The silos did help mainstream users form communities. This is still useful—carriers of rare diseases can organize on Facebook, stuff like the ‘TomNod’ group that coordinates to scan satellite photos. On Twitter, humor and art (pixel art, for instance) communities formed that can be casually observed by other Twitter users—bolstering their exposure.

But even all this traffic has become a bad thing! For instance, there is no ‘surfing’ any more (in the mainstream). For the most part, traffic just shows up. You don’t have to look for blogs because Facebook and Twitter stuff you with whatever they please all day.

My relationship is a lot healthier with blogs that I visit when I please. This is another criticism I have with RSS as well—I don’t want my favorite music blog sending me updates every day, always in my face. I just want to go there when I am ready to listen to something new. (I also hope readers to my blog just stop by when they feel like obsessing over the Web with me.)

Google is a silo too. And I can tell you Google is part of what sucked all the fun out of Web 1.0. Facebook and Twitter were not even around. It was Google. And living under Google dominance is no fun.

This isn’t completely true—mailing lists and forums were a big source of real blog readers. Like Usenet before them. Google was a source of poor, transient traffic. In those days, you could share your writings/findings with fans of a certain band or movie director (if that was your topic) by posting on their forum, just as you would with Reddit. (And links were shared on forums and mailing lists.) However, now you can get algorithmed to death. Your link can get lost in the feed before anyone sees it.

I think the best thing the silos brought was simply the ability to be notified of a reply without needing to check your server logs.

But I appreciate your perspective, Brad. I wish I agreed more on this one! Maybe in time.

You should! I wondered if I would enjoy teaching kids or if they would drive me nuts. And they drove me nuts! But then I learned to adapt and now I just think they’re each a wonder. There have definitely been kids that I didn’t like. But then I got to know them.

I haven’t really discovered too many ‘educational’ apps—I like the form factor of the iPad and the kids use apps for filming, recording, drawing, linking to each other. We use it more like a ‘medium’ rather than a ‘subject’. I went into this job thinking that I wanted to help find a way to bring programming into the classroom—but I now feel that was misguided and arrogant. There are more important things than programming. Perhaps not in commerce—but in life, surely.

Thankyou for your questions and for the linked article. I really appreciate your sincere searching for answers and the fact that you would take the time to read and to listen is remarkable!

I’m not an expert on all grades—and I’m only three years deep into my research on the grades I specialize in, which is 1st through 3rd in the U.S. I have spent a bit of time in 4th and 5th—Chromebooks are very useful to these grades and are a step forward. (From no computer 😆.)

I have such a different perspective from articles such as Stager’s that I just don’t know where to begin! And since this is an off-handed comment, I’m not going to dig up citations—but hope to do more of that soon on my blog.

On the topic of laptops:

• Trackpads are a huge problem. Childrens’ hands get extremely tired trying to manipulate them. So an article that mentions a laptop without emphasizing a mouse—I realize this seems like a small thing, but it isn’t!
• To say a Raspberry Pi is better—I just can’t imagine. I did RPi stuff in after-school clubs but the setup and takedown is insane. And you don’t want your kids behind giant glowing tombstone-sized screens. They also are totally underpowered—they take longer to boot and get going—so it seems funny to criticize Chromebooks as not being beefy, then mention… RPi?
• To say that a Chromebook can’t fulfill Papert’s and Solomon’s list smacks as disingenuous—it’s just that there is a lot of elitism around what is proper technology. Just off the top of my head: Sphero, Twine and Voxel Builder are legit tech. Scratch and Scratch Jr. are legit—but are aging. I looked down on these, too, until I saw what kids were doing with them.

There was also a project that Linden Labs was doing on iOS called Blocksworld that was fantastic, but everyone ignored it (and their in-app purchases were awful.)

Since my focus is young kids, I feel (and the research seems to be showing more and more) that tablets are the sweetest computer at that age. A pre-reader just cannot navigate a keyboard yet. And a tablet is not a computer for mere consumption for them—armed with the right software, they will write, record, create visuals of all kinds, it totally opens them up. I hope to show more of the projects that I do with the kids because I think it will be eye-opening.

For me, the hardware issue is pretty easy at present: iPads for up to 3rd grade; Chromebooks thereafter. The more interesting discussion—the software—is where we should spend our time. And also, there is a limit to how much time you can spend with technology in the younger grades, for motor skill developmental reasons.

