[T]he Insurrection was the first time Americans could truly see the radicalizing effects of algorithmic platforms like Facebook and YouTube that other parts of the world, particularly the Global South, had dealt with for years. A moment of political violence Silicon Valley could no longer ignore or obfuscate the way it had with similar incidents in countries like Myanmar, India, Ethiopia, or Brazil. And once faced with the cold, hard truth of what their platforms had been facilitating, companies like Google and Meta, at least internally, accepted that they would never be able to moderate them at scale. And so they just stopped.
The evidence of the past decade and a half argues strongly that platform corporations are structurally incapable of good governance, primarily because most of their central aims (continuous growth, market dominance, profit via extraction) conflict with many basic human and societal needs.
Last fall, the former Googler and ex–Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer offered a charitable explanation as to why Google Search feels worse, arguing that the search engine is merely a reflection of the internet as a whole, which has become more complex and laden with fraudsters and garbage. The explanation lets Google off the hook a bit: The company’s chief purpose is to navigate the sprawling morass of information, after all. Ultimately, it’s a tacit admission that Google has tried and failed to tame the web.
Progress is the tangible evidence that we’re moving closer to our goals. We’ve been conditioned to measure success in terms of progress… Growth is a subterranean shift, not what you made or did, but a change in who you are. It’s hard to measure, harder to describe. And it’s deceptive because in a growth moment, everything might look the same, but it feels so different.
She points out that on paper, she doesn’t have much to show for last year. I was feeling that too… and likewise feel it was a year of growth regardless. I’m tackling all this emotional bullshit that’s been dragging me down for decades, breaking through all these toxic perspectives I didn’t realize I was carrying around before. My progress isn’t quantifiable, but I *feel* so much better. I was telling my therapist this week that I feel like that Ira Glass quote about the gap between our taste and our skill but for emotions, that I can see these unhelpful patterns of behavior but can’t stop myself from reacting that way. But simply being aware of them is further than a lot of people get 🤷♀️
Looking forward to: walking with a friend I haven’t seen since summer next week
Stuff I did:
5.75 hours consulting
5 hours writing 🦾🦾🦾 wrote several alternate blurbs to help me decide between ending options to feel out what’s more marketable
make that late business license a $230 mistake — the city *also* charged me a late fee of $115 🤦♀️
set up my new refurbished chair and I don’t like it 😢 have initiated a return but need to deconstruct the chair first, and of course the instructions don’t work for the model I got 🫠
finally loaded my library into MusicBee and started doing more cleanup from there — having a different view makes it more readily apparent which artists I have Too Much of proportional to my liking of them
almost two hours of blackberry clearing… discovered I planted native roses in the gravel zone! I cut one and was like 🧐 waaiiiiitaminute those thorns don’t look the same… So now I need to pay closer attention and not just cut anything poky 😂
spent an hour on the phone with five different insurance reps to get them to send me my birth control, my doctor hadn’t prescribed it as continuous use but told me I could take it that way… wound up needing to request a new prescription in the end 🙄
baked sourdough cream scones flavored with orange zest and dried cherries instead of vanilla (discovered my cranberries were best by 2023 😒 not risking it)
investigated Hardcover as a Goodreads alternative — it looks awesome but lacks custom statuses, so I have to decide if it’s worth giving up my “not interested” shelf to switch… it might be something I wait for them to develop a bit more
walked with two friends
Dinners:
Indian kathi roll takeout
chilaquiles + avocado
burger takeout: impossible burger with grilled onions and blue cheese
sausage sandwiches (the hot dog buns were moldy so we had to use hamburger buns 😄)
feta pasta bake again — used a local sheep feta and maybe overbaked it so it didn’t emulsify this time but still tasted fine — also used parsley instead of basil
DNF’d Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer (decided it was bad weird not good weird after 40 pages), The Four Dimensional Human by Laurence Scott (I like the metaphor of modem as portal but the writing wasn’t for me), Elements of Taste by Benjamin Everett (the idea of mapping flavors to taste profiles sounds neat but doesn’t bear out), and Salvaging Abby by N.J. Walters (bad guy is pure evil rapist type)
I was all excited to read Heavenly Tyrant, then I opened it up and (on Kindle) the first *three pages* are content warnings, starting with:
“Please beware that this book contains violence and abuse, body horror, mass murder, toxic relationship dynamics, discussions of reproductive coercion, allusions to childhood sexual abuse, and references to miscarriage, domestic violence, sexual assault, and suicide.”
