Trust and Faith in Our Web

Links Around the Web
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A recent post by @brennan that I have lots of scattered thoughts about, covering topics such as

  • An orientation of suspicion toward unfamiliar images online
  • Indie web onboarding, particularly in relation to the recent OnionBoots videos
  • The “discovery vacuum,” i.e. finding personal websites in the first place
Generative bot debate containment zone:

I’ve realized one of the first things I do (unconsciously!) when I look at a piece of art (be it visual or writing) is look for tells, to see if it’s genAI or not. Why the fuck do I do that? What a miserable way to interface with art!

While I recognize that this feels bad, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. Even pre-2022, there were plenty of reasons not to take everything at face value, including images. Plus, when art is good, I think looking closely at the details can be rewarding. That’s how I think about evaluating lots of kinds of art, really, not just images: Does it reward paying attention?

We’ve started looking at adding an anti-AI logo to work that’s purely human-made, but I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or that’s part of the same paranoid impulse. […] There’s even the organization Not By AI built around the premise of badging human-first work.

I read a different set of posts on this subject several months back: “Written by Humans, Not AI” badges & a followup post by Ruben Schade, as well as Why I donʼt use a “not by AI” badge by Michael Kjörling.

These badges aren’t themselves a guarantee of anything, which is the same problem shared by the ill-advised humans.json proposal (a subject which could be its own thread). Michael points out that standardizing a marker in this way might just make whatever it’s used on a more attractive target for scraping. And like I told Ruben, I’m also unimpressed with NotByAI.fyi’s “90% Rule.”

For the time being, I think the best methods available to us are still just 1) manually evaluate what opinions this person has posted about generative bot programs, and 2) check it to see if it makes sense – which is another thing that would be worth doing anyway.

Onto the subject of onboarding:

YouTuber OnionBoots uploaded a video on the Old/IndieWeb revival a month ago, and it has over half a million views. While I have seen a handful of people refer to the video as their introduction to the IndieWeb who have recently joined the forums and groups I’m part of, it is a very small amount of people compared to the amount that have watched the video.

I wonder what the biggest obstacle here is. Is the ask too much? Is there too much that goes into getting started on the IndieWeb, and so people remain on corporate social media that they’ve become accustomed to? […]

The conversion gap here is staggering if you think about it. Half a million people watched that video and are presumably curious, who feel something is wrong about how we live online and are looking for a door. And a handful walked through it. What is the door made of?

I have a lot of thoughts about this. Some of those I’ve discussed before in Which Part of the Indie Web Ethos is the Bigger Priority? (thread). If anyone wanted, I could also take out the red pen and go through the OnionBoots video itself in more detail. Big picture though, I think the necessary staring point is this:

Persuading people to do anything is hard.

Not just for the indie web. In general. It can take skill and it can take luck and it can take elbow grease, and I think too often people underestimate that, as though persuasion just flows naturally from truth, instead of having to be clawed up from the earth by our fingernails.

In light of that, I’m impressed that the OnionBoots video has already done as much as it has.

W. Evan Sheehan wrote it plainly. The IndieWeb is for developers. Not intentionally exclusionary, but practically, structurally, still built around people who are already comfortable with a terminal.

I’m neither a developer nor someone comfortable with a terminal, and yet here I am. I’m all for more options, of course, but to the extent that talk like this (“the indie web is for developers”) clicks for anyone, I suspect it’s because they’re thinking of the indie web in an unduly narrow way.

There’s also the discovery vacuum. Personal websites are hard to find from inside corporate silos. You can’t accidentally stumble into a Neocities page the way you’d stumble into a TikTok. There’s no algorithm serving you someone’s beautifully weird blog about fountain pens and Croatian folklore at 2am.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is why we need handcrafted surfability.

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i think the indie web, like all hobbies, just also won’t appeal to everyone even if they think it’s interesting! for example, i really can’t imagine many of my irl friends creating a website no matter how much i beg them to. it does require quite a bit of time and energy to learn and also is just simply not that appealing to many people. attitudes towards blogging is that they don’t really have anything to say and even if you convinced them they do, ik most of my friends at least just simply wouldn’t want to do it.

and besides, i think for most people the indie web vs social media dichotomy just like… isn’t real. the indie web is inherently much slower than social media is, which means (at least for me) it just occupies a different part of posting. i still use instagram heavily as its easy to talk with my friends or post something on my story and have my friends respond. i quite like this, but i can also write longer essays with more intent on the indie web at the same time. so basically the indie web doesn’t really occupy the same niche as social media for many people.

