fluffy (Posts tagged indieweb)

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
3liza
smellslikebot

how to keep following people when a major social platform implodes

(...and you don't want to join 20 new websites)

First, get an RSS reader*:

You'll be able to make a custom feed to follow blogs, webcomics, social media feeds, podcasts, news, and other stuff on the web all in one place. To follow something, find its "feed URL"-- often marked by an icon that looks like this ↓-- and paste it into your reader of choice as a new feed.

image

Some feed URLs for social media:

  • Twitter: Feedbro can use Twitter profile URLs as feed URLs. Otherwise, use nitter.net/username/rss (or other Nitter instance) (You can get a CSV file of all the accounts you follow using "Download a user's friends list" on Tweetbeaver)
  • Tumblr: Use username.tumblr.com/rss or username.tumblr.com/tagged/my%20art/rss to follow a blog's "my art" tag (as an example)
  • Cohost: Use username.cohost.org/rss/public (WIP feature)
  • Mastodon: Use instance.url/@­username.rss
  • Deviantart: Info here
  • Spacehey: Info here
  • Youtube: Go to a channel in a web browser, view page source, and use Ctrl-F/Command-F to find a link that starts with "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id="
  • Instagram: Feedbro can use Instagram profile and hashtag URLs as feed URLs. Otherwise, Instagram doesn't have RSS feeds, and due to aggressive rate limiting on their part, it's not so simple to generate a feed URL.
  • Facebook: Feedbro can use public Facebook group/page URLs as feed URLs.

(If you know an artist who exclusively posts to Instagram, you may want to gently suggest that they crosspost elsewhere...)

Also see how to find the RSS feed URL for almost any site. Try using public RSS-Bridge instances or Happyou Final Scraper to generate feeds for sites that don't have them (Pillowfort, Patreon, etc).

*You can set up your subscriptions in one reader and import them into another by exporting an OPML file.

dduane

This!

RSS feeds were a great way to keep track of things before the rise of the platforms, and (if we’re smart) they’ll be great again.

fluffy-critter

Also if you have a website that lets you run PHP applications (most of them do), you can install a server-side feed aggregator like Feed on Feeds so that you don’t have to remember which things you’ve already read somewhere else.

rss indieweb
kaththedragon
krudman

I do not want to sound like... You should have known better/I told you so/etc, but as... not that, as I can sound, I really hope artists take stock of what's going on at twitter. Things that have happened to artists in recent years:

  • tumblr banned porn to appease bigger companies
  • webtoon called your passion a side hustle all while laughing that to the bank
  • deviantart scrubs your art to sell AI art
  • patreon is constantly finding new and exciting ways to make people who use it nervous
  • twitter has been collapsing for the past year
  • there are other sites with their own problems Im not familiar with

There is no single platform that won't throw you under the bus if the people running it think they can make more money elsewhere. It doesn't matter if they'll find out they're wrong later. They'll gamble with your livelihood, and when their platform collapses, they'll sell it off afterwards and move onto the next thing to ruin for a buck.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Tumblr allows nudity again, but it's run by clowns, and it won't be but a few years before they find some new parent company or investors that want to ruin it again. No platform is safe because this is how this game is supposed to be played. Growth, growth, growth, tear it down for scrap, and sell it.

I don't pretend to know the answer to this problem, but at least diversify, make your own website, and make back ups.

krudman

Worth reblogging in light of twitter announcing it's going to scrape it's own site for AI training and now artists are feeling forced to jump ship.

Extrapolate everything you've seen in the past year and take an educated guess if twitter is going to get better or worse moving forward. That site is only going to get worse, and it shouldn't be a surprise at this point. This website is only going to get worse. Every website is only going to get worse. You don't need'em!