Instant deflation. In the past year, I have noped out of three books I was excited about after the book opening to gnarly content warnings 😕
Words I looked up / concepts I learned:
TIL chicle is a natural gum, and the name comes from Nahuatl!
Choice phrases:
“At their best, hypertext links are a hint of something, a foreshadowing. A document that bristles with them is like when a storyteller dangles a juicy detail in front of us, only to reconcile it much later in the tale.” — Dorian Taylor
“We are drowning in systems that strip the intentionality away from our social lives, and that offers us the illusion of community in place of the reality of it. Effort is what strengthens the synapses of our social networks.” — Ed Yong
“I want to feel the friction of civil disagreement: It’s through this friction that I understand what I believe.” — Alicia Kennedy
Heard a hummingbird calling in the front yard, then spotted it fly up, divebomb, and chase off another hummingbird
Spotted an orange-crowned warbler with its head glinting in the light as it bopped around our apple trees
Saw a hawk land in the Douglas-fir behind my house, but it was gone by the time I got the binos
before starting cleanup on the left side of the yard (Tuesday)that’s a new blackberry pile and there’s a bigger one out of frame — red flagging tape is marking the roses (Thursday) Progress!
Add friction to the activitiesyou’d like to change, and remove friction from the things you’d like to do more of. This is usually applied at a personal level, but we can think of it across communities, too: Where is there friction in our community that blocks people from participating in the ways we’d like?
In the IndieWeb, we talk a lot about the friction involved in new community members building a website, but I wonder if the bigger barrier is using a website — specifically, friction in the ways we connect with others through our websites.
Decentralized communication across websites looks and feels a lot different from social media interactions. There’s a lot for people to adjust to when leaving the hyperspeed world of Threads and Instagram and TikTok… or even branching out from newsletters. On social media, everything happens in the same place. On the indie web, people are talking to each other from different places; the conversation is not in one spot, but constructed of hypertext. Participating in an indie web conversation can take many forms: sending a like or reply from your own website, writing a post on the same theme, collecting links in a roundup, leaving a native comment on the original website, emailing an author.
There are a lot of harmful and toxic dynamics to social media that we don’t want to recreate in the indie web… but people do want connection online, and if it feels like there’s no way to connect with others via the indie web, they’ll simply continue to migrate from silo to silo. A little friction can be helpful as a protective measure against harassment and abuse, but right now I suspect there’s too much friction to encourage the types of connection we want more of.
The tools I’m talking about
The IndieWeb has built tools and established protocols to allow websites to connect more easily — some that people have built for themselves, and some that are available for other website publishers to use. Some of these tools are easier than others for non-technical users to deploy.
I wrote last spring that I’d like the indie web to be a viable option for people instead of corporate silos or private online spaces like Discord servers. Personally, I don’t care if anyone reading my blog has a website or not* — I count readers as part of the indie web crew — so I want to consider how people without websites can participate in the indie web too. So, in this post, I’m talking about specifically IndieWeb tools like Webmentions**, but also things at the CMS level like native comments, as well as email and community projects.
It’s important what tools are available to the community because on the decentralized indie web, individual website publishers decide what connection options are available for their readers. That’s why I allow native WordPress comments as well as webmentions, added a way for readers to give (positive, anonymous) feedback, and publish my email address instead of having a comment form: I want it to be as easy as possible for people to join in the discussion or say hello, and to show that there’s a human behind all this even if they don’t want to say anything. I offer a variety of options for connection because there’s enough social friction to delurking that I don’t want any friction on the tool end.
Easy connection encourages participating in the indie web
It’s important for the IndieWeb to consider the needs of people who don’t currently have websites because the challenges of having conversations on the open web are a deterrent to becoming a web publisher on your own website. In other words: the better tools available for connection and conversation on the indie web, the less friction there is to having and using a personal website to connect with others.
Most people don’t want to shout into the void, they want to feel connected to people. If indie web tools discourage connection, it may feel empty whether or not it truly is. And for people switching from very active social media, total silence may feel quite discouraging. Easy-to-use tools for connection support a healthier ecosystem overall, making the indie web better for both writers and readers.
Making it feel safe to join the indie web community
The vast majority of web users are lurkers. The risks of participating in social media are high, and anyone moving to the indie web is bringing that bias towards non-participation with them. So it’s not just the tools we need to provide to new folks, but the mentality that participating in the indie web is safe. Anne made the great point that community requires that people feel safe. People need to feel safe to publish and to comment on the indie web.
That means it’s not enough for connection tools for the indie web to exist — they need to work in ways that make people feel safe using them. It’s important to us, when we are communicating, that we are taken the way we mean — so there is social danger to using tools that may not carry our intent accurately. Here is where I believe existing indie web tools add friction. I’ll call this “social friction.”
