Reading list
Shortform reading
This is an incomplete list of the shortform reading (and listening and watching) I’ve been doing lately.
Networked publishing, native analytics, and $100M earned by indie publishers
What we see in our websites (and why I am so excited about the web)
With every personal website made, every web page published, every story told, every experiment embarked on, we can expand the aperture of the web. We can introduce people to its potential. We can expand the potential of the web, too.
I got an email from a guy who doesn't understand why I'd run a website without trying to monetize it. My response became a manifesto. Oops.
Some weeks ago, I quietly shipped a new content type on A Working Library, such that I am now writing short, social-shaped posts on my site and then sending them off to the various platforms. This is not a novel mode of publishing, but rather one borrowed and adapted from the POSSE model (“publish on your site, syndicate elsewhere”) developed by the IndieWeb community. While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context. Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.
But there is a problem across certain quarters of the IndieWeb stemming from what I think is internalised behaviour learned from continuous exposure to the mores of Corporate America.
If you can’t find certain types of content in the curated collections of links on IndieWeb sites because the curators have adopted wholesale the corporate rules of “what is allowed" then the IndieWeb is just going to be a pallid reflection of the CorporateWeb, but with far less clout.
Has the IndieWeb become discourse again?
And to me, this is actually what “being IndieWeb” or “doing IndieWeb” is about: using the web in ways that fit your wants and needs, being mindful of when (and to whom) you give up control over your stuff and your connections.
Figuring out how you want to use the web is a daunting task, to say the least! The IndieWeb wiki is full of interesting examples and ideas - but as a logbook of ways of using the web, it can be inscrutable. It was never intended that every way of using the web would be suitable for everyone.
Has the IndieWeb Become Irrelevant?
I've come to think of the IndieWeb as an attempt to compromise with corporate silos and their imitators.
I prefer discussion in open web (their blog)
I have a bias towards discussion in the open that I know probably most people don’t agree on. Many like to keep the discussions in small circles and behind closed doors. And there definitely are topics where I like to do that as well, especially very personal ones.
In Make ripples through time and space by writing, under heading “From small private circles to the collective knowledge base”, I wrote about how I prefer questions in work context being asked in open channels rather than DMs where they only benefit the individuals in question.
An alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was like to build this site from scratch
So now I have this space I built for me. A place I can feel proud of because I made it. A place that represents me and the way I want to present myself to the world.
A place for my voice to shine through. A real home.
#blogging · #digital-sovereignty · #indieweb · #programming · #web