we pulled a list of servers from a 3rd party provider called instances.social. However, instances.social was a 3rd party and automated service. The one thing that it could not do was any kind of quality control as it simply listed every instance submitted–regardless of stability or their code of conduct. As Mastodon has grown it has become increasingly clear that simply listing every possible server was not in our interest as a project, nor was it in the interest in the majority of the communities running Mastodon.

Aunque muchas personas buscan esas comunidades más íntimas en internet, no todos pueden crear un jardín digital: es necesario tener un conocimiento mínimo de programación básica. Crear una página desde cero ofrece más libertad creativa que las redes sociales y los sitios web de alojamiento que permiten arrastrar y soltar elementos en la página, algo que puede resultar desalentador y consumir mucho tiempo. Chris Biscardi intenta eliminar esa barrera de entrada con un editor de texto para jardines digitales que todavía está en su fase alfa. Denominado Toast, es "algo que se puede experimentar con Wordpress", resalta. En última instancia, queda por ver si los jardines digitales serán un remanente escapista del infierno de 2020 o se marchitarán con las redes sociales más fáciles. Appleton afirma: "Tengo interés en ver cómo se desarrollará".  "Para algunas personas es una reacción a las redes sociales, y para otras es una tendencia. Si llegará o no a la masa crítica... eso está por ver", concluye Critchlow.

El consultor Tom Critchlow, quien lleva años cultivando su jardín digital, explica la principal diferencia entre los blogs convencionales y la jardinería digital: "Con los blogs, el autor se dirige a un gran público. Con los jardines digitales, uno escribe para sí mismo. Te dedicas a lo que quieres cultivar con el tiempo".

every page on my blog contains a link to its archive in the page footer. This ensures that you can not only browse the latest version of all of my blog articles in case of a server breakdown. This also enables you to browse all previous version, probably changed over time. Go ahead, try a few "Archive" links of my articles. If any of my articles start with an "Updates:" section, you know for sure that there are older versions accessible via the Internet Archive.

Avid Bookshop in Athens, Ga., sends personalized URLs to customers with a list of handpicked recommendations.

Ownership is the critical point here. Ownership in email in the same way we own a paperback: We recognize that we (largely) control the email subscriber lists, they are portable, they are not governed by unknowable algorithmic timelines.3 And this isn’t ownership yoked to a company or piece of software operating on quarterly horizon, or even multi-year horizon, but rather to a half-century horizon. Email is a (the only?) networked publishing technology with both widespread, near universal adoption,4 and history. It is, as they say, proven.

I'd also like to find a way to say thank you to Aaron Parecki who built webmention.io and Ryan Barrett, Kyle Mahan, et al who built brid.gy. However, I can't see a way to do either and, indeed, the latter explicitly say "We don't need donations, promise."

They should see comments as part of that process. It’s not the product that matters, it’s the participation.

Not since Lincoln

Mikhail Gershovich - Vocat (@mgershovich)

Lastly, I walked through Github Pages, and how using a separate branch, you can publish HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JSON for projects, turning Github into not just a code and content management platform, but also a publishing endpoint.

Michael Berman - California State University Channel Islands (@amichaelberman)

Rolin Moe - Pepperdine (@RMoeJo)

Golwg360 will feature a rolling news service and will give businesses, public bodies and individuals the chance to set up their own micro-sites.

Instead my approach now is to publish my thoughts more freely with less premeditation. Particularly in this space, which is mine, for me, by me.

The second article is from Tom Critchlow titled Building a Digital Garden. What I really like about Tom's piece is his discussion of the idea of "non-performative blogging" in your personal space on the web.I love this idea. Instead of "content marketing" we can use our websites to get back to what made the web awesome while also creating better resources for ourselves and our users.

However, a healthy news ecosystem doesn’t just require a thriving free press, it also needs a diversity of curators, newsletters and content discovery options that enable the weird and wonderful to surface. We want to use Nuzzel as a test kitchen to see what models works for curators as well as content creators. The simple goal is a sustainable open web where the goals of creators, curators and consumers are aligned around the best possible experience.

Republishing guidelines

We advocate for a Slow Web Movement. We are what we eat, and we are also what we consume online. Data-driven advertising, BlackBox algorithms, and the competition between Big Tech to keep us “engaged“ has created an addiction to low-value content. It is time to reset our digital consumption and create healthier habits. Since the last decade, with a set of guidelines, the Slow Web Movement is changing Software to make it care about us again. Think of it as the equivalent of "Organic" for Technology.

Contravening that force is going to require something more than personal control, promoting something other than atomization.

That is to say: if the problem has not been the centralized, corporatized control of the individual voice, the individual’s data, but rather a deeper failure of sociality that precedes that control, then merely reclaiming ownership of our voices and our data isn’t enough. If the goal is creating more authentic, more productive forms of online sociality, we need to rethink our platforms, the ways they function, and our relationships to them from the ground up. It’s not just a matter of functionality, or privacy controls, or even of business models. It’s a matter of governance.

Grant Potter

You’re giv­ing up far more than de­sign choice. Mr. Williams de­scribes Medium’s key ben­e­fit as res­cu­ing writ­ers from the “ter­ri­ble dis­trac­tion” of for­mat­ting chores. But con­sider the cost. Though he’s bait­ing the hook with de­sign, he’s also ask­ing you, the writer, to let him con­trol how you of­fer your work to read­ers. Mean­ing, to get the full ben­e­fit of Medium’s de­sign, you have to let your story live on Medium, send all your read­ers to Medium, have your work per­ma­nently en­tan­gled with other sto­ries on Medium, and so on—a sig­nif­i­cant concession.

The architecture of the platform where I published allowed authorial control of content but could not control context collapse or social interactions.

Where’s my next dashboard? I imagine a next-gen reader that brings me the open web and my social circles in a way that helps me attend to and manage all the flow. There are apps for that, a nice example being FlowReader, which has been around since 2013. I try these things hopefully but so far none has stuck.

There’s a whole lot of IndieWeb sites out there, some very unlike the others, yet all can intercommunicate. IndieWeb should have claimed the “together, not the same” slogan before Google took it for Android commercials, because that’s exactly what IndieWeb is. And it is great.

Two key constituencies for social movements are also early adopters: activists and journalists

Plurality, diversity, and tolerance were celebrated

The centralization of information also worries me because it makes it easier for things to disappear.

2019 is the year when publishers — whether big ones like Axios or the Los Angeles Times or tiny ones like mine or Judd Legum’s Popular Information — move away from letting someone else call all the shots. Or, at least, they should.

But what if, in 2019, we take a step back and decide not to let the platform decide how to run the show?

I’ve been working on a redesign of my site recently, using a more robust CMS, and the advantages of controlling the structure of the platform soup-to-nuts are obvious, even if it requires more upfront work.

“We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.”

Venture capitalists now talk about “kill zones”, areas they will not invest in because one of the big players may squeeze the life out of startups or buy them up at a low price.