If I am off, I am always glad to be directed to papers I’ve missed!

I think shallow responses are kind of nice—sometimes you don’t have time to reply fully and it can be polite to just 👍. In fact, I sometimes go back to likes and flesh out the reply. So it acts like a bookmark, an ‘ack’ and a reminder to return. That’s not too shallow?

It’s the vanity metric that is the issue. It’s a similar problem with ‘friends’ lists. Usually all we see of someone’s ‘friends’ is a number. Which makes me miss blogrolls, when people took the time to say “Ok so this is Heather, she is an archivist…” and, yeah, that starts to feel like a friend.

Both likes and friend counts are also fed into algorithms and become a basis for popularity (aka ‘value’, according to these networks). But popularity stems from discussion anyway—you don’t need an algorithm, if people are talking and linking, it’ll happen. There’s a larger algorithm at play here that the networks can’t replicate.

@herself 👍!

Ooo goodie goodie. Looking forward!

I’m on the Wayback today too, reconstructing a lost site. Fellow packrats unite.

Hi, Eddie! So you syndicated this post to Indieweb.xyz and it didn’t go perfectly. I had a bug that prevented your author name from displaying. I hope to provide some better tools so you can see what’s going on when you send a Webmention.

In the meantime, the bug should be fixed. Cute cat! (Oh, and this post should +1 Jasmine on /en/cats.)

After playing with it quite a bit, it seems that—if you reply to a specific micro.blog post using a link (in this case: https://micro.blog/jd/820446), it’ll add the @-mention to the beginning if you send a Webmention. And you can also force the @-mention(s). So, if you’re mentioning several people, you’ll want to put those on—and, in that case, it’ll leave them however you have them.

Great work on your site! I also use Jekyll and have been working on a fork of the ‘jekyll-webmention_io’ plugin that adds a bunch of features. I wish Jekyll was faster—my site takes over a minute to build now. Maybe I’ve done something. I have.

I use Jekyll—a ‘staticgen’ like Hugo. I absolutely agree that it gives me flexibility. I don’t think I even realized how much until you mentioned it! I have been kind of hard on it lately, because my customizations are starting to cause me a lot of pain. And it’s just not a good way to do Indieweb things right now. I keep shopping for a new program; I think it’ll just have to do.

In a way I feel similarly about CSS—it’s pretty expressive and flexible, but it really strains when I try to do something complex with it. Actually, I just struggle to speak its language. So what you’re saying about handmade sites being ‘laborious’ is dead on. It’s rewarding when it’s done.

Oh and I really like Codepen. Here’s a prototype I built before diving in. Thank you for asking—I appreciate that.

@eli @bradenslen Thank so much for the encouragement. 😅

Ok I like that! ‘Before there was a set visual vocabulary.’ I definitely feel like the web has become extremely rigid. Blogs have coalesced into a common format. And home pages have, too—with ‘hero images’, for instance. I do miss the old styles of the web, but even more, I miss the variety. (I even feel like CSS has played a role in this. With old tables and spacer gifs, one could really concoct strange layouts. To some extent, image maps and Shockwave helped there.)

I am feeling a fresh liberation of style after having lived through the recent era of staleness. It’s like something is brewing, about to begin.

Okay. So I think I’ve sorted this out: in that long post that kept reposting, I had a link to several micro.blog posts (including one of yours). That one post was showing up as like three replies in the timeline.

For my own reference (and others that I may point here), I did this to solve it:

1. I don’t send Webmentions to any micro.blog links that are in the main text of my posts.
2. I don’t include micro.blog replies in my blog’s feed. They will only show up as duplicates, since they are already sent as Webmentions.
3. There is no need to attach an @-style username to the main text, since these are automatically added by the Webmention.

Pleasure to meet you! Well done on the hand-drawn borders on your blog. I’m not necessarily nostalgic for the 90s—I just miss handcrafted blogs and I am starting from that aesthetic, we’ll see where it goes. Your sketches are great. I love pencils (as a crossword enthusiast) and I love that your sketches are in pencil.

Oh definitely! I apologize if I’m coming across as critical - I’m kind of working in the dark here as to how one should connect with micro.blog from the outside. (How to craft replies, where Webmentions show up.) But this isn’t unusual—every blog has its quirks, its templates and conventions. There are a jillion microformats and there are Salmentions and so on. Anyway, on the contrary, I’ve enjoyed sorting out how to participate here and hope I can perhaps provide some useful stuff to you.