Social needs for communication tools
To feel safe communicating with a tool, Internet users (both readers and publishers) need:
Consistency and predictability:
we know what our tools will do
and they work the same way
every time, on every site
Autonomy and transparency:
we feel empowered by our tools,
not constrained by their limitations,
and can use our tools with intention
From my perspective, neither of these needs is consistently met with the indie web’s existing tools. I have been using webmentions for several years and have experienced unexpected behaviors as well as limitations. Silos meet the first point — consistency — but not the second — autonomy. If it’s impossible for IndieWeb tools to operate consistently by virtue of multiple implementations, I still think we can do better than the silos on the second point.
Social friction on the indie web
These are some challenges I see to conversation and connection on the indie web, along with some ideas for possible solutions from a non-technical user’s perspective. (I’m writing as a longtime WordPress user — so it’s very possible I don’t know about solutions to some of these problems that exist on other platforms!) I also gathered whatever examples I could think of as prior art — some on individual websites, others being tools or settings that publishers could implement on their site now. This is certainly not exhaustive — I did not go wiki-spelunking 😉
We’ve talked about many of these issues at Homebrew Website Club and pop-up events, so they’re not really new. But, towards the end goal of “refining what we have” and “filling in the gaps,” I wanted to collect them in one spot to wrap my head around the scope. Also, I think it’s better, in terms of safety, to plan ahead than wait for someone to get hurt; anything we do to improve our tools benefits current users, as well as making the indie web more attractive to new people.
I’m channeling business-speak to frame the challenges I’ve noticed as problems and solutions, but want to acknowledge that:
a) not everyone may agree with me that these are problems per se, and
b) I’m not a developer so I am not personally capable of fixing many of these problems, but I am not trying to make them anyone’s responsibility… though if someone’s looking for an indie web project, maybe these can provide inspiration 😉
Under the presumption that we desire more people to participate in the indie web community, we have two audiences to consider: publishers and readers. Publishers are usually also readers, but (in my conception of the indie web) readers aren’t necessarily publishers. Collectively, personal website owners establish communication norms for the indie web since we choose how our readers can interact with us.
Social friction for indie web publishers
@mention notifications are unreliable
Problem statement:when I tag someone or reply to their reply, how do I know they received a notification? (e.g. I suspect my own domain-level notifications are broken because I haven’t received any in months — if you @mentioned me in 2024 I probably didn’t get it 😉) If I post a native comment response to someone else’s webmention reply, does the original author hear about it?
Possible solution: a dashboard to see all the places where our outgoing replies have been sent / posted
Possible solution: implement Salmentions and codify how they work so they’re predictable (and opt-outable?)
Possible solution: a non-webmention notification system for @mentions
Prior art:Devastatia and Axcelott use a person tagging method that emails people (I got tagged by Devastatia and thought it was great)
Possible solution: federating your website could allow tagging of people using ActivityPub
I’m scared of this route because I have had some weird unpredictability issues involving replies that mentioned (but were not in response to) micro.blog users that made me look like a reply guy instead of blogger doing courteous citation / quotation
Webmentions are all or nothing
Problem statement: there isn’t a way to not send a webmention to someone that you link to, if your webmentions get sent automatically
Possible solution: the ability to not send webmentions for selected (entire) posts rather than individual links
Prior art: WordPress lets me turn off *receiving* webmentions for individual posts (I don’t use it because my setup relies on self-mention backlinks) — but I don’t know if it disables *sending* them
Webmentions look different everywhere
Problem statement: Every individual website treats webmentions a little bit differently, making it hard for publishers to predict how they will render on the other end — sometimes they aren’t even displayed, sometimes they’re collated into a facepile, sometimes they’re shown truncated, sometimes they’re shown in full — as a publisher, I also notice that webmentions are sent with a variety of markup that my setup may not always render as intended (I try to fix those when I notice them)
I don’t have a solution for this besides maybe community guidance for presentation, outside of the official protocol?
Lack of audience control
Right now there’s a lot of appeal to the perceived safety of the Cozy Web (like Discord communities). IndieWeb tools don’t need to be for everyone, but I suspect the desire for private posts will continue to grow, even within the existing community as well as new members. Lacking that option will guide people towards the cozy web instead of the open web. (🙋♀️ me! me! I want private posts!)
