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Like Barriers to a more social IndieWeb – Tracy Durnell...

Tracy and Sara have been posting about social norms with a specific view to the IndieWeb.

What caught my attention in Tracy's latest was the question:

Does the indie web – or the IndieWeb – feel enough like a place to organically foster norms for interaction, or do we need to be deliberate in crafting them?

To add context she says:

I use IndieWeb to refer to the set of protocols enabling personal websites to interact, especially Webmentions, as well as the community of people active in working on and using them. When I use lowercase “indie web,” I'm referring more broadly to the entire realm of independently operated, largely personal websites beyond corporate silos.

This is an important distinction.

The "indie web" is too large and diverse (topically, culturally, geographically, I could go on) to expect any single social norm to develop or be adhered to. As is made clear, our expectations of "norms" vary based on age, experience, the platform or medium, and the culture within which they are established.

You might propose a baseline of "don't be a dick" but certain online communities embrace being idiots/abusive/offensive – that is their social norm.

I am reminded of Rebecca Blood's statement in The Weblog Handbook when considering your audience: "Your only objective is to avoid sorely offending them."

Not going to fly in certain circles.

Over a decade ago, I wrote about the functionality within competing apps causing social norms within them: app X has feature A so apps Y & Z had better develop it or get left behind. This isn't so much copying your competitors but meeting the expectations of your users. Such functionality, however, while "matching" is siloed so not entirely applicable.

Tracy focuses on IndieWeb technologies in her post and how they might foster or affect social norms but rightly surmises that their very nature likely precludes such norms.

The IndieWeb encourages the plurality of "approaches and implementations" rather than a monoculture where participants "build what works for them, and then figure out how to interoperate between different coding/implementation approaches". A number of standards exist for technical implementation but not, as Tracy discusses, for presentation. As such there can be no set expectation for how something will look or be treated. How do you create a social norm under such conditions?

The IndieWeb is not a "place" but an idea and it does not have sufficient adoption and momentum to become one. This in itself causes issues. What it means to be part of the IndieWeb itself is not set in stone, it is a guiding principle and there is no requirement to implement specific technologies. Without doing some digging, you can never be sure if a site implements specific IndieWeb technologies ¹ and so will play nice with yours. Not to mention the inconsistency in presentation.

"Guiding principles" mean that there is a lot of room for individual interpretation about what should and shouldn't be part of the technology. Take the "nomention" idea. Tracy writes:

There could also be times when someone might want to link to a page or post without sending that site a Webmention – the equivalent of a nofollow link, but for mentions.

I had this idea back in 2018. It was decided not to include my request for such functionality in the WordPress Webmention plugin: rather than just a feature it was adding a new property to webmentions which needed more community discussion. That it is still being independently pondered five years later indicates that such community discussion has either not happened or deemed it not necessary but not publicised that decision.

I wrote a plugin to implement it for my own uses but have no idea if it still works.

While my initial usage scenario was to prevent duplicates (where I might be mentioning a conversation on micro.blog and didn't want it showing as a post and a reply) some consider a nomention, or submention, analogous to the subtweet which is considered bad practice.

Different strokes.

Unless the IndieWeb "community" defines standards for presentation and behaviour rather than just technical interoperability (which flies in the face of plurality) I don't think you'll ever establish social norms in this regard. One person's expectations will not necessarily match another's implementation.

I think that's why I stopped making a big thing of it a while ago despite persisting with webmentions.