I fall right in line with h0p3’s main comments here. He’s the daddy of this.

One of the things that I have found, in practice, is that human curation and human moderation seems to be at the heart of what we have to do. You can give me as many automated tools as you want, but I’m still the one that has to choose what’s going to go in my wiki and how I’m going to authorize other users to modify it.

He then talks about keeping the master record for Hypertext 2020.

I do it by hand. And I like that I get to do it by hand, because there’s a lot of scenarios in which I am not even sure how to automate it. So it’s best to do it manually.

I think this is one of the best messages for the Indieweb community to hear, because there are more and more protocols cropping up as part of the Indieweb suite. But Hypertext 2020 was a big realization for me that Webmentions are often not necessary and may even limit the scope of our conversations.

What’s more: I have a suspicion that people retreat into protocol work to escape from the human work that must be done. And there’s no getting around it: we should learn to better work in this medium and we are really resisting having to confront it. (I see Twitter and Facebook and such as poor tools and as mere escapes from the work that could be done.)

What if the Indieweb is not Webmentions? What if it is simply the work of reading and writing to each other?

I initially found Hibs’ comment about seeing a ‘macro view’ of the Web off-putting at first - but I think that she did good work explaining it and I think she has a great point! Her thought (around the 2hr mark) is that aggregrators like Indieweb.xyz, as they become flooded with input, become less useful at the micro level and become more useful at the macro level.

What I find off-putting is that this macro view is often used to discover trends or something. (Which is stupid to me.) But her comparison to Every Noise at Once clarifies it.

I think the macro view can be useful to discover new pockets of activity - and therefore to discover new people at the micro level. In fact, unless you are capable of forming a macro view - and of having many subgroups within an aggregator - I think it’s possible that you can’t really discover! Because if you’re only ‘discovering’ within a micro level, well, maybe you’re at a level where everything is already adjacent.

These are my really poorly written thoughts. But I think her point opened my mind a lot and I appreciate that.

h0p3 has a killer quote at 2:19:30:

I see the wiki as a story-telling device that reuses older stories to reconstruct new ones; if it is a memory palace or garden, it’s an evolving one, toward externalizing the relationship between our sensibilities and cognition (for the sake of something else). We are the kinds of creatures that tell ourselves the stories of ourselves and our Phenomenology. I want to speak to automated versions of myself (even for autosuggestions, dialectical argumentation, exploring the world) and to use those kinds of tools to pick out what is salient on the web.

He then goes on to talk about using ‘gunky’ tags to create hierarchies. (Aka ‘directories’ - and, again, I’m seeing how directories too mesh the macro/micro views for discovery purposes.)

I’m just so with him: our work is to use woefully inadequate (but flexible enough) tools - think of how TiddlyWiki, Webmentions, hypertext, it could all be so much better technologically - but these straightforward ‘gunky’ tools leave enough room for personal human work - to cobble together our own systems to map our stories onto.

And I do think that part of the problem with so many of our modern tools is that they do too much work perhaps! Such that they leave no room for personal work. (In other words, as h0p3 puts it: “the heart of what we have to do.”)

I like Chris’ point about Stonehenge being the first wiki. It’s not that it’s a kind of left-field observation. I think that we understand better the work we do now by realizing that Stonehenge wasn’t just a work of art or an artifact for them - it hadn’t achieved that status while it was coming together.

Just as philosopher.life is still coming together and even h0p3 doesn’t know what it is yet - sure you can describe it as art or as an interesting artifact - but I think that it’s actually more about a human projecting oneself into this beautiful object that can be immortal in a way that a person cannot.

I also got into going through some of the lesser-known designers in this list and found myself in some unexpected places.

• This list of games previously printed in Tabletop Gaming Magazine - many by Anna Blackwell - were pretty interesting. I think there is a neat idea in The New Gods of Babel, a Jenga/Minecraft hybrid by Brian Molina.
• Juegos Roll & Write - many of these print-and-play games are ‘roll & write’ games - in the vein of Yahtzee.^[5] This colorful collection by Sergi Sanchez Labrador is just fun to look through.
• Rolling Realms is by a very popular publisher (Stonemaier Games of Scythe and Wingspan fame) but this game was designed just as something to do during the pandemic and it’s been a group effort with their fans - see the comments on that page.
• Cat Sudoku LIVE by Ta-Te Wu.
• Also branched off into this directory, particularly the games of Douglas Ramsey, such as 30 Rails and Birdsong.

Truly nothing beats directories when it comes to discovery. You can find yourself tunneling all around the Internet. The most important part is to have contributors who are in a variety of places across the graph - and to find ways to shape it that are able to highlight all the starting points without allowing any of them to take over.