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Microformats2 are semantic markup that allows machines to understand your content’s structure — to distinguish a comment from a bookmark from a response to another post. Without them, your website is visible to humans but opaque to the open web.

Visibility to machines is, increasingly, the opposite of what people want.

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^^ I think onboarding efforts that focus on moving away from social media to the indie web are misguided, because the two of them are fundamentally different ways of consuming media.

It’s something I’ve thought a little more about after that thread about measuring content on the indie web. The idea of providing “content”, that you’re only valuable if you provide some product adjacent thing, is something inherent to how social media operates. This is doesn’t need to be the case — should not be the case — for making your own website.

I think comparing the indie web to social media is not only misleading but is also a limiting vision for what your website can be. Your website doesn’t need to be replacement for social media or a revolution against social media or only be defined against social media. In a similar vein:

This “discoverability” attitude that suggests you only exist in the eyes of others, retention being measured by activity which is measured by how often you pump out updates to your site, valuing you only by tangible contributions, are social media ideas and not something I want to replicate with my website and my relationship to the internet.

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Exactly. That’s a very modern sentiment. Open web discoverability is a slow burn; it’s not meant to track the same as social media content because social media content is ephemeral. It’s meant to be consumed now, and then largely forgotten about a couple of days later.

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Setting aside the question of quitting Instagram, I think the relevant question here is about why more people who watched the video didn’t then go make websites.

And on that note, we don’t actually know that they didn’t. There’s no particular way of tracking this sort of thing.

With that said, I have no particular expectation that they did, either.

So what are the deterrents, and which ones are addressable?

@aster’s remark about talking to friends brings to mind for me a Tumblr post I saw the other day:

this is not a value judgement but i find something super antisocial about the “just get a website” philosophy. i like tumblr because i like talking to people as peers in a shared space, i don’t want to send out a newsletter to an Audience

This gets at what I think has been a persistent weakness of various kinds of indie web advocacy: much of it does not take seriously the importance of comments.

If the response is just to treat “the indie web” and “social media” as separate spheres for separate purposes, then the reason that’s not good enough for me is that so much of mainstream “social media” is actively bad for being social. Just this past week I’ve been seeing a lot of people respond to controversial changes at Tumblr by trying out Pillowfort, and I can’t tell you how many people have expressed pleasant surprise at Pillowfort’s friendlier comment culture. We’ve got people talking about having been frightened by high notification counts and physically wincing or cringing at high comment counts because they’re bracing themselves for hostility. It really highlights how bad of a time some people have had over there, and I’m not content with treating that as irrelevant to the indie web.

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I think you’ve highlighted why some people don’t want to put comment sections on their own posts. Everything online (especially personal sites) doesn’t have to be a multi-way social channel; you can just have things that exist, without the insistence of needing to know what the last visitor thought right here and right now. Whether that’s bad for retention and reach is one thing, but I don’t think the absence of a comment section negates anything outright.

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Other people have highlighted why some people don’t want to put comment sections on their own posts. What I’m highlighting is something else.

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Thank you for linking to another one of my posts, @Coyote! Really good feedback and counterarguments in this thread. I love it :D I’ll be drafting up another blog post to respond since there’s so much.

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Thanks Brennan. Looking forward to reading it.

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Interesting article, thank you for sharing!!

Everyone else - including yourself - has said basically what i want to, just in better words, but i will say that anecdotally, the 32-bit cafe Discord server has gotten a pretty impressive influx of users, many of whom directly say they’ve come from that video by onionboots!! Now, proportional to the amount of people who watched (or even commented) on that video, it’s minuscule, but growth is smaller and steadier on the small web to begin with anyway. For my own selfish moderation reasons I’m glad that millions of people haven’t flooded our communities, lol.

