Posts about IndieWeb (RSS, JSON)

5PM — Manuel Moreale on personal websites:

Personal sites—and, more broadly, our digital lives—are a mirror of who we are. Some of us will try to neatly organize everything under one hyper-curated digital roof while others will scatter things around on 12 different domains and 24 services. Some will design a site for themselves and not touch it again for a decade while others will feel the need to redesign every 6 months. Those are all right answers to a question that doesn’t have wrong answers.

Just as there are no rules for blogging, there are no rules for the personal website. Go with your gut and build a site you love. And if you don’t like it anymore in six months, make a different version of your site.

The beauty of personal projects is that no marketing manager prescribes your site’s content. There’s no design director who sends frantic messages at 6:34 on Friday because you deviated from the company-approved design system. And there’s no opinionated engineering manager who you have to fight when you feel like rewriting the backend in a new language.

The only reason we’re having these arguments is because everything we do online is now commodified, thanks to the relentless barrage of mind-numbing bullshit from online personas grasping for attention. But think about it this way: If someone judges you based on a something you made for yourself, is it worth keeping their company?

5PM — Matthias Ott makes the case for the personal website:

Your personal website is a place that provides immense creative freedom and control. It’s a place to write, create, and share whatever you like, without the need to ask for anyone’s permission. It is also the perfect place to explore and try new things, like different types of posts, different styles, and new web technologies. It is your playground, your platform, your personal corner on the Web.

Personal websites as a place for creativity where you can experiment with design and technology without the constraints of business or clients. I prefer that view over the simplistic reason that you can own your content.

For some, the Web has always been more than a couple of websites with text fields so people can complain or share photos of their faces. In the Web’s early days, if you were online, you’d have your own site. You wouldn’t just consume the medium; you’d actively create and shape it. That part of the Web still lives and breathes, although less prominent than twenty years ago.

3PM — In Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things, Catherynne M. Valente describes how online communities die:

These sites exist because of what we do there. But at any moment they can be sold out from under us, to no benefit or profit to the workers—yes, workers, goddammit—who built it into something other than a dot com address and a dusty login screen, yet to the great benefit and profit of those who, more often than not, use the money to make it more difficult for people to connect to and accept each other positively in the future.

We keep losing online communities because they are funded by venture capital. As soon as these companies reach the end of their runway or the investors want some of their money back, their platforms usually deteriorate into a hell hole of attention-grabbing, algorithmically-optimised hot takes, advertising and abuse. It’s the same cycle every time.

And yet, people flock to every new VC-funded website, providing us with a text box to share stuff. Valente, after experiencing a thirty-year rinse and repeat of rising and declining online platforms, writes on Substack. How is Substack different from Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, MySpace or LiveJournal? No one can predict which direction Substack is going in the future, but its owners and investors certainly don’t care about the people and communities they host. Their goal is to become profitable or to find a profitable exit.

Building good technology is hard. It takes time and money. Successful online platforms operate at a scale that is not viable as a hobby. We can only sustain online communities by paying to use the platforms. But even if there was one, funded by the community, free of advertising and algorithms, how long would that last? People’s interests change, their lives change, they spend less time online, they spend more time online elsewhere. Mastodon, at the moment, looks like it’s on the right track. They rejected VC funding to keep the not-for-profit status, and the project receives enough donations so their maintainer earns a salary. But how much of people’s current drive to fund alternative social media platforms is down to Musk’s shenanigans at Twitter?

The only certain, long-term approach to secure an online community’s existence is to build the technology yourself or use open-source software and run the service on machines you maintain yourself.

4PM — I posed a question the other day when linking to John Scalzi’s How to Weave the Artisan Web:

How realistic is it, though, that the vast crowd that built a following on social media using its straightforward publication and amplification methods; that these people will start to develop and maintain their own websites?

Right now, we’re seeing an increased interest in the independent Web: People flocking to Mastodon, folks talking about RSS, and creating blog directories. But the movement is mainly driven by tech-savvy people. People who know how to code a site, host it, and already have a network outside of big-tech social media.

But artists, musicians, writers, your fourteen-year-old niece and their friends, many of them don’t know how to code or host a website. We have all this amazing technology, decentralised platforms to build social networks, and IndieWeb protocols that enable websites to talk to each other; but that technology still needs to be wired up to form a network, and that requires technical skill.

