House of Nettles: #web

Using the StoryGraph

2026-08-23T09:20:27Z

I've moved all my book reviews, both archival and ongoing, onto the StoryGraph (link also available in the header along with my other media review accounts). If you want to see what I think about books, go give it a follow; if I recognize you, I'll follow you back. As with my other reviews, I'll only be cross-posting the ones I think are particularly good, so you'll have to go to the source if you want to see everything.

I've been searching for a really good book tracking website for a long time, and StoryGraph is good enough. I used Goodreads for a number of years, despite finding its Amazon ownership intensely distasteful, because at the time I started tracking books it was the only option with any amount of traction. In addition to (and possibly because of) its position in the evil empire of booksellers, it didn't seem to have developed a single new feature since 2013. In particular, it had no way to look through one's own books by genre or do other cross-referencing tasks that are a major part of what makes these sites valuable to me.

About a year ago, I migrated everything to BookWyrm on a friend's suggestion. It solved the Amazon issue handily, but was a step back on almost every other front. The UI is so bad that it actively discouraged me from tracking books as I read them; it's ridden with subtle differences between different ways of marking books as reading or read or writing reviews that do or don't show up as separate posts on its inexplicable Fediverse backend, and the frontend itself offers no affordances for basic things like indicating that it's processing a request you made. Its database is itself deeply messy, often with half a dozen versions of a single book with none being marked as canonical and no clear path to helping the admins unify them. On top of all that, it provided exactly none of the features I felt Goodreads was missing, if anything making it harder to organize and cross-reference a collection.

StoryGraph improves on all of these issues. It's not Amazon, and in fact explicitly marketed around the fact that it's better than Goodreads which gives me at least a faint hope that whoever runs it would find it politically infeasible to sell out too badly. Its interface is silly in places (it's possible to rate a book up to 5.75 stars due to idiosynratic the way it handles intermediate scores) but entirely functional. And its collection view allows enough cross-referencing to satisfy my general needs.

The thing I don't entirely understand is this: Letterboxd has existed for fifteen years now. It's well-known, it's widely referenced, and it's excellent from a UI standpoint. Its ability to collate and cross-reference films is smooth and universal: every film links its director, its year, and its cast and crew, and clicking on any of these brings you to a standard "film list" view that covers all of the films that fit the same criterion. This view is compact but also powerful, allowing you to further filter by decade, genre, and whether or not you've watched it (or reviewed it, or rated it, etc).

I don't understand why this hasn't been adopted as the universal bar for what a functional media browsing UI looks like. Compare Letterboxd's listing of films by a director to Storygraph's listing of books by an author:

Look how much more compact Letterboxd is. Look how many ways you can customize the view! Most of the interactions that take up half the real estate in StoryGraph are accessible through the hover interface in Letterboxd, and all the metadata for each book is just a click away. This isn't going to put me off the website by any means, but it's baffling to me why other websites don't just rip off Letterboxd's design here. It's flat-out better!

A Non-Technical Intro to Webmentions

2024-10-22T02:00:25Z

I keep bringing up "Webmentions" in the context of discussing the sociable web and advocating for more people to adopt more social technologies on their websites, but I always run into a wall: there's no good place to link people to so they can understand more about what that means. All the existing explanations I've found are deep in the weeds of how Webmentions work on a technical level, which isn't a very helpful place to start for people who just want to post.

I want to fill that gap with this post, and give people who don't know the ins and outs of HTTP a working understanding of what Webmentions do and how to get them up and running for your site. To that end:

Webmentions are a way to let a website know that you linked to it.

That's it! At it's core, it's just that simple. If a website supports Webmentions, you tell it "Hey, here's the URL of a page with a link to you", it double-checks that the link actually exists, and then it does what it pleases with that information.

What can you do with Webmentions?

Notifications

The simplest thing you can do is just look at the Webmentions you receive like a notifications feed on a social media site, and appreciate that people like what you're up to. I get all my Webmentions delivered to me as an RSS feed (more on that below), and I'll always check out the links to see what people are saying.

