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Regarding the tolstoyans: Count Leo Tolstoy, the great nineteenth-century Russian novelist and thinker, taught that the meaning of life could be found through the literal application of Christ’s teachings, especially the Sermon on the Mount. Tolstoy sought to rescue the true teachings of Christ from what he perceived to be the irrelevant, irrational doctrines of faith. He emphasized the creed of absolute nonresistance (thus, incidentally, Tolstoy made a profound impression on Gandhi). This creed included the abhorrence of physical force, detestation of legalized exploitation of the poor, condemnation of private property (because ownership was secured by force), and a rejection of government (since it existed primarily for the sake of the rich and powerful). Many of Tolstoy’s followers banded into colonies, but Tolstoy himself distrusted such organized efforts, and most colonies did not last long.

Tolstoy’s distrust of organized efforts reminds me of another writer who distrusted movements. The same guy who said:

When they asked me to join them I wouldn’t,
and then went off by myself and did more
than they would have asked. ‘Well, then,’ they said
‘go and organize the International Brotherhood
of Contraries,’ and I said, ‘Did you finish killing
everybody who was against peace?’ So be it.

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I’m not sure where I first heard about Joan and her superb writing, but I’ve been following her for around a year or so now, I think.

Anyway, I was catching up on my RSS feeds and came across this post from a few days ago. It’s fantastic, as it most of what Joan puts out.

Start a blog. Start one because the practice of writing at length, for an audience you respect, about things that matter to you, is itself valuable. Start one because owning your own platform is a form of independence that becomes more important as centralized platforms become less trustworthy. Start one because the format shapes the thought, and this format is good for thinking.

I couldn’t agree more.

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But it's fun to get more datapoints so I created a similar survey and I'd really appreciate it if you could take probably 10 seconds to answer it. It's literally 1 question. I'll keep the form live for a week and then publish the results.

Thank you :)

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Henry:

The advent and development of tools & methodologies like POSSE (Publish On your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), ActivityPub, microformats, and ATProto, it’s becoming quite achievable to generate your own social network, interoperable with other networks like Bluesky or Mastodon. That network, designed for ownership and decentralization, is durable, designed around storytelling instead of engagement, and free of the whims of weird tech billionaires.

With some basic HTML knowledge and getting-stuff-online knowledge, a handful of scrappy protocols, and a free afternoon or two, one can build their own home to post bangers for the tight homies, make friends, and snipe those new friends with those hits of dopamine they so fiendishly rely on.

Pretty much everything leading up to this bit in the conclusion is gold, so far as the analysis is concerned. It falls apart for me here at the end, principally due to this blinkered idea of what kind of person might consider the above to be “quite achievable”. It put me in mind of something that came in over the email transom the other day because it links my post about the challenges to self-hosting when it comes to the normies.

Coyote:

If it’s not for someone whose every dollar is already being sucked up by survival, then it’s not for everyone. If it’s not for the hungry and the homeless then it’s not for everyone. If it’s not for the refugee and the runaway then it’s not for everyone. If it depends on having cash to spare on renting a custom domain name then it’s not for everyone. People in these demographics do use the internet, and they deserve better than to be ground up for a predatory machine, which is why we need more options that are easy and free and independent from venture capital and corporate giants.

If the indie web is for everyone, then that necessarily calls for a free tier option at every step of the way, which is at odds with defining the indie web in terms of paying up for domain names. The domain name ideal can be subordinated to a focus on other factors, such as evaluating business models or funding sources for their capacity for harm. Otherwise, a dogmatic purism about technological independence means defining the indie web in a way that’s financially exclusive, leaving vast swathes of people outside its scope, relegated to corporate exploitation.

This focuses on domain names but I use here it to represent a wider habit on the part of folks focusing on the technical concerns as people debate the so-called indieweb. Coyote earlier notes that there is disagreement over whether what’s needed is “more tools or more stuff or more collectives or more simplicity” and “what kind of concessions are tolerable and which middle-ground options to recommend, if any”.