No, wait—sorry. Not through ‘any’ means. For example, using subterfuge will often backfire. It is a dangerous technique, innit? Say I hired a bunch of eager fellas to go on news sites and forums, to bring up ‘Kicks Condor’—to link to me, fawn about me, endlessly recontextualize me—this is what is happening to you, this is why you are here, you are entrapped in my game—the unique ‘Kicks Condor’ brand with its iconic sign on a pixel chair. Have you heard? He’s rumbling up—he’s ascendant. There is a certain measurable mindshare now emerging on the flatscreens. Why, it’s more dazzling and varied than I myself had previously dictated to my personal autonomous pocket assistant! (Can this be happening to me??) Look at the pixel chair. You’ll see it again soon.

Question: does gaming the algorithm undermine the algorithm? Or is it the point of the algorithm? I’m asking all of you out there—is the algorithm designed to continue feeding us the same narrative that we are already upvoting? Or can the upvotes trend away?

Or are the upvotes just bullets in some game of Fortnite where Satya Nadella is spraying us from high above with his army of toadies that have spammed the server so that he is not just one squad—but all the squads logged in—at least for the next two minutes? Until Eric Schmidt logs on and mows down all the independent links running for cover?

I’m not sure if I can say that they are manipulating the feed—but having spent some time on the ‘new’ page, it only takes about three votes to push something toward the front page. If you have ten people doing this, then you are gaming the algo. Hobbyists won’t have this kind of paid workforce. And it’s interesting how openly he discusses molding that community as if it’s his medium.

THE ‘GO BACK…’ LINK FALLS TO THE FLOOR. IT WILL SERVE AS A FINE MORSEL FOR THE VIRTUAL VERMIN. SUCH IS THE BITTER SWEET LIFECYCLE OF A WEBSITE.

Related: an actual Mackerel Media Digital Marketing.

The meandering essays on pop culture and animal observations - they feel reminiscent of Unimaginable Heights, such as this one on ‘yellow shows’:

There are some TV Shows that I consider to be yellow shows. Yellow shows aren’t necessarily yellow in color but they are definitely yellow in feeling and spirit. For example, Sabrina the Teenage Witch is a yellow show. Actually most shows that star Melissa Joan Hart are yellow shows even though she really doesn’t seem like an overly yellow person.

Yellow shows are all very mindless and watchable. They are upbeat, use non-funny humor, and are non-offensive.

The expression ‘non-funny humor’ is for keeps.

She goes on to explain how ‘yellow’ television could be generated by neural networks.

The hosts don’t always have to be human either. The host can be generated according to what the viewer finds the most soothing or most horrible. For example, I would choose a house cat to host a show like House Hunters. I could choose the location of the hunt which could be based on an actual place or an invented environment. If I want to look at homes near the fracking trash water in Denton, TX, hosted by Donna Dresch, I can submit that info into the program. Because the results would be so terrifying, I’m beginning to think that these wouldn’t necessarily be yellow shows. More like yellow with red stripes shows. Forget everything I’ve ever said.

This is amazing! I could have myself be the host as well as the guests. Me helping me build a condo in the Dakota plains. I would have to be patient with myself through that arduous fireplace selection phase. And Sherlock could show up and the character Deuces from the book Clone Codes.

There is also a page of Microsoft Excel art. She also offers to send an mp3 to anyone who emails her. Seems like a great way to stock up on free mp3s.

In a way, this site feels like an ad-hoc wiki. I like the concept. Throw HTML files in some frames and you can just begin to build a collection from there. (Although the frames are divs - you could do this whole site as a single page. I like that it is PHP, however - which stirs up fond feelings of the late 2000s.)

Where I’m at the world pivoted extremely fast on Thursday. Now is an extremely good time to keep blogging and record your memories of the day-by-day. I’m digging into my neighborhood right now, but hope to be around a bit more to pass links and keep the lights on in our corner of the Web. I am in love with the crowd here - all you that I’ve had a chance to meet and hypertext with. Worried about you, of course. But I have no lack of confidence at the moment that you’ll come out of this stronger than before.

Along the lines of Marc’s livestream, I’ve noticed some other links to cancelled live tours/festivals that are importing on to the Web:

• Social Distancing Festival: this is a directory of actors, dancers, artists of any kind who are doing upcoming livestreams along the lines of the above. I feel some disgust at having to drop the term ‘social distancing’ - ain’t nothing social about it - but it’s turning into a solid directory. Would like to see more niche styles do this.

• #sunshinesongs on Instagram. High school kids are posting their home recordings of songs they got down for now-cancelled musical productions. I personally enjoy watching amateur musicals on YouTube, love this stuff.

• /r/togetherathome, a subreddit collecting these kind of events.

• I also think it’s interesting that Mo Willems is doing a daily doodle stream for kids, but I just think it fails because it doesn’t take calls. It would be cool for kids to hear from each other and get a chance to talk in all of this.

I’m using the homejazz sub on Indieweb.xyz to catalog what I can find.