This entire essay is very insightful—and your whole blog has a whimsical and determined air that has me punching my ‘subscribe’ button several times to make sure it does the job.

One question I wonder: while I think the self-made entrepreneur has got to be synonymous with imperialist America—couldn’t the independent autodidact, operating apart from corporate interests, be a modern type of vanguard for the dispossessed? I feel like the Instagram influencer is more a direct descendant of The American Dream; the bespoke blog a piece of the underground press—particularly in 2018, when they have become ancient machinery.

As Chris quotes:

I write it myself, edit it myself, censor it myself, publish it myself, distribute it myself, and spend jail time for it myself.

— Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky, 1942

Perhaps the difference is that the Indieweb has had an “every person for themselves” kind of ethic. There are those who DIY and there are those who GTFO. Whereas underground presses functioned collaboratively. And maybe M.B could be an underground press if it had an editor and it sought out its sources. It feels more like a Lions Club, some casual martinis and a snapshot of the dwindling sun.

I hope that’s no condemnation. I think the underground presses had their coffee houses, which gave you a place to bump into co-conspirators.

But it’s the editor thing that I keep bumping up against on this Web—that we do need more editors, more librarians, more collaboration. We haven’t quite figured out how to organize in structures that benefit, well, all of us. That means starting with the lowest tier. If the library can make a way for books to land in the hands of prisoners, refugees, the poor—then those books can make it anywhere.

And I think this spiritual cause exists in the Indieweb when I see notes like those on Brid.gy’s FAQ entry “How much does it cost?”

Nothing! We have great day jobs, and Bridgy is small, so thanks to App Engine, it doesn’t cost much to run. We don’t need donations, promise.

I feel to inspire readers that might fall across this post—those who can fashion things and who can throw themselves into rebuilding the Web (as if it were Dresden)—to take up this same spiritual cause. To make a generous piece of this crucial public engine. (I realize that this sounds terrifically technopiliac and loathsome, maybe even in a shameful ‘tech bro’ way, but this technology is here, right here, fucking everywhere else too it turns out—so let’s try to find our way, shall we?)

I do think the Indieweb has the glimmer of real answers. But it’s a massive undertaking. But that’s okay—real answers are too.

I think the biggest problem with syndication is ensuring your stuff looks good on the other side.

This is a big problem with micro.blog for an outsider. I have no need to run my blog from there—and I don’t want to start storing some stuff on micro.blog and some stuff here. I want all my stuff on one master bookshelf. But I’ve had a hell of a time getting my Webmention replies to show up there.

For example, I have a reply that did appear on Eli’s post. But it doesn’t show up on the actual micro.blog thread.

I then signed up for an account and added my feed.json for syndication there. My reply to frankm showed up in my feed. But it wasn’t until I sent a Webmention that the post finally ended up on the thread.

I wish I didn’t have to have an account—I should be able to just Webmention a reply like any other Indieweb blog out there, right?

Indieweb.xyz – this is manual, on a post by post basis.

Sweet, this is the way to do it. I use Jekyll under the hood, so I added a field to my posts that looks like this:

syndicate: [xyz:/en/linking, twitter:kickscondor]

So I can selectively syndicate posts. Once I can get Twitter right, I’ll probably syndicate everything there, like you do.

I think one syndication service I’d like to see is one where I could syndicate to an e-mail digest that people could sign up to get weekly or monthly.

I personally don’t care about the domain thing. It’s nice to own a TLD, but I’d be happy with kicks.neocities.org. My thing is being able to reply and write on my own site so I can style it and have a place to call home.

I totally agree with this. Replies are the hardest thing to get right on the Indieweb. My replies still don’t work the way I want them to. They’re also the most rewarding part of adopting Webmentions—and I’m not sure how they can be easier. I just think we need to get to the point were blog software does it all for you.

Anyway, welcome, Kimberly! Great to see your dad’s blog. (Kimberly has a following page with nice descriptions of who is who.)

Heh, Usenet, anyone?

See, and now that I think of it—I think the Open Web is now the alt.* hierachy. While Twitter and Facebook are the Backbone Cabal. (See The Great Renaming.)

Maybe all we’re doing is going through centralizing and redecentralizing cycles here.

(The actual post is here.) Just wanted to offer some encouragement—there are a lot of folks out there blogging again. We just need to stay linked. The great thing about micro.blog is that I can leave you comments from my blog. Would be nice to have that on ‘inessential’—but I’ll be sure to follow what you’re doing there regardless.

