@fLaMEd had bookmarked this, and itâs in part a response to one of my recent rants.
I have since updated the rant in question to address it.
Iâm stilll drafting my own post, might happen that Iâm back from holiday now
unless you know at least a little bit about websites and how they work,
This is a very generous read of the situation lol. I do have another post coming on this subject because I had an interesting email exchange that made me realise a few things.
Keen to see how this unfolds.
Still havenât had a chance to jot down my thoughts yet
Some fun takes from this guy.
Iâm content to let him have the last word, since Iâve had my say.
This guy sounds like fun. Iâll make sure to keep the conversation going ;)
I was going to post about that, but I decided it was better to send him an email. Thatâs more my style.
Just catching up on this one Ownership, connection, and controlâ IndieWeb stuff
Maybe I shouldâve titled my zine âWelcome to the Personal Webâ instead of âWelcome to the Indie Webâ. I donât actually know anything about the organization IndieWeb; I just used indie as short for independent. Do you think the title of the zine will cause confusion?
Iâd have gone with âWelcome to the Webâ, but if you donât want to change the title you could always add a little aside to differentiate between the indie web and IndieWeb.
I was going to write a post about this but I havenât found the time, so Iâll post my take here. I think itâs weird to call the discourse a strawman argument when the Getting Started page on the indieweb wiki is directing people to get into services that implement all of the protocols (or implement them yourself). It doesnât say âmake a website and youâre on the indiewebâ. You could make the argument that the indieweb wiki doesnât represent everyone on the indieweb, but if someone wanting to get into personal websites sees people talking about the indieweb and searches for it, it is going to be the first thing they find, and itâs going to make them think it is way more complicated than it needs to be. Itâs very frustrating to me that apparently no one affiliated sees this as a problem and that the real problem is pointing it out.
This is why I donât like a lot of techies, despite being one myself. They mistake their preferences for prescriptions, and once they get it into their heads that their over-engineered approach is the One True Way thereâs no persuading them otherwise.
Apologies for bumping the topic, but I think itâs a preferable alternative to creating a new topic about the same topic. After all, thereâs tons of links here already giving context about the âdiscourseâ.
My Relationship to the âIndieWebâ sphere
One of my main special interests these days is semantic HTML and the Semantic Web as a whole. Adding as much machine-readable semantic information to my websites is one of my primary goals nowadays. I think it might be a neurodivergency thing â I am fascinated with data and categories after all.
I got into the whole âIndieWebâ-related sphere through the microformats2 standard, which is to my knowledge still the best and most wide-spread (even if that doesnât say much) standard for marking up semantic information on the web beyond the capabilities of HTML itself. Since the very small microformats2 community is practically identical to the âIndieWebâ community, it was pretty much unavoidable.
I am loosely participating in the current âIndieWebâ community, for example by submitting blog posts to their âIndieWeb carnivalâ community events every once in a while. Other than that, Iâve not integrated myself that much.
The reason I looked up the term âIndieWebâ on this forum was actually because I wanted to get a feel for what the opinion on them of the people over here was. I noticed that despite sharing a lot of my ideals about the Semantic Web, the people in the âIndieWebâ community seemed⌠different. With one or two exceptions, they were all rich guys in tech with seemingly no desire to express themselves outside the norm.
Their websites all practically seem like glorified, polished LinkedIn pages, really. Many of them were random big data tech CEOs. I even received a damn NFT for participating in the last IndieWeb carnival, which was so incredibly awkward that I had to take a break from the internet for a second.
âIndieWebâ and Indie Web â whatâs in a name?
I think the whole drama and confusion on this side (the subculture side) is mostly about the name itself, honestly.
When I got into this whole subculture of personal websites, Neocities, web-rings and so on, we all called it the âweb revivalâ. Thatâs owing mostly to the fact that my path to discovering the subculture had been, in order:
- Emo and scene revival cultureâŚ
- âŚwhich led to SpaceHeyâŚ
- âŚwhich led to Melonking/MelonlandâŚ
- âŚwho called it the âWeb Revivalâ.
I had not heard of the term âindie webâ for the same subculture until way later, and even then it was just one of many (âsmall webâ, âold webâ, âŚ).
The IndieWeb organisation alongside the whole Microformats thing that it is strongly connected to is way older than our subculture. Many of the people involved with âIndieWebâ are actually members of the W3C, writing the actual âofficialâ standards of the web such as HTML. If anything, we took over the name from a many decades old organisation.
So what about âIndieWebâ? Is it worth it?
That said, I can understand the criticism people have of the IndieWeb organisation and their goals. I did mention the vibes I felt were quite off.
However, I would disagree with some of the stuff people mentioned. I think the âmicroformats2, POSH, semantic HTMLâ thing is not inaccessible or elitist at all. In fact, theyâre actually taking care to explain it as easily as possible, and it seems to be one of their values:
âThe term [Semantic HTML] is a mouthful, and belies both how simple it is [âŚ]. We need a simple short mnemonic term that captures the essence of the concept, and is easily verbed (to posh, poshify, poshed up).â
â on the POSH page
Their resources for writing more tutorials and introductions are just small because barely anyone participates these days.
That said, I think the lack of an ethical or social focus hurt their community quite a bit. I think the Indie Web â or web revival â subculture was pretty lucky that Yesterweb practically kicked it off with a political manifesto. My subculture is rightfully categorically opposed to the NFT-bro tech CEOs that I encountered on âIndieWebâ. And yet, microformats are pretty cool.
Then again, I donât care whatsoever about webmentions or turning my website into some kind of web application. I only ever cared about semantic markup, but thatâs not what most people on âIndieWebâ seem to care about at all. And thatâs the thing â a lot of the posts shared in this thread so far hit the nail on the head for me. I donât actually see any use case for all the fancy stuff they do. RSS is wildly more useful to me than an h-feed or POSSE or webmentions or whatever, simply because thereâs actually implementations of it and more people than a dozen actually use them.
We can put all the semantic information we want into the web, but if there are no applications that can actually do anything with them, thereâs no use whatsoever. And the only things that seem to be worked on are those awkward social features like Webmentions.
That said, they seem to be aware of this. When talking about possible new microformats, they pretty quickly told me that it doesnât make sense to expand the standard by even more specifications when almost none of them have any practical use right now.
My current stance is that I am drawing inspiration from the microformats2 specification, implement it as much as possible despite its lack of use, occasionally participate in their open online events for the fun of it, but other than that keep a distance and donât get too involved.
Sorry for the long post. ADHD meds.
This was a lovely read I have to say. Thank you
You should have this on your own website if it isnât already there.
I was originally just planning to write one or two paragraphs on the topic here, but due to my ADHD medsâ silliness, the reply grew into blog post length.
I should put it on my site, yeah. Thanks for the hint. x3
Iâve been on those. Amphetamines are a hell of a drug.
They improve my life a lot, but they also lead to incredible productivity to a fault â as you can see, haha.
ADHD drugs just made me more aggressive. Not so much violent, but less diplomatic and rather intolerant of people testing my boundaries.
I stopped taking them when a new manager at my day job had asked me where I had been on the weekend, since apparently they had tried to call me. Normally, I would just have said, âI was out of town.â
But while on Vyvanse I snapped, âSince the company isnât paying me to be on call, thatâs none of your business.â
I also started seeing a different shrink because the one who had put me on Vyvanse had plainly misdiagnosed me.