Problem statement: website owners’ options for posting are basically total visibility or none, with no in-between
Prior art: LJ and its descendants like Dreamwidth have “friends only” posts; Ghost restricts monetized posts from the RSS feed; Substack allows partial visibility of some posts to all viewers and complete visibility to paid subscribers, the dividing point controlled by the author; Google+ allowed publishers to create “circles” for publishing to selected groups only
Manu sent me a pre-publication preview of my interview for People & Blogs, I don’t know if that was security through obscurity or some sort of limited audience post 👀 (Being a lazy blogger slash excited to post this, I’m not asking before publishing 😉)
Possible solution:RSS only posts to reach a regular, repeat audience only
Moderation is No Fun
Currently, personal website publishers must review comments and webmentions manually, personally*, which makes them susceptible as a social attack vector; giving publishers more control in the event of receiving (or even preventing) excessive comments could make people feel more comfortable writing about controversial topics.
If more people federate their websites and more platforms support Webmentions, it could be possible to receive much more attention on your website than you wanted. At a discussion of IndieWeb social norms, Joe shared a personal website post he’d seen with nearly 300 interactions (chiefly from Mastodon) — so it is already possible to receive A LOT of mentions through federation. Big bloggers in the past have had to deal with large and hostile comment sections, and current bloggers with active comment sections like John Scalzi and Chuck Wendig talk about employing The Ban Hammer freely.
Problem statement: personal website publishers must do their own moderation, and webmentions have potential for abuse either in the form of spam or harassment
Possible solution: shared blocklists for bad faith commenters
Prior art: blocklists on Twitter and Mastodon and Bluesky (not saying these are without their own problems)
Possible solution: set a maximum number of comments / webmentions a post could receive (at all or within a certain time interval), then auto-reject all others (instead of needing to manually go in and turn off comments after you’ve already gotten too many)
Prior art: some CMS’s give owners control over the time period that comments are open for (e.g. two weeks after posting)
Possible solution: limit replies for specific posts to webmentions only, and not accept any Fediverse replies or native comments
Prior art: on WordPress I can separately disable native comments and trackbacks/ pingbacks, which I believe are tied to webmentions
Possible solution: accept only likes/ reacjis, and no textual replies, for a given post
Possible solution: ability to bulk reject all comments / engagements from a particular source domain without needing to look at them (e.g. if you got dog-piled by a specific Fediverse server)
Possible solution: limit replies on a specific post only to existing approved commenters and auto-reject everyone else
Prior art: I’m thinking how on some social media sites you could limit comments to mutuals — but the indie web doesn’t have “mutuals” like that 🤔
Could you enable IndieAuth login for your website and limit comments to logged in users? (I’m not technical, I don’t get how this stuff works 😉)
Social friction for indie web readers
Supporting indie web readers is on individual website publishers, as well as developers of IndieWeb tools and CMS’s.
Simple interactions are too hard
Problem statement: simple interactions that are easy on social media, such as likes or short comments like “nice!” or “lol,” are socially awkward / unsuited to use with webmentions
Possible solution for people replying to others from their website: limiting types of posts or categories from RSS feeds
on WordPress I can exclude a whole category from RSS, but my personal preference is against very short social posts interspersed with long ones
Possible solution: publishers can accept reacjis directly on pages instead of only via webmention
Possible solution: publishers can allow readers to subscribe to email updates
for deliverability, my understanding is that you really need to pay a service (like Buttondown or Ghost) to send email for you
There’s no sense of “neighborhood”
Problem statement: there’s a lack of ‘collective’ feeling between independent websites, no definition around ‘what is indie web,’ no sense of being with others when you are reading on the indie web
Possible solution: places where readers can see websites next to each other / where publishers can opt into having their work collected
Possible solution: places that people can share and view hashtags on websites so it’s easier to find what bloggers are saying about a particular topic and feel like you’re participating in a bigger conversation
Possible solution: websites can indicate when readers are on the site so anyone reading can see if someone else is “reading along,” or allow readers to leave signs that they were there
A lot of the shift from corporate web to indie web is mental. The tools need to be there to support that transition, but there are layers upon layers of awakening:
Recognizing that there are other places to find interesting things to read or look at outside of social media — and often they’re *more* interesting. Recognizing that you don’t have to be tied to the people in your past, and that letting go of those ghost connections can free up space to meet new people. Recognizing that the blogging community is alive and well — and that it’s not too late to start one too and join the fun.
Recognizing that when you drop a micro post, you’re self-publishing. Recognizing that you can be free with your opinions on your own website without self-censoring for your family members or worrying about going viral. Recognizing you can swear or talk politics. Recognizing that you have things to say and that it’s worth it to share them.