I think evangelizing the raw Indieweb might be over at this point. The term is at least five years old.

Webmentions have not had the uptake that even pingbacks had in their time. I still think it’s possible for platforms to find some hype—like Micro.blog has seen a lot of adoption, or Aperture might draw people in.

@simonwoods I’m guilty of a ton of navel-gazey, unchecked wankery of that type, even though I initially found that part of Indieweb pretty off-putting. (And the “blogosphere” that came before it.)

It’s an unfortunate thing that we have to do so much meta-discussion to make progress. But I guess when I look around at all the decrying of social media and silo-stuffing (you know, writing posts for Reddit) going on out there, I start to wonder if maybe that energy is best put into shameful blogging about blogging. I don’t know why such an act is so much more shameful than blogging about skiing, recipes or rash prevention—but it truly, truly is.

(Oh and @eli—thank you for making an attempt to crosspost to Indieweb.xyz. Never seen one from a micro.blog and you should be good now.)

This reminds me of these “useless web” sites—this being the primary one—that have managed to stay very popular. (A lot of YouTubers make videos of themselves clicking through this site and I often see kids at school using the site.) And it’s basically a webring. But it’s not a code-based one, it’s the opposite—it’s totally curated.

(Oh, also, the fellow who does this also works on a directory of “inspiring” projects that looks great. So, this is a person who is having some success playing with curated discovery projects.)

I think computers have completely blown it with discovery. The smartest minds have all been working on this for decades now and it has been a disaster. The question to me now is just: how do we equip our librarians? And I tend to think that we don’t need anything more—our technology is totally under-utilized.

However, there is one promising development that I see from the Microcast.club directory: the self-designed cards that show big images on each entry. The directory is using the itunes:image entry in the podcast RSS feed. This is fantastic because the curator can select/filter the directory entries—but the authors can customize their cards.

I wish RSS stylesheets would have caught on so I could offer this kind of thing for the Indieweb.xyz blog directory.

The repeated use of the word nomad has conjured up a song I had forgotten: Nomad Tell Us and its repeated admonishment, “You must relate to the earthling mortal!” Haha, it’s so emblematic of reading your wiki!

My wife is a librarian, and it feels like you are doing indieweb-librarian work to me. Do you consider it part of your vocation? It feels like more than just an aesthetic experience to me.

I suppose I will get a little personal then. My aunt died over a decade ago and she was a library director on the West Coast. I still think of her all the time. But she has been gone so long that I can’t find any of her interviews or papers like I once could. I talked to her once about Ranganathan, who I had just discovered, and she talked about edge cases in categorizing books—in fact, I think I’ll start storing books in an “edge case”—and then she died and I live with the regret of never seeing that promising conversation continue.

But I kept talking to librarians after that—it sates my wish to talk to her still. I had a friend for a little while who was a librarian on Microsoft’s campus. A corporate librarian! She was fantastic to talk about books with.

Librarians are not admired in the same way that teachers are, but their work can be very important. Someone has to sift through the vast sea of words and pluck up the ones worth saving. This is becoming even more impossible today. I sometimes feel like there could be an amateur librarian’s movement—this is what I’d hoped the old Internet “surf clubs” would be—but it truly is a gift of generosity to attempt to organize the world out there. I admire your wife and these others.

If I understand correctly, there are diminishing returns in the scaling of triangles for visual modeling.

Well, I guess I thought that more triangles would only improve definition, but this is a great observation.

(Oh, comment about this conversation: we are using a type of embedded reply form here which is quickly growing deep. I wonder how else we might capture this discussion—which might go on for some time—into a large flat structure, simple to read back on, but which might keep related threads together without losing access to the original message. Or maybe these quote-and-reply forms are too restrictive, I wonder if we can sprawl out more.)

I hope that my representation becomes increasingly accurate and useful to me. Even if I fail, I hope to come closer and closer to success on this issue.

Well, here’s one question—how will you endure a drastic change? Like: what if you reverse a core tenant? Or, moreso, could you discover that you aren’t a wiki, but are a different type of information structure? Perhaps you’ve decided you are and that’s the end of it.

You are sort of bumping up against communicating with the outside. I will be interested to see how you sort this out. Your many-meg single page site is so unique and I find the opportunity to download all of it to my computer memory like the visit of an oracle—a single being, sent to deliver the collected wisdom of any query I might have.

