Interaction on the Web - My Addition to the Great Posts by Alex, Tracy, Jo, and bacardi55

by

Recently, Alex started a conversation about how the Indie Web community does not really give enough space to all the different ways we already know of how to communicate online. And how limiting is can be to only rely on the webmentions.

And I agree with him, that webmentions are a technical barrier - both in how to set them up and use them. Anybody who thinks HTML is not a technical barrier needs to hang up with some non-programming people. Not to mention, there were times, when I sent the webmention, and just got back a non-helpful error response. In these cases, it is hard to figure out if the problem is on my site, let alone solve it.

But also in how their setup of different sites limits what an 'acceptable' webmention is. The result being, that I have so far read multiple posts of people complaining that some people are sending the like webmention with the text. Can't provide the link, since I did not save any - they did seemed a bit misguided?

And he ended up with how we need more ways of having a lightweight interactions.

And there were multiple responses on the topic, like from Jo, Tracy and bacardi55. All of them worth reading, as they all bring additional thoughts to the table.

Now, I don't remember which Indie Web Camp it was (I think it was the 2022 Dusseldorf one, but I am not sure), but I know we had the discussion of what is needed to be a part of indie web and Indie Web. The conditions for first were:

  1. Have a personal website
  2. that is non-commercial
  3. on their own domain

and the additional condition for the second were the participation in the community surrounding this ideas. Or I guess at least identifying with it.

And I have my own opinions about the third point at least, because I think the people blogging on wordpress.com or people having a Neocities sites or people with microblog site are part of the indie web as well. Even if they do not have their own domain. I honestly think this condition is only there, because some members of the Indie Web community have domain name buying problems.

I think that it was on the Indie Web Camp Nuremberg 2023, that for participating on the indie web, one needs HTML and maybe microformats.

I am bringing this up because one does not need to have webmentions or any other Indie Web like things in order to participate and feel part of the community. No technical division exists there. And we should not be limiting ourselves with using the 'Indie Web' technology, if it does not suit us.

Even if listening to people talk can sometimes give this impression. For example Angelo recently talked about the personalised recommendation system based on the feed of the people he follows. Because in the Indie Web community we all use posts and microformats for books and movies and songs.

Unless you are Jeremy or James or Tantek and probably a lot more I don't know about. I love Jeremy's format, because it is simple, one can have a good overview and the comments are gold.

We will get to the technical barriers again later.

So then the question becomes, what do we want the social interaction to look like in the web?

I will be the first person to admit, that I honestly have no idea. I have been thinking about the socialisation and friendship building and keeping in the last couple of months and I still do not have any answers.

I do think that there is something to the continued interaction, no matter how lightweight. I am surprised in person, that people remember me just by showing up, even when I did not speak with them yet. It has sort of been my way of how to worm up in different groups. After some time, one just becomes the part of the group and then magic starts happening.

Online text communication does not really have the same feeling. Or at least without people putting some energy in. Or it can end up somebody just reading the articles of another person, but there is no interaction and no communication. I think this is the danger zone for relationship to starts to feel or even become a para-social relationship.

So how do non-Indie Web community sites solve this? In the asexual and aromatic communities (at least the Wordpress + surrounding ones) they do have comments. I recently started browsing last month submissions for the carnival, and I was surprised that one of the comment was something like 'nice seeing you after a long time'. This is a visual representation that these people know each other.

And this is still a indie web. Is this the way Indie Web community wants to go? I don't have an answer to that.

Jo mentioned in their post, that even webmentions can cause the feeling of 'did anybody read this?'. I can get this feeling too. The way of how I am handling it right now is to just have as little inboxes to check as possible. Since I get very small amount of email and webmentions, I can make sure this does not become too frequent of a problem.

It is only a problem, because it does not really feel like a socialisation to me? I am expecting some feeling from anything socialisation-like, and I don't always get it from webmentions?

I have the feeling that comments would make this worse. I think instead of making a comment button, I would need to figure out what I want out of online socialisation.

Light-weight one sentence emails are good. Likes without comment only give me that feeling, if I already know a person and I could see what they might like. Otherwise not really. Somebody using my idea and writing their own posts is great. Somebody quoting me and making me feel like I did not get my point across? Not so much.

But honestly? None of them are negative for me. So I would be willing to get any of them.

What does this tell about my preferences? I honestly have no idea.

Let me now go back to the technical barriers.

I optimised my site, so I am able to write and work on it without access to the internet. That does mean, that posting on it is not... the easiest thing to do. One of the reasons, why I don't really post spur of the moment thngs. Also, having comments on the site would not be trivial and honestly I don't want to put in the technical work needed to make it work. Especially since I am not sure that I would even liked it.

The comments are probably easier for people using Wordpress, but then I heard and experienced that webmentions on Wordpress can be a bit pain in the anal hole. Not to mention that everybody tried to break into your site.

And that is the main technical barrier. Since each of our sites makes different things easy, difficult and impossible.

Because there are technical barriers for anything that is not easy on the certain platform. A couple of months ago, I have noticed a bug, that made the webmentions plugin not work on the ClassicPress. The problem was one line parsing the post, where the function used was from the Wordpress 5.3 I think? So not available on ClassicPress. Figuring out how to solve this was... not motivating enough for me, so I hope somebody figured it by now and resolved it? Because otherwise it still does not work...

And finding the specific communication channel, that would be easy on all platforms, is probably a pipe dream.

So maybe we need to be more explicit about what we want?

I liked how bacardi55 mentioned in their post of what kind of way of contacting is alright. Maybe the post is not the best place, as one would need to stumble upon that post, but maybe we could be more explicit about?

Sort of reminds me of the Tumblr posts that people reblog, when they want more interaction.

For example:

I recently used the idea from this post and added some questions I am always willing to answer to my main page. Maybe we need to expand this a bit?

So include the way you want to be contacted, and maybe also including the what or why and not just the how?

If we can not make technical barriers smaller, would it be at least possible to make social barriers lower?

Because to me, the two biggest barriers to the more frequent communication are not technical. It is not the lack of the comment box or technical problems. There are two.

The first is the lack of energy for it. The February was a good example of that, and I do need to catch on the correspondence. I don't even have the objective reason for that, it just happens.

The second is the fear of being a nuance. I am not the only person fighting this (though I am worse at it without any diagnoses). And I know that in most cases I am not. But it still makes the barrier to the communication higher than it has any right to be. It is my personal problem and I should not use it as an excuse, but it is there.

So while I like the questions that Tracy posted in her post, I am at the level of forcing myself to have any kind of online interaction. They are good question, but since my problems are on a bit more fear based level, I don't think I have the perspective to even attempt to answer them.

I do love that we are having this discussion.

Just this week I finished the book Ace. One of the point was that one of the reasons for the 'importance' of romantic relationships vs. friendship is that we are willing to have the sometimes awkward conversations of what we actually want from the relationship. And if we value friendship we need to have them there as well. I think the book We Should Get Together also suggest this, but I did not finish that one yet.

So I do hope we will continue to have this conversation, until the web actually works for us. Even if it takes a while. :)

(These conversations are also a lot more interesting then the technical challenges of the indie web. And probably also harder to solve in a way, that will work for us.)