Tag: IndieWeb

Choosing my pace by shaping my thinking spaces (Part 5)

Post author By Tracy Durnell
Post date February 23, 2025
7 Comments on Choosing my pace by shaping my thinking spaces (Part 5)
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This is part five of a series on tackling wants, managing my media diet, and finding enough. Each post stands alone, so you don’t have to read them all. Read the introduction on “the mindset of more.”

Too much info, too fast

Information has a near-physicality to it — we feel the emotional force of content. Although the same volume of information is coming into my feed reader as always, the intensity of the content of late has made it feel like too much. The perceived speed of my intellectual spaces has increased because so much of the information I’m exposed to is emotionally distressing. And going too fast for too long makes me tired — mentally and physically. As someone prone to anxiety, I need to be conscious of how my body internalizes what I’m reading.

We feel the emotional intensity of what we read from a feed as speed because it seems that a large number of consequential things have happened to us in a short span of time. Caitlin Dewey frames it as being deluged:

[W]hen it comes to political news… I sometimes feel like I’m standing at the base of some fucked-up virtual waterfall, with thousands of gallons of dense, icy water pounding down ceaselessly on my head.

Our bodies translate our online emotional experiences into physical realities; our bodies react to what happens in virtual spaces the same way they react in physical spaces, releasing stress hormones and raising our heart rate and blood pressure although we’re sitting still. Chronic stress is terrible for our health. But we wouldn’t spend so much time online if it was only bad – we also receive mental rewards from gathering information.

I don’t think withdrawing from information altogether is the answer, but I wonder whether we can reclaim some agency by changing the places and ways we’re exposed to information — by controlling our perceived intellectual pace.

Our intellectual pace is influenced by:

the total amount of information we’re exposed to,
how much of it we actually consume,
the information’s emotional intensity,
the place we’re consuming it, and
whether we feel we can do anything about it.

Tags agency, balance, bodies, control, FOMO, indie web, IndieWeb, letting go, media diet, open web, overwhelm, pacing, place, Ray Bradbury, slow living, social media, spaces, speed, willpower

Featured Relationships Technology The Internet Websites

Sanding off friction from indie web connection

Post author By Tracy Durnell
Post date January 9, 2025
18 Comments on Sanding off friction from indie web connection
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Add friction to the activities you’d like to change, and remove friction from the things you’d like to do more of. This is usually applied at a personal level, but we can think of it across communities, too: Where is there friction in our community that blocks people from participating in the ways we’d like?

This is followup to “The IndieWeb’s next stage?” as well as my entry for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, hosted by Venkatram Harish Belvadi on the theme of friction.

Tags challenge, community, conversation, feelings, indie web, IndieWeb, safety, tools, Webmention

Websites Writing

Gift to the indie web: I will edit your blog post

Post author By Tracy Durnell
Post date December 1, 2024
12 Comments on Gift to the indie web: I will edit your blog post
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Do you have a blog post you’re stuck on or want feedback on? As a gift to the indie web community, I am offering to provide a developmental edit for up to five bloggers this December.

Tags blogging, community, critique, editing, gifts, indie web, IndieWeb

Society Websites

Social norms of the IndieWeb: followup from Homebrew Website Club

Post author By Tracy Durnell
Post date May 18, 2024
7 Comments on Social norms of the IndieWeb: followup from Homebrew Website Club
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Questions and followup thoughts from today’s Bonus Homebrew Website Club on the social norms of the IndieWeb. Notes here.

Social norms across platforms and between communities

There are different social norms within different communities on different platforms — how much do the community members shape its norms versus the platform and its affordances? E.g. are the norms for food Instagrammers more similar to another Instagram community or to the norms of food TikTokkers? How much do communities — and their social norms — cross platforms? I would guess that the norms I’d use with any individual are based on what shared community I perceive us to have, whether that is primarily IndieWeb or writing or what have you. (Do you find that you interact with the same person the same way on their blog versus on Mastodon / micro.blog?)

If our personal websites draw in people from multiple communities — and different platforms by pulling in comments from POSSEd posts — we’re potentially creating a muddle of social norms and expectations for readers. What seems appropriate on one platform may be out of bounds on another, but by drawing back in those comments we’re mingling those slightly different cultures. (Are our websites the port cities of the internet? 😂) One way I’ve seen people try to address the risk of context collapse from work being shared broadly is through stating assumed audiences — can this also cue readers to the appropriate social norms to follow (by helping new readers especially position the writer in the appropriate shared community)?

We talk about the blogosphere as a single thing sometimes, but there are many, many communities inside blogging: book reviewers, crafters, coders, interior designers, recipe writers, personal finance / FIRE bloggers, and lifestyle bloggers, to name a few I happen to have encountered. They may have brought along that community’s existing social norms from interacting in other places. When we’re talking about social norms of the IndieWeb, versus these other communities (which are part of the lowercase indie web), I think we’re talking about people with personal websites that represent them rather than a topic (although many in the community write mainly, or only, about technology). <– help me out here? 😂

Tags blogging, communication, community, event, identity, indie web, IndieWeb, social media, social norms

Featured Future Building The Internet Websites

The IndieWeb’s next stage?