So I am happy to communicate however you see fit, because your oracle’s purpose is to organize your thoughts, not to be a telegraph system. My organization here is the opposite: it’s designed to send dispatches to individuals. But I am going to make some small changes to have a tiny oracle as well.

I don’t think any of these things are technological problems, though. I am happy to drive to your house and ring the doorbell or go to the basement doorway and let myself in—or whatever the protocol is for you. I think that’s what’s so marvellous about your site and sites like whimsy.space.

I hope you don’t think I’m a snob. I would argue I deal with many unsavories.

I hope you’re okay being a snob! Why would that be so terrible? We all live on a giant graph paper and, speaking for myself, I really like my coordinates. You might just be snobbish about being your own type of unsavory.

There is an interesting poem I recently read called bulldyke that made me think of this. The poem itself dabbles in unsavory—are these words disgusting? Are these thoughts perverse? Is the afraid little boy lover in the poem—certainly he’s the unsavory one. (And, also, poetry—isn’t poetry just awful?)

I don’t know, but I like deciding these things. Who doesn’t? I’m a snob, too.

Like everyone else, I hate Facebook and what it has done to the Hypertext Kingdom and I will fight it valiantly and with great, upturned nostrils. But I have also used it to obsessively follow the death of Kaylee (and other children that I will write about some time) and I have depended on this awful unsavory to read their obscure stories. It has filled me with profound spiritual mayonnaisse.

I should also say that I enjoyed the recent VICE video with a girl in big Sally Jesse Raphael glasses interviewing an Incel. I felt that I really loved both of them. Not in a Jesus way; like the Double Rainbow guy, crying and marvelling over colorful semicircles. I don’t know if VICE is unsavory—I guess I wonder if all businesses are.

Perhaps the biggest worry I have is that I will think someone to be pure and unscathed and godlike—only to discover that they have touched their whole staff in all the wrong places. 😂

I’ve been thinking about a problem which you’ve probably seen a dozen answers to. I have now been asked twice for a way to push notifications of updates. I am worried that my wiki isn’t well-designed for that. I’m not entirely sure what I would push to others (my New kind of does that). I would like to know your thoughts on where I should go with this.

I am happy with how you have things. I understand how you work now. If anything, I would argue that you should continue innovating in the way you have been. That, like the single-page oracle metaphor from earlier, you will find more ways for the technology to symbolically represent you. This is paramount.

First off, re: open sourcing Indieweb.xyz—I’m driving toward that. I’m in a private repo on Github right now. But, man. It’s unnerving to open that kind of code when… it’s running live on my server. So I am trying to find the security holes before releasing it.

I don’t have big plans for Indieweb.xyz, but one thing I’m planning on adding is a way to create a whitelisted sub. You basically can make a list of URLs and those are the only URLs that can submit to the sub. Who knows, I might use Vouch for this. I just want to use something that makes it effortless.

I wonder if this might be useful for quick collaboration. Name the sub, link a bunch of websites together and then go to town, sharing stuff.

I also am creating a few themes for people who want to run their own Indieweb.xyz as well, since the one I’ve got is designed for the web at large—clearly not the arXiv crowd.

Cool ideas!

A more advanced solution also scales. Which I would argue is a bad thing!

A large super-crawler ends up taking on the Whole Web. Which leads to a massive directory. Which leads to the big players having the resources to game that directory. Drowning out the individuals again.

If there are 100,000 bloggers, then we need 100,000 blogrolls.

This is the magic of it: Google can’t compete with 100,000 blogrolls. Yes, they can aggregate them. Destroying them in the process.

So, yes, we agree on how decentralized can really give us progress. And I agree that our problems are mostly not technological, but are human problems.

(This is similar to the discussion on decentralization out there that seems to think the answer can simply be solved by new technologies. Dat and IPFS are fantastic, but we can decentralize in vastly more meaningful ways today—but we don’t. We could learn to be better human discovery engines.)

If people began to link again, to read again, to explore again. Less statistics, fewer algorithms. More curation, more editors.

Great stuff today, Brad!

Mostly, similar to what coldbrain has said, I find blogs when they are casually mentioned on a blog or comment somewhere. Stuff like blogrolls and directories and such just don’t seem to exist. I know, because I’m constantly looking for them!