That type of analysis is basically missing from Henry’s essay, and it’s precisely that sort of thing which drives me crazy about the indieweb as a professed movement. Normies generally are not going to be into a position to DIY their presence and activity on the web, and so Coyote is quite right to raise the titular question of which part or parts of the indieweb ethos to emphasize.

Is it more important to evangelize that everyone run as much of their own shit as humanly possible, or more important to evangelize the ways in which they can get off extractive silos by choosing more ethical services that do various aspects of the hard work for them? For that matter, is it more important to be out there building the more ethical services that would do various aspects of the hard work for them?

Henry comes so, so close to addressing this question in his brief disclaimer on nostalgia, but leaves it in that sidebar and never goes on to call out the tell.

To be very clear: I’m not trying to Good Old Days the internet. None of this is meant to make you feel nostalgic — the Internet used to be slow and less populated and less diverse, and its access was limited to those of a certain class. The Web For All is a marked improvement, widespread global internet access is a marked improvement, and what I’m asking you to consider is what it used to feel like to use these tools, and what we’ve lost in the Big Tech, Web 2.0 and web3 devouring of the ’Net.

The very fact that the internet used to be “less populated and less diverse, and its access was limited to those of a certain class” is what made for a DIY web in the first place. The people who were here were the people who found the tinkering irresistible and indeed didn’t mind losing entire nights to trying to debug a webpage, fighting to configure MoveableType correctly, or figuring out why their DSL connection wasn’t working. Normies aren’t going to want to have to do these things, or things of their ilk, in order to get away from extractive silos.

Henry’s analysis is correct, as is Coyote’s, but only the latter places the focus in the right places: we can’t just leave people to their own devices with a hearty “make a personal website!” and other inspirational calls. Henry offers five aspects of making a personal website, but the fourth is going to lose normies right off the bat.

Leverage the IndieWeb and its wonderfully thought-out protocols, tools like brid.gy to syndicate your ideas out to the wider web, and then use Webmentions to bring the ensuing conversations back where the content is.

I’m not even a normie in this context and my brain glazed over by the word “protocols”.

This is just not how we get people to invest more in a more personal web. There’s an adage about needing to meet people where they are, and—whatever the vagaries of that idea in different contexts—for indieweb purposes we should just take it to mean that you can’t expect someone who just wants to share photos with their grandchildren—or with their grandparents—to figure out how to HTML a gallery website at their own domain hosted on Hetzner using a Bunny CDN.

First, let’s figure out how to get people out from under the extraction without insisting that they in essence and effect make time for an entire new to them hobby. First, let’s make and promote more ethical services that get people representing themselves online in spaces over which they have more control. Whether or not any of them then become converts to a DIY ethos themselves is a problem for later.

Much later.

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Put another way, I don't think they know that there are hippie-type developers who believe in you and your free speech, and build accordingly. The web is the home page for that movement, and it's still there and ready to do the job it was built to do, and not feed your soul into the slurry-making machines. #

BTW, I was right about our respective ages. I am five years older, so we are of the same generation, but have taken different paths, but have arrived at basically the same place. And for what it's worth I voted for George W. Bush against Al Gore in 2000, but voted and worked for John Kerry in 2004.#

Another btw, in the early blogosphere we had a motto -- watching them watch us watch them, etc. You aren't blogging if you aren't always considering what you're doing. #

Must-watch narrated bodycam video from Jan 6 Capitol riot. Maybe the saddest moment in American history, so far. #

Problem with ChatGPT is that it thinks you always want to know everything about all the options, no matter how convoluted they are, based on incorrect assumptions about what you're doing. You ask a simple question with a simple answer and they write you a four page briefing on everything. At least they do seem to give you the correct answer up front. They ought to work on making these things manageable, and btw for these reasons I believe they must write the most shitty code when they're left to write the whole thing. If they have a different better mode, please let me talk to that one! :-)#