Move, network, make a website, a youtube channel, a blog, make friends, build relationships, diversify, grow. You won't get serotonin, notifications, and good boy points for good posts™ on the terf website, but the people who matter will follow you.

fluffy-critter

Inexpensive ways to own your own shit:

Alternatives to Twitter, Tumblr, etc. for posting in more social spaces (great for promoting your own shit to people who might actually care about it):

  • Mastodon (finding a good instance is hard, admittedly, but mastodon.art is great for artists)
  • Cohost

How to follow peoples’ posts without being stuck on social media feeds: (in no particular order, I haven’t used any of these so YMMV)

Or if you’re capable of installing applications on your own website, there’s several self-hostable feed readers. I use Feed-on-Feeds, and I hear really good things about FreshRSS.

Also maybe consider joining the IndieWeb.

rss web hosting indieweb fuck social media fuck twitter also fuck tumblr tbh
foone
foone

Two ideas:

1. I wonder if anyone has tried to build a Tumblr-a-like on ActivityPub?

2. I wonder if you could build a Tumblr/ActivityPub bridge out of the existing Tumblr API? Like I know Tumblr has said they plan to eventually make Tumblr part of ActivityPub, but you could always go "fuck you" and do it for them.

fluffy-critter

1. Yes but none of them ever caught on (people seem to prefer just using Mastodon instances with ridiculously high character limits)

2. Yeah probably, but I’d rather see RSS come back into fashion TBH

IndieWeb
hyratel
rainbowgazes-archive

man googling stuff kinda fucking sucks now huh

rainbowgazes-archive

want a product recommendation? why not check out 13 lists in a row that are all sponsored by the companies that list their products on said lists. need advice on how to do with something? how about 11 sites that were just registered 2 months ago and all look virtually identical that have the same bits of advice listed. want computer help? well heres fixmypc2021.com and unfuckmycomputer.biz and windowshelpreal.info all listing the same basic troubleshooting steps like "restart your computer" or "download our malware ridden program" that dont help at all

rainbowgazes-archive

do you know how much it hurts to have to add "reddit" to the end of all my search queries because its just about the only way i can guarantee ill encounter real people that have the same questions i do and not 58 articles all written by an AI program designed to catch the most amount of web traffic from google as possible?

fluffy-critter

So, Google’s search rankings are based on back when the Internet was like. Hey here’s people posting stuff online in public to each other on their personal websites.

But then everything moved to social media, and the social networks have it in their best interest to putting everything behind a walled garden. And many social networks (including Mastodon and Tumblr) have gotten in the mindset of even excluding search robots entirely, under the guise of “privacy” and the like.

So it’s not just that the SEO companies are crowding out human opinions and discussions of things, but humans are being encouraged to not even allow their stuff to be a factor in the first place.

As always, the web was designed around the idea that people would have their own websites with their own content, and that people would discover things based on people linking to people.

Once again I implore you (yes, you!) to have your own website.

indieweb social networking social media internet seo
hyratel

beginner’s guide to the indie web

kafus

“i miss the old internet” “we’ll never have websites like the ones from the 90s and early 2000s ever again” “i’m tired of social media but there’s nowhere to go”

HOLD ON!

personal websites and indie web development still very much exist! it may be out of the way to access and may not be the default internet experience anymore, but if you want to look and read through someone’s personally crafted site, or even make your own, you can still do it! here’s how:

  • use NEOCITIES! neocities has a built in search and browse tools to let you discover websites, and most importantly, lets you build your own website from scratch for free! (there are other ways to host websites for free, but neocities is a really good hub for beginners!)
  • need help getting started with coding your website? sadgrl online has a section on her website dedicated to providing resources for newbie webmasters!
  • HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are the core of what all websites are built on. many websites also use JS (JavaScript) to add interactive elements to their pages. w3schools is a useful directory of quick reference for pretty much every HTML/CSS/JS topic you can think of.
  • there is also this well written and lengthy guide on dragonfly cave that will put you step by step through the basics of HTML/CSS (what webpages are made from), if that’s your sort of thing!
  • stack overflow is every programmer’s hub for asking questions and getting help, so if you’re struggling with getting something to look how you want or can’t fix a bug, you may be able to get your answer here! you can even ask if no one’s asked the same question before.
  • websites like codepen and jsfiddle let you test HTML/CSS/JS in your browser as you tinker with small edits and bugfixing.
  • want to find indie websites outside the scope of neocities? use the search engine marginalia to find results you actually want that google won’t show you!
  • you can also use directory sites like yesterweb’s link section to find websites in all sorts of places.