Now, these things do exist in the small enclave of the Indieweb. There is the Indieweb wiki, which has links all over it. And IndieNews, Indiemap, Blog Snoop and so on. But if I’m looking for blogs and websites that are out there—it’s impossible.

If I’m looking for a specific topic, I’ll Google “quilting blog” or I’ll look on Pinboard under the tag “chess”—and see what blogs come up.

But more often than not, I really want to read someone interesting. Someone’s stories and thoughts. To find all the great writers of our time that are out there. (Most writers I know that write in the literary tradition are lost as to where they should find readers now. It’s terribly ironic when you consider all the reading that is done on the Web in this age.)

This all excites me, though! It seems that there is still a frontier on the web. There is still a chasm to cross between all of us. We have a long way to go.

And I think that’s what drew me to the Indieweb. The answer will start here, in this group, because we’re thinking about it. I think about when Ward Cunningham came out with the wiki—it seemed like such a small, pointless invention. But what a masterstroke! What will be next?

Oh and one more thought about directories: I have a theory that exploring a directory is possibly not directly the best way to discover new things. They can be big and dry and tough to get through. I think they more directly benefit the builder of the directory and, also, those listed in the directory.

The builder of the directory explores and unearths other folks. They then leak into this person’s life in a myriad of ways. (For example, I began by simply linking to you once, in pursuit of new things, but now I follow you very closely.) The initial link begets more. Knotty, twisty—here I think of Sam Ruby’s word intertwingly—vines of links around each other.

And the recipient of the link is possibly motivated to build their own directory, so as to establish (or at least to not forget) their new network. So it can be viral. Blogrolls very much experienced this.

I think the idea behind Blog Snoop is solid—I mean you’re just talking about trying to define the edges of a certain community. I’m sufficiently convinced now (between Reddit wikis and ‘awesome lists’) that directories still serve this purpose. Find The Others.

I guess part of the problem is—what is the community? Bloggers? The Indieweb? The subset of the Indieweb that wants to talk about discovery? (Search, directories, blogrolls, etc.) I think you are shooting for larger than the Indieweb—bloggers, in general, right? That operate independently? So, do Medium blogs count?

Ok, so, the usability of the directory is central. This makes sense: a directory is a practical instrument. It needs to be elegant and tight. Using a blog as a directory is very novel and very convenient—and it can work! But I think the directory itself needs to be incredibly sweet to use: full of great stuff, well-organized and fun to use, if possible. I think you have to really want to visit the directory regularly.

Google won by distilling everything down to one box. It was actually fun to use Google because you could start typing and it would try to finish your sentence for you. Which I actually think more people enjoyed for its novelty than its usefulness. And it was useful, too!

So a few starter suggestions:

• The whole tag cloud is off to the side, as if it’s not important.
• I can’t see some of the words in the tag cloud, they are too small.
• The biggest words in the tag cloud are words like “General” and “Internet” which are almost non-categories because they apply to all blogs.
• It’s not clear how to submit my own blog unless I dig. People should really be encouraged to participate.
• The text is large, so lots of scrolling is involved. I think this is what the ‘awesome lists’ are doing right. It’s also what Chris Aldrich is doing so well with his blogroll.
• A dense list, like the one Chris has, also feels more active, for some reason.
• The thing you are doing perfectly, though, is the care in the descriptions. This is actually the most important thing once the directory is usable—and you have that already.

I am working on a personal directory right now, so my attention is there. But maybe if we keep talking about this, we can figure it out. Don’t give up—just keep talking and refining.

You’ve actually given me a great idea (I think it might be ‘great’, who knows) for Indieweb.xyz. I think I’m going to make a directory of the sites that submit to it. And it will also show the sub (‘tag’) that they most commonly submit to. It would be a simple change and might help me gradually collect links to blogs that I can go through over time.

Good luck, Brad! These tiny efforts may seem small in the face of massive social empires out there, but I think there are many people who are (or will) participate if they can just be found.

Ok, here we go. Hello my friend.

It is a real surprise to get a note from you. Frankly, I’m blown away by what you’re doing—and I felt that you were deeply embedded somewhere in your wiki, not exactly reaching out to pass notes. But I’m so glad.

The representation you’ve chosen for yourself is no illusion. If all I see of someone is pictures and quips, the image of that person is just a bit of shattered glass. But one thousand words cannot lie. They may be untrue, but they divulge so many more triangles to build that person with.

I am reluctant to say that even a verbose persona can ever be accurate, though. We start to believe that these pixels are us. I think they are just a good show. We are always in public here. And our souls know it.

