webmention.js 0.4.0

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I’ve just released v0.4.0 of webmention.js, which adds the ability to coalesce comment-type responses into the “reactions” section. I’d been considering it for a while but finally got the impetus to add it during today’s Respectful Responses IndieWeb session.

This change shouldn’t break current users of webmention.js, as it’s an opt-in configuration value.

As an aside, I really need to get around to making an actual site for PlaidWeb, so I have somewhere to put non-Publ discussion and release announcements.

Distributed toxicity and the IndieWeb

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This tweet has been making the rounds in IndieWeb spaces, and reflects a thing I’ve been thinking about on and off lately for obvious reasons:

I’ve seen several other related sentiments lately; with a certain prominent politician being deplatformed from all of the mainstream social media platforms, and all of the platforms that accept him being in turn shut down or otherwise made ineffective, people have been (quite reasonably!) wondering what happens if he ends up starting up his own IndieWeb site, and causes a resurgence in self-hosted or otherwise privately-run, single-author blogs.

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Incremental progress

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Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of criticism about the IndieWeb movement based on the notion that everything that comes out of it is biased towards people with technology privilege; that it’s all well and good for people who know how to run a website to build their own thing, but that the vast majority of the Internet is made up of people who’d have nowhere to begin. And that it follows that the IndieWeb movement is inherently flawed.

I agree with the issues of tech privilege and access, but I disagree with the conclusions.

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Two PSAs regarding IndieAuth

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IndieAuth is starting to get some traction in the greater Internet space, which is really cool! I’m glad to see a protocol finally emerging around distributed/federated identity, managing to get some traction where OpenID more or less failed (despite a few hangers-on still supporting it).

There are two issues that implementers of IndieAuth clients (i.e. websites which use IndieAuth for authentication) and endpoints (i.e. the things which do the actual authentication) should be aware of.

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Stuff about webmention

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Marty wrote a great, thoughtful essay about some of the problems with webmention right now, and I agree with it.

One of the many problems that’s emerging with webmention is it’s turned into a sort of Swiss army knife of notifications; the IndieWeb uses it not just to send responses to folks, but also for things like publishing to Bridgy Fed or syndicating content to content aggregators. It’s the basis of how notes work. It’s up to the recipient to try to disambiguate the meaning based on context and post-type discovery, and what things are can change over time, sometimes in unpredictable ways that fall apart.

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Access token grants for feed readers

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This year IndieWeb Summit was canceled1, and some pretty good conversations took place. As usual my biggest interest was in doing authenticated, secure sharing of private posts, which has been a huge focus in how I’ve been building Publ.

I wasn’t really able to participate in any of the development stuff (as I’m still in quite a lot of pain due to whatever the hell is going on with my chronic pain stuff interacting with whatever the hell has been going on with my shoulder for the past month), but I did join in on the ending of a discussion/dev session about AutoAuth.

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📅 IndieWebCamp 2020, now online

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I’m planning on attending IndieWebCamp West 2020, an online version of IndieWeb Summit that was originally going to be in Portland in just a few weeks. For anyone who’s interested in working towards an open, personal web, this is a pretty good place to do it.

An observation

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I used to get a pretty steady stream of offers for “featured guest posts” on my website, but then that tapered off, and I figured it was just because those spammers found something better to do for their SEO. But that was also around when I stopped posting to my own site regularly and was mostly blogging on Tumblr or posting to Twitter.

But ever since I moved back to this site as my primary posting destination, the emails have started to come back, which makes me think they never really left – they just stopped asking me.

It’s weirdly validating, in a way.

I mean, I’m still not going to accept any of their offers (this is my site, not some random free-for-all, dangit!) but it’s nice to be wanted all the same.

(That said I do post guest art, so if you want to get something featured on this site, draw a picture of one of my characters. I’m pretty easy to please in that regard.)

wellp

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That ended up not going very well.

It’s still a good to-do list of stuff I want to do, but making comics, working on AR stuff, and generally being in pain/depression while also figuring out my ADHD meds has taken a lot more out of me than I expected.

Really gotta stop being overly ambitious.

I’m warming up to ActivityPub

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While Publ is still going to be an IndieWeb-first platform (simply because it’s so much easier to integrate – having modular Lego bricks and a pick-and-choose functionality set that is as simple as adding it to one’s HTML templates is a very compelling approach), I’ve had some good discussions regarding ActivityPub lately and it’s starting to seem a bit more possible to add that as an add-on for Publ.

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