if you are going to browse the indie web or make your own website, i also have some more personal tips as a webmaster myself (i am not an expert and i am just a small hobbyist, so take me with a grain of salt!)

if you are making your own site:

  • get expressive! truly make whatever you want! customize your corner of the internet to your heart’s content! you have left the constrains of social media where every page looks the same. you have no character limit, image limit, or design limit. want to make an entire page or even a whole website dedicated to your one niche interest that no one seems to be into but you? go for it! want to keep a public journal where you can express your thoughts without worry? do it! want to keep an art gallery that looks exactly how you want? heck yeah! you are free now! you will enjoy the indie web so much more if you actually use it for the things you can’t do on websites like twitter, instead of just using it as a carrd bio alternative or a place to dump nostalgic geocities gifs.
  • don’t overwhelm yourself! if you’ve never worked with HTML/CSS or JS before, it may look really intimidating. start slow, use some guides, and don’t bite off more than you can chew. even if your site doesn’t look how you want quite yet, be proud of your work! you’re learning a skill that most people don’t have or care to have, and that’s pretty cool.
  • keep a personal copy of your website downloaded to your computer and don’t just edit it on neocities (or your host of choice) and call it a day. if for some reason your host were to ever go down, you would lose all your hard work! and besides, by editing locally and offline, you can use editors like vscode (very robust) or notepad++ (on the simpler side), which have more features and is more intuitive than editing a site in-browser.
  • you can use ctrl+shift+i on most browsers to inspect the HTML/CSS and other components of the website you’re currently viewing. it’ll even notify you of errors! this is useful for bugfixing your own site if you have a problem, as well as looking at the code of sites you like and learning from it. don’t use this to steal other people’s code! it would be like art theft to just copy/paste an entire website layout. learn, don’t steal.
  • don’t hotlink images from other sites, unless the resource you’re taking from says it’s okay! it’s common courtesy to download images and host them on your own site instead of linking to someone else’s site to display them. by hotlinking, every time someone views your site, you’re taking up someone else’s bandwidth.
  • if you want to make your website easily editable in the future (or even for it to have multiple themes), you will find it useful to not use inline CSS (putting CSS in your HTML document, which holds your website’s content) and instead put it in a separate CSS file. this way, you can also use the same theme for multiple pages on your site by simply linking the CSS file to it. if this sounds overwhelming or foreign to you, don’t sweat it, but if you are interested in the difference between inline CSS and using separate stylesheets, w3schools has a useful, quick guide on the subject.
  • visit other people’s sites sometimes! you may gain new ideas or find links to more cool websites or resources just by browsing.

if you are browsing sites:

  • if the page you’re viewing has a guestbook or cbox and you enjoyed looking at the site, leave a comment! there is nothing better as a webmaster than for someone to take the time to even just say “love your site” in their guestbook.
  • that being said, if there’s something on a website you don’t like, simply move on to something else and don’t leave hate comments. this should be self explanatory, but it is really not the norm to start discourse in indie web spaces, and you will likely not even be responded to. it’s not worth it when you could be spending your time on stuff you love somewhere else.
  • take your time! indie web doesn’t prioritize fast content consumption the way social media does. you’ll get a lot more out of indie websites if you really read what’s in front of you, or take a little while to notice the details in someone’s art gallery instead of just moving on to the next thing. the person who put labor into presenting this information to you would also love to know that someone is truly looking and listening.

  • explore! by clicking links on a website, it’s easy to go down rabbitholes of more and more websites that you can get lost in for hours.

