LEECHING AND LINKING IN THE HYPERTEXT KINGDOMiReplying to: Indieweb.xyz: Difficult or Silo?
Heh, well everything not on your own domain is a silo, or at least I can make that argument. Not all silo’s are bad we’ve all just gotten sloppy talking as if they are. Silo’s become particularly bad when they become monopolies: ie. Facebook, Twitter, Google. But what you are trying to do with Indieweb.xyz is exactly the opposite, that is create another independent outlet for both articles to be found and also blogs to be found. We need more of these not less.
Indieweb et al.: Commendably, you have built Indieweb.xyz using Indieweb tech. But I’m not sure if the Indieweb, as it sits right now, is the best audience. I mean, we Indiewebbers all “got ours”, we can talk to each other directly anytime we want, we have: webmentions, chat rooms on Indieweb.org, Slack, IRC and maybe other places, we have Twitter, we have our own Indie News self serve aggregator, newsletters and most of what we talk about with each other is Indeweb related. And there is nothing wrong with any of that, it’s just that, maybe Indieweb.xyz gets overlooked by that audience. I see you have opened things up so that more diverse non-indieweb equipped blogs can syndicate and I think this is wise.
There are blogs and bloggers out there, basically talking to themselves because nobody can find them. They don’t know if anybody is reading or appreciates what they post because nobody comments and they have no clue about Indieweb. They want to reach out but they don’t know how, maybe they aren’t techie, maybe they majored in English at Uni. How do we reach them? How do we get them to get off their duffs and nailing manifestos on Indieweb.xyz? I have to confess, there are times when I forgot to syndicate to xyz because my post was not linking or Indieweb related. I’m getting over that.
Difficulty: I think it is best if we have to do a little work to syndicate to xyz. I’ve thought about what if we could syndicate via RSS but that would spam xyz out. It does not need all my drivel, only my better (or longer) posts. And if you incorporated RSS then the real spammers would take over sooner or later.
There is a generational thing here too. I’m not talking about the Indieweb, but others on the web. They have become passive, or at least it seems that way to me.
Keep at it. You are experimenting with something good. When all the massive silos like FB and Twitter go down or wall themselves off, people will discover the need for places like Indieweb.xyz. They just don’t know it yet.