Unless you find someone to do it for you. And who’s more likely to build a stable and user-friendly platform using IndieWeb technology while there’s momentum? Is it the nerd coding away at night after a long day building software to make your pizza arrive earlier or the VC-funded startup that puts money and a team behind the idea?

Remember when Substack started, and everyone lauded that email is based on open standards that no company can own. But Substack still owns the editor, they own the database that hosts your content, and they sure try everything to make people sign up for their service to read any of your content. And if Substack decides to put their service behind a paywall or close it down altogether, your work is gone unless they provide a way to export all your data. Nobody owns HTTP either, yet we’ve seen previously how open platforms are giving in to the pressure from financiers and retract further and further from the open Web.

And as much as I’d love and genuinely hope to see an independent web materialise and algorithm-driven content distribution disappear entirely, I fear the moment will be hijacked by big money. Because it is so difficult to build.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t try. I really do hope that ethical companies like Micro.blog and Automattic continue to work towards an open Web and carve out a niche for people who care.

6PM — RSS used to be ubiquitous. Every blog had an RSS button somewhere. So did many news sites in the days before social media. RSS is making a comeback at the moment, but it’s nowhere as omnipresent on websites as it used to be.

What happened? Safari supported RSS in the past. Apple added some basic support to the browser in 2004 but removed the feature in 2012. Some connect RSS’ decline to the popular Google Reader, which was axed in 2013. I’ve never used Reader, and there have always been alternatives. I don’t think that the lack of feed-reader software led to the demise of RSS adoption.

What happened was monetisation. To make money on the Web today, you either charge users for your product or sell ads. Many news and social media sites offer content of varying quality, and they are rarely essential to people’s lives, so users usually won’t pay for their usage. So you sell ads. And to sell ads, you need page views. To get page views, you want visitors to linger on your site to open as many pages as possible.

RSS encourages usage patterns that oppose continued engagement. It notifies readers when a new story is posted; there is no incentive to constantly re-visit sites to check for updates. Likewise, the barebones nature of how feeds are presented doesn’t trick you into clicking elsewhere. You read what you’re interested in and move on to the next.

As a result, big sites removed or stopped advertising feeds on their pages:

• Twitter used to offer RSS feeds. Some argue they removed them because Google Reader didn’t display title-less feeds correctly. Yeah right. They removed it, so people sign up for Twitter because that would be the only way to follow someone.
• Medium offers RSS feeds but hides them. At least they’ve got instructions on how the subscribe in their docs.
• The New York Times offers a wide variety of feeds, but you have to Google to find them.
• So does The Guardian.
• The German weekly paper Die Zeit has an RSS feed but doesn’t advertise it, even though they ran a piece about RSS in 2020.
• Most indie blogs offer RSS, but there are still a surprising number of sites that don’t display a link to their feed. I have to view-source and sift through the page header to find the link.

What can we do to make RSS a format that isn’t just appreciated by a few nerds? Advertise RSS. The RSS icon that used to be universal, you could find it on many, many websites. We need to put RSS on every website that offers feeds. Unfamiliar users will get curious. And they might try using a feed reader, which will stick because it is convenient. They will demand better integration into browsers and ask big news websites to offer their feeds more prominently.

2PM — It has finally happened: Elon Musk has taken over Twitter today.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens next. Some expect chaos others think it continues to be a necessary evil. Maybe a right-wing mob equipped with pitchforks and torches will overrun and force out all remaining humble and honest people from the platform. Perhaps not; who knows?

Whatever happens, may I interest you in a couple of alternatives, just in case:

• micro.blog is a, well, micro-blogging service built on top of open APIs. It’s not free but has no ads, and you own your content, which you can syndicate to other platforms.
• The distributed social network Mastodon has been around for some time but has yet to take off. Maybe its time will come (Remember the pitchforks). Different communities run Mastodon nodes; you can pick one that fits your interests.
• Blogs are still a thing. You can write your own; it’s fun. 

You can also do what old people generally do and spend less time online. Because the decontextualised arguments, the self-aggrandisement, and the flat memes — you’ll find them anywhere online. Read a book, go for a walk, start taking photos, or cook yourself dinner, instead of having it delivered by a bloke on a scooter.