  • seeking out fansites or pages for the stuff you love is great and fulfilling, but reading someone’s site about a topic you’ve never even heard of before can be fun, too. i encourage you to branch out and really look for all the indie web has to offer.

i hope this post helps you get started with using and browsing the indie web! feel free to shoot me an ask if you have any questions or want any advice. <3

fluffy-critter

Also indieweb sites don’t have to exist in a vacuum! There’s another thing called “IndieWeb” which is about tools and protocols that let websites be social at each other.

The most important protocol in IndieWeb is called “webmentions,” which are just a way for websites to tell each other about links in a nice way. The protocol itself is pretty simple and quite easy to set up!

The easiest way is to follow the instructions at webmention.io to add a little bit of HTML to the top of your page, and then include webmention.js on your site. After you do that, your pages are part of a social network! Now your pages can be used to like/reblog/reply to other pages without any special arrangement. There’s a bunch of tools that you can use to make it even better; the two most important ones are:

  • brid.gy will convert likes/reblogs/replies on other social networks into webmentions on your site
  • webmention.app will make it easier to actually send the notifications out

Also, when you link to a page, you can use a little bit of added HTML to say what kind of link it is! For example, to “like” a page you do something like:

I just read <a class=“u-like-of” href=“https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/12455-Indieweb-vs-Fediverse”>a really cool article about the IndieWeb</a>

That ‘class=“u-like-of”’ tells the site you linked to that you aren’t just mentioning it, but that you “like” the page, similar to pressing the ❤️ button on Tumblr! There’s a few other things you can put there that mean a few other things; the most common ones are:

  • u-like-of: this link represents that you like the page
  • u-bookmark-of: this link means you’re saving it for later
  • u-in-reply-to: this link is a reply to the page you’re linking to
  • u-repost-of, u-quotation-of: you’ve copied all (repost) or part (quotation) of the page to share it with more people (this is how things spread in the IndieWeb!)

There’s also a bunch of other things that people do with webmentions, for example they can be used to send RSVPs for invitations to things. Here’s a bigger list of the responses that are supported!

One of the really cool things about IndieWeb is that there’s a lot of software that supports it already; micro.blog is basically an IndieWeb version of Tumblr (which costs $5/month for an account, but there’s no advertising and no algorithm!), or if you can run WordPress you can install the IndieWeb Plugin for Wordpress and get full IndieWeb support with basically no effort.

Oh, and another really cool thing is that you can use your IndieWeb website as your identity for logging into other sites that support the protocols! It’s like “sign in with Facebook/Twitter/Google” except it’s using a website that you control, and a bunch of sites use it for some really interesting things! (For example, my site supports this as a way of getting access to friends-locked entries, and the novembeat website lets you use it for the submission system!)

Anyway. The possibilities of IndieWeb are incredibly phenomenal, and Tumblr has made some moves towards supporting it directly. It would be extremely cool if they do this. Please let @wip know this is a thing you’d like to see… I sure as heck would!

indieweb tumblr social media websites
knitmeapony
accordion-druid

Don't Lie To Me About Web 2.0

If you're like me and you're trying to keep an open mind that there may someday be a non-scam application of blockchains, you've probably read some articles about "Web3", which promises to re-decentralize the web by something something Blockchain.

I realize this is far from the most important criticism but i think it's really interesting that the standard explanation you find replicated nearly word-for-word at the beginning of most "Web3" articles has a big ol' chunk of historical revisionism in it. It goes like this:

"First there was web 1.0, which was, like, geocities pages and stuff, and it was decentralized. Then there was web 2.0, which was the centralized silos of social media - facebook, twitter, etc. Now Web3 is gonna re-decentralize everything by letting you own your own data on the blockchain…"

No! Stop there! Web 2.0 was not social media! You're rewriting history that's less than 20 years old!