Post author By Tracy Durnell
Post date May 17, 2024
23 Comments on The IndieWeb’s next stage?
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I think two main groups of people are drawn to the IndieWeb:

technical people who want to control their web experience, and
people who admire the vision on the homepage: “The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”.“

(And some are in both.) You can probably guess that I’m in the latter group 😉

Over its first decade-plus, the IndieWeb community has done a great job developing protocols and experimenting with a wide range of tools to accomplish many online activities. The wiki is a rich resource for DIYers, and the availability of the chat for people to ask technical questions is fantastic. Regular Homebrew Website Club events offer a way to connect directly with other website owners. The W3C has adopted the Webmention protocol. In this sense, the IndieWeb is already a smashing success.

I also think we could be more, if we wanted.

Tags communication, indie web, IndieWeb, tools, vision

Culture Health Social

Reply to gRegor: COVID safety at events

Post author By Tracy Durnell
Post date May 13, 2024
2 Comments on Reply to gRegor: COVID safety at events
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Replied to More on Health and Safety by gRegor Love (gregorlove.com)

There’s an IndieWeb event in Düsseldorf this weekend, so I’ve been thinking about event health and safety policies again. I think there are two important aspects when it comes to these policies: 1) They should be in place well before the event and communicated clearly in key places… 2) They should consist of more than *only* recommendations.

👏 I appreciate the work you’ve done on this gRegor! I know I’m unlikely to attend any in-person event soon, in part due to not traveling and in part from worry over event logistics, so I haven’t bothered to get into the details of what would make me feel safe to attend. I worried that I’d feel obligated to attend out of guilt if organizers went to the extra effort to make it meet my needs. But since you’ve been brave enough to share your thoughts, I’ll second them.

Tags code of conduct, COVID, event, gathering, IndieWeb, masking, policy, safety

Meta Relationships Technology Websites

Adding a heart reacji to my WordPress theme

Post author By Tracy Durnell
Post date April 26, 2024
13 Comments on Adding a heart reacji to my WordPress theme
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The Open Heart Protocol is a simple way to add anonymous reactions to your blog, developed by Mu-An Chiou. (I’ll say simple, with the help of Benji — my eyes glossed over at the actual protocol page, short though it may be.) I added it to my site this week, so anyone can “heart” a post. Benji set up some other emoji options but I’m going to keep it simple for now and start with only a heart.

This came out of the conversation the IndieWeb’s been having about casual interactions. The Open Heart Protocol adds an easy option for readers to react to a post without having to comment or send a Webmention*. I like when other people’s websites have similar functionality — sometimes I don’t have a response so it’s nice when there’s another means to show appreciation.

On social media, likes and reactions can influence people to post differently, seeking reactions. I doubt that adding this heart feature will make me feel any pressure since I don’t get a notification — I’ll just notice it the next time I go back to that post, which could be the next day or months later. I write often enough and about such a broad range of topics, I’d naturally expect some to be more interesting to other people, and not getting anonymous likes on a post I wrote for myself isn’t going to deter me from writing more things for myself. The indie web is also small enough that I’ve been trained not to expect a ton of feedback on anything I publish here.

Since leaving a heart is anonymous, there’s no social pressure for any reader to “be seen” liking something. In that sense it’s not a two-way “relationship building” feature, but not everything needs to be. We can be friendly strangers — driving, we’ve got the courtesy wave, online, we have reacjis 😄

Tags connection, how to, indie web, IndieWeb, tool, Webmention, wordpress

Activism Featured Future Building The Internet

“Webbing” the IndieWeb

Human Protocols by Chris

In summary, the IndieWeb will thrive because of the human protocols we develop by using it. We don’t need a central standards body to define those protocols. Instead, we will refine them through continuous conversations with ourselves.

Let’s keep talking about it 👏 I think the next phase of the IndieWeb is developing clearer social norms. This is also a great way to engage non-technical community members!

A thought from Jacky:

But I sorely wish the “Web” part of the “IndieWeb”, in the sense of building collective tools that lift all the boats instead of individual yachts being propelled, were something that was focused on more and not left to the rest of the world to just “adopt”.

Ghost is federating:

ActivityPub is a lot like email, and Ghost already supports email subscriptions. This means we can use the same interface to support both. Your audience enters whatever address they’re used to subscribing to things with, and Ghost figures out the rest.

This allows your readers to choose how they would prefer to subscribe, and your work to reach farther and wider when you publish.

Tags blogging, collaboration, community, connection, experimentation, indie web, IndieWeb, reading, social norms, tools

Future Building Society The Internet

Rewilding for resilience

Replied to We Need to Rewild the Internet (noemamag.com)

Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists know something just as important, too; how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control.

Taken together, the enclosure of infrastructure and imposition of technology monoculture forecloses our futures.

As a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day.

Rewilding is a work in progress. It’s not about trying to revert ecosystems to a mythical Eden. Instead, rewilders seek to rebuild resilience by restoring autonomous natural processes and letting them operate at scale to generate complexity.

I’m reading this and thinking we need to rewild culture and society, not just the Internet. Consolidation is no more healthy for the movie industry than it is for tech. Culture is bound up with the Internet, but both the infrastructure side, which this article focuses on, and the policy side around moderation and data control, are important to adapt. The IndieWeb has a role to play in rewilding the Internet, which is part of what I like about the movement.

I see these three concepts arise often lately in conversations about repairing what we have broken: rewilding, queering, and decolonizing. They’re distinct but all a way of interrogating what is normal, who is in power, and what our goals are.

Rewilding an already built environment isn’t just sitting back and seeing what tender, living thing can force its way through the concrete. It’s razing to the ground the structures that block out light for everyone not rich enough to live on the top floor.