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…I think less “content” more “creation” was what I meant in that thread. The indie web has lots of content, but it is lacking in original creations. Also I think the small web and social media can coexist. I use both and neither hurts the other. They compliment each other imo.

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Okay, here is my response! :D

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Thanks for the link and the kind words. Re: unduly narrow, I mostly meant to direct that at W. Evan Sheehan for saying the indie web is for developers, although at the same time, I appreciate the expression of concerns there about the difficulty. I just think “the indie web is for developers“ is a bit reductive.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see you pivot toward this framing of the “good web.”

Let me try to define the Good Web. The Good Web is any part of the internet built in good faith, which I mean in the specific, contractual sense. The maker is not optimizing against the user. No dark patterns. No retention schemes. No bloated scripts designed to keep you scrolling past the point of nourishment into the territory of compulsion. Nobody on a bbCode forum is selling your reading habits to an insurance company. The Good Web is not a technology, not a protocol, not even a community—though it contains all of those things. It’s a disposition toward the person on the other end of the connection.

Under this framework it sounds like we move further away from technical details and more explicitly put the focus on ethics, which in theory would significantly broaden the scope.

Contentious choice, but I’m interested to see where this goes.

So, to pitch an example for discussion: where does that leave something like Bluesky?

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I’m not Brennan, but I’m very interested in decentralization and a fan of AtProto specifically, so I’d like to weigh in.

First I should mention I’ve personally never been able to get into microblogging, so I haven’t touched bluesky myself, despite having an account for ATProto reasons. But I agree it’s concerning that the company chooses to continue to host the content of harmful individuals and calling that act “neutral”. I’m certainly against the idea of the “marketplace of ideas” as it’s clearly just another way for the status quo to reproduce and reinforce itself. And I have a friend whose been personally put on a very negative list and had to reach out to the owner to get that corrected.

But, decentralized moderation is a tricky problem to solve, and I think it’s worth considering blueskys approach in the context of the alternatives. Before I get to that though, I want to discuss why I think decentralization is important for resisting enshittification and for moderation in particular it’s important to avoid imposing a universal objective set of ethics, which is a myth. I and all the people in my life are against transphobia and other forms of bigotry, for example, but if we had to explicitly lay out “what should the consequences for known transphobes X be? What would a path to restoring their connection, if possible, look like?” you’d get as many answers as respondents. So even if we could agree on pillars like “don’t allow bigots on the platform” the actual details of stuff like “should their old posts be deleted? Only the objectionable ones? If they grow as a person should they be let back on?” are not ones with universally agreed upon answers, and I don’t think it makes sense to allow a single corporation to decide for everyone.

The activitypub solution is placing moderation at the hands of instance owners. Ironically enough I think this tends to be less meaningfully centralized than bluesky, because you’re ceding ultimate moderation authority to an even smaller group of people, and by virtue of having your identity associated with the instance you can’t truly “migrate” your identity. And the knowledge and resources needed to create an instance (and one big enough for you, a random new user, to even be aware of it) means the ones setting these rules are all still amongst the more privileged of us. And of course, instance owners are also known to use block lists and quickly defededate from entire instances, because making decisions per-user is too much work for some person running an instance as a hobby, so I believe it ends up banning a lot more innocent people than bluesky labelers do.

I dont think there’s that many different ideas floating around at combatting decentralized moderation, and the labelers approach seems better than activitypub to me. You as a user can change your moderation without losing your digital identity, and it’s easier to create a moderation setup that more closely aligns with what you want.

I’ve mentioned growing as a person here quite a bit, and I think that’s actually getting at a bigger issue with all this. I think the current internet is so large and social media exposes us to so many people that it’s difficult to envision proper restorative justice and preventing harm without vindictively permanently punishing people. We get forced into boxes based on a handful of posts and are not allowed to be nuanced or grow because how can anyone be expected to do that for each of the hundred strangers they might interact with every single day. I discussed this in the comments on on Moxie’s latest post, but I think the solution (and something that would get us closer to the Good Web too) is for designing social media so viral users and posts just don’t happen, and so that you’re more likely to see people on your friends list or a hop away from your friends list, so people can be nuanced growing individuals instead of one of hundreds of strangers. I think that actually might help the social media and society at large become a better place than any flavor of moderation.