Web 2.0 was:

  • blogs with comment sections
  • wikis (wikipedia was far from the first wiki!)
  • forums (that is, discussion that was previously on Usenet migrating to like phpBB web forums)
  • bookmark sharing sites like Del.icio.us
  • user-defined tagging systems as in del.icio.us (and computer nerds who spent a lot of time defining taxonomies being blown away when it turned out you could let users define their own tags and a useful system could organically emerge)
  • on a technical, behind-the-scenes level, static HTML files, server-side includes, and Perl CGI scripts were getting replaced with structured, database-backed web frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Drupal, etc.)
  • AJAX as a way of loading content dynamically into a page without the user navigating to a new page
  • Javascript in general allowing more full-featured applications - as did Flash
  • RSS feed as a user-defined way of aggregating content

when someone tried to buzzwordify all these disparate trends they noticed that what a lot of them had in common was "Website owner allows website visitors to enter words that will be seen by other website visitors" and summed that up as "User-generated content" and branded it "Web 2.0" around 2004-2005.

I was there. I worked on backends for a lot of this stuff!

The key shift was where things were hosted. In Web 2.0 you might use off-the-shelf software like WordPress or phpBB or whatever but you were still hosting all that stuff on your own server. Your server, your rules; you'd set your own moderation policy and wield your own "banhammer". The free speech compromise was "don't like my moderation policy? Make your own website."

It was a huge paradigm shift in 2005-6 when YouTube started and said "we'll host your videos for you". (What? trust a third-party website to host my videos? Sounds sketchy) That was the beginning of the end, because once people gave up running their own server in favor of letting a big company host their stuff on a centralized server, we gave up all the power.

Social media wasn't web 2.0, it's what killed Web 2.0!

You might think I'm arguing over mere nomenclature but the important fact is that this era existed, and the Web3 pitch pretends it didn't. We already had decentralized internet with social features. This fact contradicts the story the Web3/blockchain advocates want to tell you, so their story skips this entire era.

Web 2.0 lost to siloed social media because:

  • running your own server is a pain
  • running your own server costs money, especially if you want to host video
  • signing up for facebook/twitter/etc is much easier for non-computer-literate users, who outnumber us 1,000 to 1
  • once there's a critical mass of users there, anybody who wants an audience has to be there (network effects)
  • non-technical users didn't understand about paying with their privacy, and in most cases had no experience with the freedom they were giving up
  • the price was not apparent until everybody was locked in
  • Apple made a fateful decision that mobile-phone internet should be app-centric, not browser/website centric. Then Android copied their mistake.

To make the web3 argument you have to explain why "a distributed ledger where each update contains a cryptographically signed pointer to the previous update, replicated across many computers via a decentralized protocol, that rewards people for hosting nodes by paying them pretend money when they brute-force solve a cryptographic hash" is relevant to any of these problems. I suspect it is not relevant, because:

  • the blockchain is incredibly slow, inefficient, and energy-intensive, and it can only hold miniscule amounts of data. (The ape pictures are not on the chain, only links to them are on the chain). So everything still has to be hosted elsewhere.
  • for most web3 stuff "the" blockchain means the Ethereum blockchain, where it sometimes costs thousands of dollars to make a single transaction process.
  • people who don't want to run their own webserver sure as heck aren't gonna run their own blockchain node
  • in practice, people don't interact with the blockchain directly, but through intermediarires (coinbase.com etc), who inevitably become centralized.
  • in practice, control over blockchain itself, for any popular blockchain, is highly centralized to a tiny number of the largest mining consortiums

if you want to make the dream of "buy your Minecraft skin as an NFT and bring it with you to wear in Fortnight!" work (why is this the example every article uses?) you would need to get all the games involved to decide to implement equivalent items, or some kind of framework of item portability, and if you could do that then you wouldn't need the blockchain!

What might help solve any of the problems that killed Web 2.0:

  • cheap and easy (EASY!) web hosting
  • portable data standards
  • antitrust enforcement with teeth
  • privacy laws around data collection that make the centralized social media business model unprofitable
  • a critical mass of dissatisfaction with corporate social media

I want a decentralized internet to come back more than anybody, but blockchain is completely irrelevant to that.

indieweb web 2.0 social media history this is 100% accurate
hyratel
psshaw

IF YOU’RE READING THIS I NEED YOU to go to neocities.org and make an account.

