Werd I/O

In his excellent newsletter Things That Have Caught My Attention, Dan Hon writes:

So my thing is this: not an indie web, but a sustainable one. One that is kind of adjacent to the indie web, but that builds long-lasting, reliable services, not ones that disappear. This adjacency comes from the answers to the question of: what kind of attributes are required for a sustainable web? Do you need easily exportable data? Sure. Do you need some element of user control? Sure. Are those the *defining* characteristics? Not really. But I think we might be verging on a sort of turning point where applications and services can, at the outset, say: "you know what, here's our plan for being around for a while so you can *trust* us and invest time in us". [...] A web where we build for the long-term, and perhaps pulling back from explosive, burn bright and short products and services.

You should read the whole newsletter here, and subscribe over here.

I buy into this completely.

I also believe, strongly, that sustainability is a kind of independence, and therefore something that should go hand-in-hand with the #indieweb. If you're going to own your site and your own presence, you should be able to do so in a way that you're going to keep up: if you're writing your own platform or handcoding your own site (as a small minority will), you've got to make sure you'll keep writing your own platform or site, because otherwise what's the point? If you're building a startup that aims to solve a problem for real people, shouldn't you ensure that the product or service you're building can continue to exist? Otherwise the point is simply to make a lot of money. I'm not knocking that as a goal in itself - I am very interested in making my project a financial success - but if you're not continuing to solve the problem for your users, or if you're simply taking away a tool they have come to depend on, you're treating them as collateral damage. I don't believe that's an ethical way to build software.

If you're not building in sustainability, you're naturally going to be beholden to outside entities: either to acquire what you've built (if you're building a startup), which may result in your project shutting down, or to use someone else's service. As in life, you lose independence by not planning for the future.

All of this came about because Andy Baio is resurrecting Upcoming.org, which I'm delighted by - at least until there's a viable, mass-market indieweb event tool.

I've been planning on heading to the Internet Identity Workshop for years; although I did once make it to a one-day London version, I've never managed to get down to Mountain View for the full three-day length.

From the website:

Do you care about privacy in Age of Surveillance? (You should.) Do you want to do something about it? Are you already doing something about it? IIW is where you get to meet and work alongside others tackling the same problem.

Or let's say you care about new forms of money (such as Bitcoin) and what the geeks call distributed hash and crypto ledgers. IIW is for you too.

Next week, I'm planning on being there. I'll be demoing Idno, but also talking all things #indieweb and catching up with developments in the identity community.

Kaliya facilitates great events, and although I'm less personally familiar with the other organizers, I know they are very well-respected in the community. It should be fun. And if you're in the Bay Area on May 6-8 next month, it's not too late to join us!

Right now I don't have comments on my site. Despite this, I think discussion is one of the most important parts of the web. I'm definitely not anti-comment, and I love feedback.

My intention is that you'll write a reply on your own site and link over here. Using a back-end mechanism called webmention, which is supported by a growing number of platforms (there's a WordPress plugin), your comment can show up as if it was posted here, while living on your own site. If everyone starts to do this, we'll start building up distributed discussion threads across the web, that aren't owned by any one person or company. I think that's pretty cool.

But I also recognize that not everyone wants to do this, and not everyone can do this right now. Webmentions are a pretty technical proposition, and lots of people don't even have their own sites right now. If you saw this on Twitter or Facebook, you can comment there and those comments will show up here too, thanks to a back-end piece of glue called brid.gy. (You don't need to do anything for this to happen.)

Sometimes, though, you just want to post a damn comment. With that in mind, I'm curious: if you're reading this, do you prefer threaded comments - like you might find over on Reddit, or implemented over on Livejournal - or the single-track blog comments that you find in most places these days? There's a lot to be said for both. A lot of the supporting technologies around commenting - and regularly-updated content in general - are based around streams rather than threading, but that's not a good reason not to implement threads if they're more useful.

Then you start thinking about the form of comments. They've been text as a convention since forever, but this platform supports multiple kinds of content. I think allowing photo comments is a lovely idea, for example. Gawker's discussion platform Kinja supports this, and allows for some more colorful debate, as well as things like photo competitions. Audio and video comments are a bigger can of worms - Seesmic was a video discussion platform, before pivoting into more traditional media and being acquired by Hootsuite - but shouldn't questions of decorum and sensibility be up to the site owner rather than the platform?

At any rate, let me know what you'd like to see.

(And yes, #indieweb folks, I think displaying webmentions as threads is a very interesting thing to think about. As long as you mention both the base thread and the sub-comment, I think it could work out.)

I'm finding it fascinating to hear about the ways people host their websites. We're living in a world where professional hosting has been eaten by "the cloud": virtualized servers arguably rule, supported by tools like Docker and platforms like Amazon Web Services.

Yet personal hosting has not kept pace. Here, hosts like Dreamhost, Nearly Free Speech and (sigh) GoDaddy maintain a much older style of technology stack: virtual hosts, configured using tools like cPanel, which typically support PHP and MySQL. Geekier site owners might choose to set their site up on GitHub or S3, but these only support static page assets. Generally speaking, if you want to set up an app based on Rails, node.js or even Python, with a Postgres or NoSQL backend, you're kind of screwed if you don't have much technical knowledge, or if you only want to pay the $5 a month you'll lay down at many shared hosts.

One of the things communities like the #indieweb need to support their efforts is much better hosting. Projects like Johannes Ernst's Indie Box solve adjacent problems in innovative ways, but there's certainly a market for easy to use hosts which support a wider array of back-end technologies in a way that allows non-developers to get up and running quickly. Yes, centralized services are an important part of this solution space (if they're built in a way that is respectful to their users), but there's a self-hosted middle ground, too.