And as a quick aside, it’s not as relevant to a discussion on the good web but I do think the flavors of decentralization ATProto is enough to allow people to stay on protocol but leave the influence of bluesky the company behind, and that’s sufficient for me. The fact the whole lexicon system allows people to use their identity across various different apps and even have data sovereignty through a self hosted PDS will be extremely advantageous in allowing people to move away from the large corporate web in the future imo. Discord, for example, kept getting adopted by communities because people already had discord accounts, and that’s a really nice convenience. But the alternative to discord is likely not an all in one community hub plus support forums plus wiki, as discord is used for today. It’s likely three or more separate apps that communities can use together, and ATProto would allow those apps to share identities and not require new users to create three new accounts.

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Interesting perspective. It seems Tumblr serves two purposes: a host for creations/posts as well as a community space to participate in. Making a website can replace half of that, but community is much harder. There are community spaces out there on the indie web (right here, even!) but you have to find them, which is difficult unless you know where to look. It’s important for internet community spaces to be decentralized, or else they are constantly fracturing every time a social platform gets worse, but how do we make these decentralized spaces discoverable?

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This is a good question, and I definitely don’t know enough to give a good answer. While I use Bluesky, I only syndicate my posts there and don’t actively use it.

Reading your writing on the platform, specifically learning that Bluesky is “a technological workaround to reduce the power to ban people” was eye-opening for me. I’ve understood the marketing/branding of the platform as “an ethical alternative to X”.

And even with this in mind, that’s still true isn’t it? Even with all the problems Bluesky has, even with the new discovery they raised $100 million primarily from crypto firms last year, it is still less harmful and toxic as X currently is.

In a blog post explaining origins, Jack is quoted saying “[t]he biggest and long term goal is to build a durable and open protocol for public conversation. That it not be owned by any one organization but contributed by as many as possible.”

I have to say I think lowercase bluesky as an idea, and the AT protocol, are good. But Bluesky, PBLLC. the company? It’s hard for me to say that it was built on a good-faith foundation. It’s difficult for me to not view the platform as inherently compromised as I currently understand things.

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This is a major reason Tumblr was the social media platform I was most active on for 13 years (2011–2024) before making my own websites my primary online presence. The combination of discovering other blogs that share your interests by searching tags and adding your own comments to posts via reblogs and/or replies provide a sense of community. In recent years, Tumblr had actually implemented a community feature that allows users to create groups dedicated to specific topics.

I believe serving the purposes of a host for creations as well as a community space to participate in is also major factor to Neocities’ popularity, or at least something close to a community, since Neocities allows you to discover other websites hosted on Neocities, and leaving comments on other Neocities profiles provided the user enables profile comments.

So I agree that how do we make decentralised online community spaces (more) discoverable is a question worth asking and exploring. I also agree that it’s important for online communities to be decentralised instead of relying on social media platforms.

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The Cory Doctorow decentralization-vs-enshittification narrative is not something I believe in. Certainly he did identify a financial incentive to mistreat the userbase, but he dropped the ball when it comes to the logical follow through on those ideas, and I think that oversight has carried through in most applications of the framework.

I’m just not invested enough in that kind of many-sites-on-one-protocol decentralization for it to outweigh anything at issue here.

That’s been how a lot of people have talked about it, unfortunately. Just the other day I spoke to someone who had no idea about its actual background. It’s something I’ve had to keep pointing out to people again and again.

For our purposes I figured Bluesky would make an interesting example because it seemingly fulfills the letter of your criteria without adhering to the spirit of it. Certainly I think the Bluesky team does sincerely believe in their own mission… and their mission is one that I find morally repugnant.

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I understand Doctorow and his theory of enshittification can be criticized, but my post focuses on decentralized moderation and how centralized moderation imposes moral universalism, which is not something I believe Doctorow ever explored. I think you’ll actually find decentralized moderation appealing as it’s in alignment with your ideas on the host/guest relationship (although bluesky’s default app and app view don’t fully respect that relationship, and by no means am I suggesting the Bluesky corporation is without fault, even if my post is defending ATProto).

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