It’s an emergency. Look. People are really getting into it now. Do you want to be the last kid on your block still depending on corporate social media for your self-actualization?

psshaw

I sharpened my skills making psshaw.neocities.org and it’s still made up of mainly basic code like <img> and <table> tags. It’s only in the later pages that I’ve decided to try advanced stuff like responsive CSS.

naalbraxusmazkelix.neocities.org is even simpler, to resemble something built in the late nineties.

I feel like there’s so much personality that’s just waiting to be brought back into Web 1.0. It’s a whole sandbox you can learn how to wrangle, and shockingly fast. I want to see what everyone can do!

jammerlee

Okay, I’ve been on the internet since before the great Y2K scare and *old person voice* Back in my day, everyone had websites like this. I had several. It was normal, everyone’s websites were a reflection of themselves and their interests, and it was beautiful. I’ve been lamenting a lot lately missing this era because of how badly social media has distilled and homogenized the internet experience

Your sites remind me so much of web 1.0 and it’s beautiful. I love this. Please keep doing this. Please keep expressing yourself.

Please everyone bring this back. Bring back personality, bring back individuality, bring back fun

And if you’d like to have a fine pairing to go with your website, I suggest going to proboards.com and setting one up. Still want social media, but want a smaller and more close-knit community without the same constant fear of some rando finding you and sending you threats, or something accidentally going viral and giving you a panic attack? Individual forum communities. You make your own rules, you can make your own aesthetic, and if you use add-ons or know CSS you can get a lot of customization. Also, forum signatures! They’re a great quick little way of expressing yourself! Use imgur.com to host your images! 

Seriously, Forums are AMAZING for sharing both long and shortform content, shitposts, art and writing, everything! Love roleplaying? They’re the best and most organized way to do that and be able to have everything tidily archived and easy to search for!

And best of all, you don’t have shit like twitter’s algorithm breathing down your neck or promoted shit being shoved in your face!

Please please please if you hate all this corporate homogenizing bullshit and attempts to do shit like manufacture fandom, this is a way you can fight back and express yourself!

nikkiscarlet

I’m seeing people in the notes going “that sounds nice and all but I don’t know how to code.”

Friends!

There are resources to make it easier!!

And you don’t have to make a website that looks like a shining, professional corporate product. You can just kind of slap some colours and images on a webpage and add to it from there, as you learn. I learned to build basic websites when I was 10. It’s a little more work than just signing up for a social media profile and filling out a few forms, but it’s so incredibly rewarding when you start to see your idea taking shape.

And there’s a whole community of people out there who want to see you succeed and would be happy to help. Check out the Yesterweb, they’ve got a Discord community and a Mastodon instance and even a Minecraft server. Sadgrl/Sadness, who runs the community, is super sweet and helpful. They’ve got a ton of manifestos from community members about why it’s so important to bring back the spirit of the old web. Oh, and they hate crypto, so you know they’re not just a bunch of tech bros.

I’ve also seen people in the notes saying “But nobody’s going to follow me there.” That is always a concern when it comes to moving to any new space on the web, especially if it’s outside the big social media platforms, but even though I’m a huge supporter of reducing and/or entirely removing your presence on the big platforms, there’s no one saying you can’t stay on them in order to keep in touch with the people who matter to you — or even to use those platforms to promote your site! I’ve distanced myself from Facebook, for example, but I still have an account there and keep the Messenger app open. I’ve set it so I appear offline to everyone, but I’ve told the people I care about that I’m still there and they can reach me any time, I just won’t look like I’m online. You can use status updates/tweets/posts/whatever to tell people “Hey, I added an art gallery to my website!”, “Hey, I added my latest fic to my website!”, “Hey, if you’ve ever wanted to learn everything there is to know about snow leopards, they’re my special interest and I’ve built a web shrine to them now, so check it out at this link.” You can set up a guestbook or a forum on your website to keep the lines of communication open. And Neocities is set up in such a way that you can make new connections with other people in the community. So not only can you still keep in touch with everyone you still want to keep up with, but you can also make new friends and follow new people!

