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Still got a headache and fuzzy after yesterday's migraine and didn't sleep well. Our grandson has a temperature and I woke in a sweat this morning so did a precautionary Covid test. It's negative 👍

# As the daily feed is now the only feed for the site I decided to remove the "no posts on this day" feature. It will now only include days with posts.

Dave Winer has added the <source:self> channel level element to the source namespace as a way of indicating the canonical URL of the feed without having to include the Atom namespace. I've also added this to the daily feed.

# In her post Social norms of the indieweb, Tracy discusses how communities and their norms cross platform boundaries and the subsequent risk of context collapse.

Even within the indieweb (where a goal is to allow sites to communicate with each other) opinions differ on what information sound be displayed after receiving a webmention.

When I stepped back from the blog recently I decided to undo the changes that allowed me to cross post to Bluesky and back feed replies. I also removed my RSS feed from my micro.blog account so that posts wouldn't show in the timeline there. As micro.blog supports webementions replies would show as comments on the blog.

Returning to blogging again, I have decided that this is how I'll keep it. While I am active on Bluesky (albeit fairly minimally) I have decided to keep that separate. Although Bluesky is designed as a decentralised system, and as the network expands and more "people" run their own servers or compatible systems, the places posts spread will obviously increase beyond the Bluesky app. That's a given but, even though my bio says that replies could show as comments on my blog, many won't be expecting it.

I feel that intentionally sending a webmention from your own site to another is a different matter. It is understood that webmentions allow this cross talk between sites so I don't feel the need to hide the names, links or reply content of those sites sending them. Micro.blog is an exception as, while it supports webementions, not everyone who sets up an account might understand what they are and how they work.

Some prefer to only publicly show the number of mentions or likes, keeping the details for their private consumption. The webmention spec details how they work but not what one should do upon receiving them. A social norm needs to develop here so that those implementing them have a reasonable expectation as to their handling. If that norm becomes not publicly showing any details then I'll be happy to follow it.

I've been saying for years that indieweb technology needs to be simpler to implement. That's indieweb - one word.

A number of people have linked to a post by Giles Turnbull saying Let's make the indie web easier. That's indie web — two words.

There is overlap and the same principles apply. However, the indieweb is part of the independent web but not all of the independent web is indieweb.

The indieweb website states it is a people-focused alternative to the "corporate web" and:

is a community of independent and personal websites connected by simple standards, based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary identity, publishing on your own site (optionally syndicating elsewhere), and owning your data.

Great, isn't that the same thing? Well, not exactly no. To be 'IndieWeb' (one word) means to follow the basic principles of the independent web (and more) but ideally using indieweb standards as listed on the site: ¹

• IndieAuth
• Webmention
• Micropub
• WebSub
• Microsub

My previous posts have been about how difficult it is for people to implement these standards.

Giles goes way further by saying that it needs to be easier to set up a website period. Never mind the fancy bells and whistles, never mind the nerdy standards and protocols, just setting up a simple self-hosted site is … too. fucking. hard.

We need more self-hosted platforms for personal publishing that aren’t Wordpress …

Why not build static website generators that people can just unzip, upload to the shared hosting they've just paid for, and start using via a browser?

Jeremy Herve goes even further saying that it's not just the tools that are the problem:

The minute we're talking about "unzip", "upload", we’ve already lost folks.

He argues that the onboarding flow matters more than the tools. There absolutely needs to be more platforms that provide a simple 'point and click' style of installation and more hosting providers that support such installations. That over 40% of the web runs on WordPress tells a worrying story.

Update Kev has some thoughts and is collecting links to others as well.

James let me know that yesterday's post on RSS had hit the front page of Hacker News.

I was expecting a lot more push back on my statement that "people inventing new 'standards' are deliberately trying to make them hard" but (so far) only one comment mentions it:

This blog post feels like a subtweet, making accusations of malice about... something? ActivityPub? If it flat out said what it was talking about, we could have a more productive discussion.

I've long said that various standards are too complicated for the average person. ActivityPub is certainly beyond me and a lot of indieweb building blocks are also out of reach.

Things don't have to be so complicated.

Frank Meeuwsen asks Show me your blogroll considering them "the best artifacts of the Early World Wide Web". They certainly help with discovery of other bloggers.

I had a dedicated blogroll for a while on the old WordPress site but also a 'pseudo-blogroll' (called The Directory) automatically generated from those who sent me webmentions. The Directory was a different approach that allowed people to discover other indieweb bloggers.

I no longer have an explicit blogroll but my /reader essentially performs the same function and has an OPML file available for download. The OPML is automatically updated whenever I add/remove a feed to/from /reader.

As I always say, what better recommendation can you make than the feeds you actively read yourself.

In the spirit of the personal web and discovery, I finally got round to adding the site to the indieweb Webring. It's only taken me a few ... years 🤣

I was a bit stuck for where to put it but eventually opted for in the menu tray:

I always enjoy hitting the 'next' link on a webring and not having a clue where it will take me.