When I write a blog post, I want it to live on my blog, rather than a platform. I can thus invest my time thinking about how to make my blog better and backing it up, rather than having to worry about where my writing is, finding ways to export data from a platform, setting up persistent backups, etc.
This looks like a handy RSS-to-Mastodon service.
The return of RSS and POSSE points to a revival of the personal website ecosystem that thrived in the early blog era. Writers, researchers, technologists and more are relaunching their independent homepages, complete with feeds, as both a public notebook and a channel for sharing insights. The personal website is the ultimate sovereign territory online, enabling creators to share content on their own terms.
I feel like Joan Westenberg has come up with the perfect tag line for personal websites (emphasis mine):
By passing high-quality, human-centric content through their own lens of discernment before syndicating it to social networks, these curators create islands of sanity amidst oceans of machine-generated content of questionable provenance.
A good overview of syndicating from your own website to social network silos:
The platform era is ending. Rather than build new Twitters and Facebooks, we can create a stuff-posting system that works better for everybody.
References and contributors include Cory Doctorow, Manton Reece, Matt Mullenweg and, of course, Tantek.
Mandy takes a deep dive into the treatment of altruism in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
I love not feeling bound to any particular social network. This website, my website, is the one true home for all the stuff I’ve felt compelled to write down or point a camera at over the years. When a social network disappears, goes out of fashion or becomes inhospitable, I can happily move on with little anguish.
A very timely post on using If This Then That to automatically post notes from your own site (via RSS) to Twitter and Mastodon.
I’ve set this up for my Mastodon profile.
A wonderful introduction to the indie web—Ana really conveys her sense of excitement!
Some good blogging advice.
Building a blog for the long run? Avoid Medium.
A great introduction to indie web building blocks from Jamie.
A terrific—and fun!—talk from Zach about site deaths, owning your own content, and the indie web.
Oh, and he really did create MySpaceBook for the talk.
Facebook and even Instagram are at odds with the principles of the open web.
Related: Aaron is playing whack-a-mole with Instagram because he provides a servie to let users export their own photographs to their own websites.
I saw Nicholas give this great talk at Paris Web on site deaths, the indie web, and publishing on your own site. That talk was in French, but these slides are (mostly) in English—I was able to follow along surprisingy easily!
Welp! As of today, none of my posts, links, or notes can be syndicated to Facebook:
The
publish_actionspermission will be deprecated. This permission granted apps access to publish posts to Facebook as the logged in user. Apps created from today onwards will not have access to this permission. Apps created before today that have been previously approved to requestpublish_actionscan continue to do so until August 1, 2018.
If you’re reading this on Facebook: so long, it’s been good to know ya.
Um …if I’m reading this right, then my IFTTT recipe will also stop working and my Facebook activity will drop to absolute zero.
Oh, well. No skin off my nose. Facebook is a roach motel in more ways than one.
Here’s the video of the talk I gave at Design4Drupal last week in Boston. There’s a good half an hour of questions at the end.
Here’s the talk I gave at Webstock earlier this year all about the indie web:
In these times of centralised services like Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, having your own website is downright disruptive. If you care about the longevity of your online presence, independent publishing is the way to go. But how can you get all the benefits of those third-party services while still owning your own data? By using the building blocks of the Indie Web, that’s how!
A thorough run-down of the whys and wherefores of being part of the indie web, from Chris.
I approve of Dries’s plan!
In trying to decide on his indie web approach, Dries gives an excellent breakdown of the concepts of PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to Own Site) and POSSE (Publish to Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere).
There are some great responses in the comments too, like this one from Chris and this one from Tantek (syndicated from their own sites, obvs).