The biggest reason personal blogs need to make a comeback is a simple one: we should all be in control of our own platforms.
If what is happening on Twitter hasnât demonstrated it, our relationship with these social media platforms is tenuous at best. The thing we are using to build our popularity today could very well be destroyed and disappear from the internet tomorrow, and then what?
You know what the one big valid criticism is of all this “write on your own site, not on walled social media sites” is? It’s boring. It’s not very social feeling. You’re “talking into the void,” as someone recently put it to me.
But IndieWeb never said “don’t participate in social media.” In fact, it’s the opposite. They say participate everywhere you want to, just make your own site the canonical hub.
As for me, I really need to learn more about ActivityPub and Web Mentions. I’ve got the WordPress plugin installed and activated/set up on this site, I just don’t really get it yet. What I’d like is that conversation about anything I post here gets consolidated into essentially the comments section beneath each post. And that if I comment-via-blogging about someone else’s posts, it makes its way there. That feels like it could really up the fun-level.
I need to look at ActivityPub next too.
Def agree that WebMentions pacifies the vibes of posting into the abyss while also making the page feel more fun and alive.
I am building in my website a “microblog” area. I’ll keep writing long articles as posts but links, snippets, quotes, photos and YouTube videos I like will be in this microblog area, like Tumblr.
ActivityPub kind of does that already. If you comment on a site’s post on Mastodon it is created as a comment on the site as well.
By “site,” do you mean web site? Or Mastodon account? Got an example handy? A few unusual web sites support ActivityPub natively, and there are other approaches like the WordPress ActivityPub plugin and my own https://fed.brid.gy/, but otherwise, that’s not built into Mastodon or any other AP services that I know of.
Yeah, I have to figure this out as well. Just set up a custom post type that only accepts a description, and auto-posts to the socials using Buffer, but would love to go full IndieWeb POSSE at some point too.
If you figure it out, would love to hear a post about it.
I want to learn more about ActivityPub myself because I need to move to a new CMS, and I want to do so with a platform that is actively contributing and integrated into the fediverse.
I feel contractually obliged to link to a post like âBring back personal bloggingâ chriscoyier.net/2023/01/05/i-fâŚ
I’ve been meaning to look into Web Mentions as well. But, one thing that was odd when looking at Web Mentions on someone else’ site that used them is that I would click through to the “people who liked this post”, and like of them brought me to profiles on Twitter that no longer exist. I guess that’s no different that someone commenting with a “Website” that doesn’t exist in the future. But, just wasn’t something that I expected to see.
I’m down with that!
Webmention is the coolest social networking implementation that next to nobody uses. The novelty of being able to comment on another person’s website directly from my own hasn’t worn off, but the fun diminished pretty quickly after finding that hardly anyone supports it. Creating and sending mentions is also a bit tedious for those of us who need to do it manually.
Its funny that I did write much less during the last years because of “talking into the void” syndrome and at the same time felt huge pressure to put out super polished content.
Wrote a bit about setting up inspired by Adam moji.blog/article/webmenâŚ
Next is FE display of mentions
Some one nice here
The problem with personal blogs is that you get less audience through discovery channels, hence, we need to also bring back Web Rings.
I’m with you regarding the word “blogging”. I love it and feel nostalgic about it, but it has so much baggage and is quite limited in some fundamental ways that things like ActivityPub can fix. E.g., the UX for following and subscribing to blogs, reposting content, liking content, etc. etc. We needed centralised intermediary tools (like Google Reader) to get all that stuff, and that is a huge vulnerability.
So I’m happy to rebrand blogging as “feeds”. You have your site and you publish and consume feeds. You can subscribe to feeds. You can share others’ posts. The focus becomes your site (not your blog) and your feeds. The feels very webby. I think that will help stimulate a creative renaissance in what a personal site can be; we won’t be tied to the blog format, but we will still be able to publish and consume and remix feeds. Exciting times. Remember when mashups* were all the rage? Hope WordPress and other CMSs make it easy for people to do this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid)
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“What Iâd like is that conversation about anything I post here gets consolidated into essentially the comments section beneath each post.”
Amen! For conversation on silos (eg Twitter) and in the fediverse, this is exactly what https://brid.gy/ tries to accomplish. You’re already signed up, but it looks like you don’t have the Semantic Linkbacks plugin installed, so the Bridgy responses are totally opaque. Try installing that plugin too!
(And yes, having two separate plugins is awkward and unnecessary. They’re working on merging them!)
I had it installed for a while. At one point I think I had like 5 fediverse-releated plugins installed, and was using Brid.gy, and it was just feeling too messy and untenable for me. I’m sure I’ll try again someday, but I wasn’t getting enough value out of it for the technical debt.