Really, the only big drawback is that you’d have to accept that it’s a bit of a slower space. The old web wasn’t about a constant deluge of new content from one source — it was about exploration. It was about going down rabbit holes and finding all the weird content that makes you happy in a bunch of different places, and keeping those sites bookmarked for whenever you want to check them out again rather than following their feed. But you even can follow them on a feed — even if they’re not on Neocities — if you use RSS. And with RSS, there’s no algorithm and no advertising. It’s just simple, chronological updates.

There’s a bit of an extra learning curve if you want to get in on this stuff, but it is so, so worthwhile, and honestly so much better for your mental health. A slower web built around your specific interests means less algorithmic outrage culture: you’re not constantly being shot with a firehose of all the most controversial content to keep you angry and clicking. You’re just having a nice time building your little dedication to nice things that you like, or expressing yourself, or learning new things, and meeting new people who are interested in those things. It’s lovely and especially if you were never around for the old web, you deserve to experience it.

fluffy-critter

There’s lots of other places you can put your weird sites too! Check out tilde.club, for example, or find That Nerdy Friend who runs their own server and is willing to give you some ~/public_html space on it (which is basically what tilde.club is). Or if you want to get really advanced, get some shared webhosting with Dreamhost or whatever. Or maybe your ISP still has a forgotten “personal homepage” feature that nobody uses but has been kept running for the last 25 years because they’re worried about customers leaving if their homepage goes away!

But whatever you do, yes, please please please make your own personal site.

Also consider joining the indieweb.

indieweb small web web 1.0
fluffyinvader
cleansingreflections

idk about yall but if tumblr gets shut down (which is a very reasonable concern to have) we literally don't have an alternative

cleansingreflections

still thinking about this. ok imagine tumblr is just too unprofitable and it's shut down like tomorrow. where are you going? twitter? you're gonna look me in the eye and tell me you're going to fucking twitter? instagram? reddit? tiktok? FACEBOOK? do you wanna resuscitate vine? like genuinely, truly, please answer the question of where you would redirect your followers and mutuals in case tumblr was shut down tomorrow, because i don't think many people understand that genuinely and honestly there is no other social media platform that has the same level of customization, tagging system, overall user-friendliness as tumblr, it's not perfect and i'm not saying that, but dude it is absolutely not better out there

fluffy-critter

As always I’m gonna beat the drum about the IndieWeb. Right now it’s very developer-oriented, but it’s slowly changing. Services like micro.blog exist, and you can get WordPress hosting and add an IndieWeb plugin to it.

Once upon a time, Tumblr itself seemed like it would be easy to interoperate with IndieWeb. It still feels like that could happen. Here’s what that would take at a minimum:

  • Support Webmention (which is a protocol for doing notes in an interoperable way); mostly this means removing the href.li URL shortener on all outgoing links, and to add a Webmention endpoint
  • Allow subscribing/following external feeds via RSS and/or h-feed; Tumblr actually used to have this function (sort of) but they removed it

That’s it. That’s all there is to make Tumblr into an IndieWeb provider. Here’s some bonus things they could do as well:

  • Support Micropub and Microsub, which are protocols which allow folks to use their own dashboards instead of the default Tumblr one
  • Add support for IndieAuth, which is a generalization/simplification of OAuth2 (the protocol used by apps) to allow folks to use their own websites to log in to Tumblr and vice-versa
  • Add optional per-post privacy settings, which can then be federated via TicketAuth and would make Tumblr (and the IndieWeb by extension!) way more compelling than Facebook

Once upon a time it felt like this would be impossible from a business standpoint, because the whole thing that makes social media sites compelling is that they force everyone to stick around and deal with whatever revenue model the site itself needs. But by making per-user revenue a thing, that means that they can position themselves as a service provider, not as a walled-garden social network that relies on network effects to remain competitive or viable.

