Slow Social
A few weeks back there was another round of social-media panic (which is reasonable), and the ever-present reminders to Use A Personal Site.
Personal sites are great! But I have some issues with that reply, and I posted about it on Twitter:
Personal sites are wonderful. But they can be a lot of work to set up & maintain. Also: personal solutions donāt solve the problem of building networks & public digital spaces.
If we want āpersonal sitesā to be an answer to social platforms, we have a lot of work to do.
At the core, Iām skeptical about treating āpublic spaceā issues as a matter of personal responsibility.
Chris Coyier made a point of RSS is, and the benefits of āslow socialā web interactions.
ā a lovely little post about how coolAnd I agree completely! [insert requisite mourning for Reader]
But then I look at my site ā this site, here ā and itās a struggle to get all the pieces working the way that I want, especially when it comes to syndication.
I do have a feed that you can subscribe to, but Iāve struggled to categorize what on my site is a āpostā worth syndicating vs a āpageā vs ???.
And Iām not always sure I have it set up right?
Validators flag the style
attribute
(setting custom props in some content),
or embedded iframe
s (for audio/video),
or script
s (usually for embedding content).
How much should I worry about these issues?
Do I need to run my content through
a tool like sanitize-html
,
and if so,
how strict should it be?
I often have similar questions
when setting up microformats,
and trying to match the needs of the format
to the needs of my content.
These are very solvable problems with testing and research ā but they start to add up.
WebMentions
Since making that post, Iāve also started to explore WebMentions, following instructions from Matthias Ott, Keith Grant, and Max Bƶck. I recommend all three articles, but the first thing that becomes clear is that this requires multiple steps, and is not a simple or straight-forward process.
The first round required several online services
along with HTML & JS changes to my static site,
just to verify my indieweb identity.
Then more changes to the site
and more online services to help fetch any mentions
(so far, nothing to see, but thatās probably expected).
It seems the only way to test the setup
is to launch all those changes publicly,
and then ask for other devs to send you mentions.
(Thatās partly the goal of this post.)
Every time I think I have the basics in place, I find some other set of instructions suggesting thereās another step to take.
Update:
I seem to have things working here now,
but Iām still not entirely clear
on how it works.
In the end
Iāve added some metadata to the site head
,
a number of microformats to the markup,
several third-party services,
and an API call to download the data from one of them.
Iām not convinced I have all the details right,
and Iām not sure which validators to test against.
If I want live updates (this is a static site) thereās still more to learn.
A Proof Of Concept (for developers only)
Iām an experienced web developer, and I can figure it out. But the steps arenāt simple, and most of my friends are not web developers. So, to me, this all feels like the prototype of an idea ā a proof of concept.
We have the technology to implement a slow social network of personal sites. Iām excited to keep playing with that code. But proving the concept is not the same as actually making it easy & accessible in a way that can replace platforms.
Whatās Next?
I know there are plugins for WordPress and other blogging software to help make the setup simpler. Thatās great!
What I would like to see is a tool that helps bring the entire system together in one place. Somewhere that non-technical people can:
- build their own site, with support for feeds/mentions
- see what feeds are available on other sites, and subscribe to them
- easily respond to other sites, and see the resulting threads
Thatās a large feature set, I know. In my mind, it would make the most sense for those features to live in a browser, but it might be possible to build as a web service with browser plugins?
Whatever it looks like, it will take a lot of work to get there.