Biomedical scientist Dr. Andrea Love returns to WIRED to answer a new slate of the internet's burning questions about pseudosciences, health fads, and false ...
I lean towards trusting studies, but also recognize I’m not qualified to evaluate their quality. Coming from an environmental background, I also have skepticism around a lack of evidence of harm, which in the environmental field is often merely indicative of a lack of research, period. I don’t have time to stay up on the best available science myself, but the news is incentivized towards sensationalizing results, especially if they find any possible evidence of harm. In the environmental field, I pay more credence to anecdotal evidence than I used to. The material sciences / chemical industry has a bad track record of lying to the public and downplaying safety concerns — the incentives are against us. All too often, our bodies are the externalities.
Alternative medicine is easy for me to set aside because so much of it is wacky, but food and material sciences are harder for me to tell what’s legit. I’m also aware of the discrepancies in medical research for women especially, and the tendency for women’s health concerns to be invalidated.
With all these conflicting considerations, how to decide where I land?
We work so hard at this, to protect the borders of the bodies of our children, that the discovery that we are already contaminated with chemicals or micro-plastics feels like a personal betrayal.
Ray goes on to quote Eula Biss’s book, “On Immunity: An Innoculation”:
“…most people prefer to think of substances as either safe or dangerous, regardless of the dose. And we extend this thinking to exposure, in that we regard any exposure to chemicals, no matter how brief or limited, as harmful.”
One of my takeaways from this video is a reminder that most things must be considered in context and relation to alternatives. I was just thinking about this when I noticed a pair of my pants had 2% polyurethane and I went❗wait isn’t that like a wood finish?? So I did some quick peeking around the Internet about fabric that contains it. One of the sites I saw offered a Life Cycle Analysis, which looks at a material from production through end of life. The concept is a sound way to consider environmental impact — but it can be challenging to obtain legitimate data for all the aspects to be considered (air quality, energy, water usage, pollution, etc.). And even as I skimmed through it, I was remembering all the research I did a few years ago on (natural) t-shirt materials and the revelation that there was no single Best Choice for the environment and social good — you always need to choose your priorities. (That’s not to say that some materials aren’t overall better than others, but consumption of any kind will have impacts.)
In contrast to fine art created for aesthetic value, folk art emerges from cultural significance and needs. Folklore encompasses emergent practices and traditions, passed down person-to-person within communities, as opposed to “high culture” which is universal and prescriptive, passed down through formal education… Folk programming is the kind of (re)programming we learn through our active use of the Internet and software.
By co-opting technological mediums outside of their intended ends, folk programming often works in spite of those intended ends or its platform’s aims.
Simple (and often seemingly silly) acts of molding environments to better fit personal needs are radical exercises in taking agency over technology in service of the fuzzy “future” we care about. They train us to view technology as something we can actively shape, not just a phenomenon we’re subjected to.
Posted in reply to Tracy (What is the impact of online writing?)
In her post, Tracy made a lot of points, the ones I want to talk about are sort of another take on her points about blogging being the oral culture and therefore does not have a canon or one perfect representation and the non-writing because of fear we are not expressing the ideas perfectly.
Because blogging is the oral culture and therefore we are looking at each other to see what is right. We connect what we are doing with our influences. The hypertext does make acknowledging this easier than before. We build on what other people did and extend it. He absorbs the memes and use them. We absorb the norms and adhere to them. We absorb the vibes and feelings and decide based on that.
In the oral culture, it was not about conveying information. It was a tool to make people act in the certain way.
This is some medium is the message shit (complementary).
I get to choose which parts [of the Internet] I visit. Soaking in the knowledge embedded in the writing and connections and the vibes of these places. It is not about one specific post. It is about the entire environment of that part.
I was getting at this a little when I wrote about how we get to influence ourselves* by choosing which communities we engage with.
The interesting — and tricky — thing about the indie web is that, as a place, it’s inherently more amorphous than a lot of other online communities. You can’t just go to AO3 or Tumblr or Instagram or Discord or Bluesky. While you have to find the community within the network at those locations, the search territory is naturally constrained. In contrast, the indie web being decentralized relies more on the participating members to do some work, even if they are only reading and not posting… which honestly can be a good thing for a community, asking for some small level of investment.
When I think about the indie web as location, the closest thing is my feed reader, since that’s where I’ve collected “all the people” — but if I think of the indie web as a place, it extends out from my own website, since that’s the place I “speak” from. To a certain extent, I get to position myself in “the neighborhood” by deciding which indie web conversations I want to join in on, which indie web customs I want to follow, which indie web protocols I want to use.
