Paul Watson’s posts tagged “Indieweb”

Today, the pace that new content is flung at us means that, without substantial willpower or intentionality, we’re so busy consuming we don’t have time to think.

It’s also empowering for regular people to be able to publish where anyone might be able to read our words: the open web. Gatekeepers like editorial boards and publishers can no longer stop those they disagree with from reaching an audience. For most time periods, archaeologists and historians can only *dream* of having access to writing by regular people, when only the words of the wealthy were recorded, to understand cultures of the past.

And our society is fucked up enough to deserve the vocal, even vulgar expression of our dissatisfaction — because I think what’s disgusting is not “profanity,” but allowing schoolchildren to go hungry and razing encampments to make homeless people invisible again.

That’s because indieweb.org is not a presciption or a cookbook or an exercise plan. It doesn’t tell you how to “be IndieWeb”. It’s a collective memory of experiments, some successful and some not, from a group of experimenters that has changed greatly over time.

This post isn’t about rewilding the web or building out new infrastructure to compete with big tech, but how we, as members and participants of the independent web, can help rebuild the connections that made the web diverse and fun to surf again.

And up in the hills, I rediscovered blogs, because those are totally still a thing, and they’re great! There are mountains of awesome blogs out there these days. The list of subscriptions in my RSS reader is getting longer all the time, and I love reading all of them.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

In the indie economy, creators build their own platforms, whether that's a website, an app, or a subscription service. They have complete control over their content, their audience, and their monetization strategies. They are not beholden to anyone else's algorithms or policies, and they have the freedom to experiment and innovate without fear of reprisal.

This resonates strongly with me, as was probably apparent from my answer to the “why do you write online?” topic we were all discussing at last night’s HWC. My website exists primarily for my artwork. I may write something about this in the next few days.

Hi - just saw your post on IndieWeb chat - my blog is at https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook

TL;DR: You can now use a penguin avatar to navigate my website.

*Waves from another site that uses Webmentions*

How about “a more fun 404 page”?

I can see the rel="me" on Instagram, but not on Threads - maybe they’ve removed it from Threads recently?

A final word on blogs before we return to our regularly scheduled programming:

https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/a-final-word-on-blogs

But here's the thing: being able to say, "wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement. Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that's supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that's not owned by any one company, that can't be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.

It’s all a bit corporate, a bit woowoo, a bit odd, but it plugs into a broader conversation about how the internet has evolved and changed, how platforms have scorched much of the landscape that was previously a bit rougher around the edges, a bit more grassroots, more personal, more creative, perhaps.

I've finally launched the initial version of my Posts feed (along with RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds), as part of an effort to take control of my short-form posts away from social media silos.

IndieWebCamp Brighton … 2024-03-09…10

I know I sound like an old man when I go on and on about RSS, but really, it’s sitting right there and is apparently what a lot of people miss.