I do look forward to the good show you have going. (Likewise: to you out there reading—hark, reader!—we are looking for you. Please read h0p3’s Find the Others as proof.)

I like what you are doing; my quest differs. I’m not looking for an ennobled species of thinker. I don’t want to avoid the unsavories. I am looking for Anyone. This is not right—there are plenty of Anyone’s around, aren’t there? Well, I am wanting to fall into fate, rather than to find only my most meaningful bosom friend. I want to travel down the river and stop at all the places that happen to be there along the way. And maybe a friend will crop up. Strange things, images and tales, too.

I am sold on it myself. I know I can communicate who I am, what I’m thinking, etc. with very low friction on my own medium-turf. My message integrates well into my identity when I use my own tools.

Yes, well, this is quite stunning actually. There is a sense on your wiki of a full use of hypertext that I haven’t seen before. It is the complexity of your organization and nomenclature. It is somehow still inviting. You have made a journal that is a vast puzzle.

I have been working, privately, on a directory of the web from a certain vantage. (I don’t know that my role is to journal; more, to explore out there.) And I think the real key that has been missing—from directories, wikis and engines—is artistry. To make it beautiful and elegant. Your work is a brilliant stone in that respect. Anyway, (hark, reader,) I’ll stop there.

Well, this will be fruitful. Feel no pressure to find some technology to make a connection with me. Climb down. We can link just fine.

Well, I think this is why I really like Webmentions as an expression of intention. In order to send one, you need to have your own blog. And you need to link back to the post. (AND, technically, you need your post laid out with microformats!)

This acts as a kind of wall around the garden. It acts like a gate. If you’ve got the code, you can get in. But likely you’re going to move on. There are just so many other places to harass and cause mischief on the web today. (Contrast with the massive silo gardens—if you are a member, you have all access to everyone there.)

I think a great benefit of social media could be that it provides an outlet for the masses so that careful enclaves can still be formed on the open web. I mean, look, there will always be bad actors in a group—groups seem to have a half-life where they grow too big and destabilize, the birth of a whole new era of drama and rage.

As for discovery, I think every blog needs a list of links to other blogs in their community. It’s like your friend list, but can be so much better than that. I want to read what you’re thinking, but I also want to know where else the discussion is happening.

Webrings are opaque; I can’t see where I’m headed. But a link list (blogroll, whatever) is like a gift.

Oh, yes, I had this happen. I was at a taco shack and the song came on. And I ate that taco very slow. I thought it was the full realization of the Bee Gees sound—which I hadn’t ever really ever appreciated before. I probably put in three months of that song.

Do they have other great ones?

Ok, yeah—this will be essential. I wonder if I can use the page’s title tag for this? Like: save the title tag the first time I check the site. Because it’s much less rare for the title tag to change than the body text.

I like the idea of the webring code. I just don’t have any influence on some of the sites that I am linking to. But yeah: mixing webrings and Indieweb.xyz is interesting.

As for the size of a directory (or webring), that is such a big problem on the Web. They need to have upper limits, for sure. If it gets too big, it feels (and does become) unusable. If it’s too large, then nothing in it is special. Like with these “awesome lists”—you are led to believe that the list is a severe abridgement, because the links in it are truly impressive.

With webrings, someone is special by virtue of discovering the ring first. So I can see closing admittance. I’m not that into webrings because it’s a pretty fragile link between all parties.

I’d like linking to take some effort, which also limits the amount of links you can have and makes them more potent.

Thanks for the ideas! Great stuff.

So, perhaps tags (or subreddit-style categories) are good for initial categorization and then a more detailed hierarchy is good for a competent editor. I also wonder: how did you track expired links? Changed links? Would you indicate that a story got an update?

Reddit has done a similar thing with wikis. By giving each subreddit a wiki, many are able to arrange a heirarchical directory of links. I guess I’m wondering if a wiki is a suitable replacement for a directory. Or if the only difference is having a crawler attached. (Which is a formidable difference.)

An idea I’ve had with Indieweb.xyz is to have users submit a finer-grained category using the u-category class. So they could submit:

<a href="https://indieweb.xyz/en/startrek" class="u-syndication u-category">
  xyz/startrek: Photos: DS9: Nog</a>

And it would place it in the permanent hierarchical directory (which crawls links to keep them fresh.) It feels like some moderation would be needed. But I am trying to stay away from that.