I’d love to see Tumblr become one of many options for how to have a good, self-curated social experience online.

Remember how Twitter had their “blue sky” initiative which was just them pretending to care about going decentralized? IndieWeb has already been there for years, from a technology perspective. It just needs a big player to agree to it.

Tumblr feels like it’s in a perfect position to be that player.

indieweb tumblr optimism
hyratel

lacedspine asked:

please stop trying to make more money off of this site it’s not going to work people are already desensitized to the ads or have adblock

wip answered:

Hey, thanks for the feedback!

We’re exploring more ways of making Tumblr financially sustainable, so we can keep this weird ship afloat. You don’t have to buy into it if you don’t want, but like Matt, current interim Tumblr CEO, said in a recent post:

Remember that right now Tumblr costs a lot more to run than it makes, part of that bet is predicated on the idea that it’s losing money now but it’ll grow and make it up later. We just have to make it through this interim period by listening to users, iterating quickly, and shipping high-quality updates.

Love,

—Cyle (Tumblr Engineering)

vergess

I would rather pay a much, much larger subscription fee than watch tumblr ground to dust trying courting advertisers whose goals are fundamentally opposed to user friendliness.

Everyone who bemoaned the advertiser-friendly porn ban or got exhausted by the introduction of autoplaying ads with sound on the mobile app ought to be celebrating.

This is the most exciting policy decision tumblr has made in a decade.

Not only does this show a genuine good faith effort to engage with users now.

It gives tumblr financial incentive in the future to listen to our needs instead of advertisers.

This is probably the most user friendly thing tumblr has ever done. It could be one of the most user friendly things possible.

This is amazing, and we need to be lining the fuck up to support it.

You know that phrase, "if you're not the customer, you're the product"?

This is tumblr's staff giving us the option to step up, stop being the product, and start being the customer.

senshilegionnaire

And if you can't afford it, it's fine!

Reblog the positive and enthusiastic posts about it, get the word out.

We literally asked for exactly this.

fluffy-critter

My long-term wish for this is that Tumblr becomes one of many IndieWeb providers. When their revenue stream transitions from “how do we get all of the money based on as many people as possible using our platform” to “how do our users individually contribute to our operating costs based on us providing a platform that provides the specific features they want,” that becomes way more feasible.

indieweb tumblr

On the most recent Tumblr shenanigans

So aside from things that I reblog on here, most of my Tumblr posts are automatic crossposts from my own heckin’ website. The thing about my own heckin’ website is that it provides an RSS feed, so the best way to follow it is via a feed reader such as Feedly, The Old Reader, Newsblur, or, if you’re tech-savvy enough to have a website running PHP, Feed-on-Feeds. Many of these have mobile apps or at least mobile-friendly sites.

Another great thing about RSS feeds is that many, many other things provide them. Including Tumblr! That’s right, you can continue to follow Tumblr blogs from not-Tumblr using an RSS feed. Typically you can do that by adding “rss” to the end of the blog URL, for example, https://staff.tumblr.com/rss. You can even get RSS feeds for specific tags, like https://staff.tumblr.com/tagged/tumblr%20tuesday/rss or the like.

If you want to go even further and move your blog off of Tumblr, there’s plenty of options for that too. wordpress.com is $4/month, micro.blog is $5/month, blogger still continues to exist for free somehow, and again, if you’re hosting-savvy you can host your own blog on your own site using any number of systems (off the top of my head, Wordpress, Jekyll, Pelican, Hugo, and Publ are all free with varying levels of technical savvy needed).

Heck, if you have a GitHub account (which is free) you can use GitHub Pages (which is free) and have a turnkey Jekyll-based blog. Again, it needs a bit of tech savvy, but it’s very much worth it to gain that, and GitHub Pages provides a nice interface that makes most of it pretty straightforward.

Keep reading

tumblr meta indieweb blogging