I appreciate your thoughtful replies. I am starting to both see how directories are present in our modern incarnation of the Web and desire some innovation for them.

Neat blog! It’s good to see so much longform blogging (like yours) still happening.

Well, yeah, I’m not sure how many bloggers like to spend time designing their blog. And if it’s all about the writing and communication for you—that makes sense! I don’t think it all needs to be organized and pretty, neither was the Old Web.

For me, I want to draw you to my blog where the post layout is preserved and you can feel like you’re visiting my little letterpress. To that end: thanks for saying hi!

So, with Horror Fiction, how do you decide how to rank things? PageRank clearly benefits all of the incumbents. I’m sure recency was important—people want to announce their new stories and articles and reviews. I’m sure people want to find lists of the most beloved stories. But I’m sure topic was important too: demonic possessions, monsters, mannequins. Although there might be spoilers in that kind of designation.

The ability to follow authors has got to be paramount in a community like that. So it would make sense for that kind of community to congregate in the Indieweb. Authors would post on blogs. (But don’t they usually post on wikis?) And then they ping the directory when they have new material.

Indieweb.xyz doesn’t have a crawler, but it does fetch the page and parse it and use its metadata. In a way, it works like a crawler where pages are submitted one by one. Even Reddit is a kind of crawler, performed by humans. So the crawler question is one of: how much do we need to go out and find random stuff unprompted?

Well, and the crawler would be useful for finding stuff outside the Indieweb. Unstructured, mostly undiscovered stuff. But the Indieweb’s insistence on structure has the benefit of weeding out spam. (For now.)

So, yes, I agree, directory + crawler. The next question is: have tags worked for discovery? (Good subreddits are just permanent, high-value hashtags.) Or can hierarchical directories still find a place?

Interestingly enough, I think two of the best hierarchical directories out there are eBay and Craigslist. And both are self-categorized! I wonder what they do to solve miscategorization.

Fantastic. Yes! This is exactly the problem. It’s very difficult for a new participant to make headway because they simply get lost in the pile.

I think all of these approaches need to be reconsidered just like you’re doing, but I want to focus on directories—which are still very much in vogue, but are unrecognizable when compared to the old Yahoo. The big directories these days are Reddit and Pinterest. (And Wikipedia, like you say.) Delicious was one of these too. They are directories because they are topic-based catalogs of thought.

Niche directories exist in the form of stuff like Pinboard, Hacker News, Lobste.rs and so on. So, Hacker News acts basically like a directory of thought for its community. And the users there spend their time pruning and curating this directory.

All of these directories struggle with a sort of memory failure—no one really plumbs the archives of these sites—but that makes perfect sense given that the focus is on absolute recency. Part of the spectacular failure of Yahoo-style directories was due to no sense of recency (a heartbeat) on all those links.

The nice thing about Yahoo was that you could categorize yourself. Reddit, Pinterest, Pinboard—you have to wait for someone else to find you.

To your point about filter blogs: I think there used to be an answer here. It used to be that for topic-based technology blogs, much of their grassroots content came from mailing lists. Mailing lists used to be the primary announcement system for software. (If you look at technology blogs, they are much more commercial now.) So the mailing lists acted like a completely open submission system where you could safely self-promote. And then blogs skimmed their favorite stuff out of these. (IRC and web forums also acted as support systems here.)

So here’s what I’d like to see in a directory:

1. Allows self-promotion. No one wants to leave a software (or fan art, essays, open question) announcement to their lonely blog. You want to push it out to the relevant community yourself.
2. Sorting isn’t driven by upvotes or algorithms. You shouldn’t need to have to figure out how to game the system. Yes, these algorithms help prevent spam. But they enable clickbait!
3. Drives users to the blogs themselves. Reddit isn’t just a directory—writers post their thoughts directly on Reddit. But those writers aren’t given all the tools. First off, the posts are limited in their layout. But also, they aren’t given syndication and identity tools like blogs have.
4. Personal views of the directory. Right now it seems that we have this idea that our moderators should have the power to decide who’s in and who’s out. But this was never true of mailing lists. I still like the idea of killfiles. You block the specific users and blogs that drive you nuts.

I am trying to accomplish some of this with my directory Indieweb.xyz, but I’m also not sure it will all work due to self-promotion having problems of its own—in addition to being a dirty word on its own.

At any rate, wonderful post. Thankyou!