My Webmention notification feed on webmention.io

In addition to being the easiest to set up, I think this is actually the most useful thing to do with Webmentions. Having a way to see when people reply to your posts makes conversation possible and seeing people's appreciation encourages performance. Even if you never go beyond using Webmentions as pure notifications, it's a great way to become more interconnected.

Replies as comments

If someone makes a post on their blog that's replying to yours and sends you a Webmention, you can display that reply like a comment underneath your post. This is pretty common for out-of-the-box Webmention plugins, like this one for WordPress^[1]. You can see it in action on Liz's WordPress blog where my reply on this blog shows up as a comment on hers, with my avatar and the original posting date and everything.

My post replying to Liz

My post as a reply on Liz's blog

Making this work nicely requires a bit of setup on the part of the page that contains the link, though. A computer isn't smart enough to take any old webpage and figure out which parts of it are the author's name, the author's avatar, the text of the reply, and so on. In order for all of that to work nicely, the linking page needs to use h-entry metadata to explicitly indicate all this information. Fair warning: h-entry is unavoidably a bit technical to set up. since it requires editing HTML. That said, some blog hosts like micro.blog do support it out of the box, and others like WordPress have plugins to handle it for you.

Even if a page is mentioned by something without any metadata, it can still display a link back; it just won't have much additional information. Here's what a bare, metadata-free mention looks like on my blog:

Reposts and likes

In addition to replies, which are basically reposts or links with additional content, Webmentions + h-entry can express a number of other relationships between posts. (Technical moment: which relationship you express depends on which class attribute you put on the link. For example, <a class="u-in-reply-to" href="..."> indicates that you're replying to the linked post. A link without a class is just treated as a generic mention.)

Reposts (class="u-repost-of"): This usually indicates that you're reposting some or all of the content of another post with minimal additional content of your own. This is modeled on the Twitter retweet more than the Tumblr reblog, which I think is better expressed as a reply.
Likes (class="u-like-of"): This indicates that you're expressing appreciation of a post, also usually without additional content. You might, for example, have a page on your website that's just there to contain "like" links. I personally don't use this one, because I find commenting to be a more personal way of expressing my appreciation, even if it's just a little ":yeah:".

There are more relationships between pages that aren't as widely supported, like RSVPs to events, reviews of media, translations of posts, and so on. But these are the main ones, especially if you're coming at it from a social angle.

How do I send Webmentions?

Some sites that support Webmentions will provide you a handy text box into which you can paste the URL of a page which links to the page you're on. My blog has this at the bottom of each page, for example. But not all pages have a form for this, and even if they did it would get pretty annoying to do manually all the time.

Blog software and plugins that support Webmentions will usually automatically handle this for you, sending them out every time you make a post (or edit it, so that websites know to update any Webmentions they display). But if it doesn't, don't despair—webmention.app has your back. It takes a bit of doing, but you can set it up to send Webmentions every time your RSS feed updates^[2], which will work with just about any blog under the sun.

Edit: Apparently the old documentation^[2:1] for setting this up now costs money, since IFTTT doesn't provide free webhook support anymore. Fortunately, Karma Chameleon has new instructions for setting it up with make.com instead, which is free.

How do I receive Webmentions?

Okay, this bit is unavoidably at least a little bit technical. Unless your blog platform supports Webmentions out-of-the-box or through a plugin, you're going to have to edit some HTML. But don't worry! I'll guide you through it.

I use webmention.io to receive Webmentions, and I recommend it. It's got a straightforward, sensible UI—the only wrinkle is that its signin process may not be what you're used to. But I'll guide you through that as well.

Choose an email address that you're okay exposing to the world. If you don't want to use your primary email, Fastmail and Proton both provide free accounts.
Let's say your domain name is me.example.org and your email is me@example.org. Add the following to your website's HTML:
```
<link rel="me" href="mailto:me@example.org">
<link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/me.example.org/webmention">
```
If possible, these should go just before the </head> in your HTML. That said, if you can't edit your layout directly, these should work anywhere on the page. They won't be visible; they're just there to tell computers
- this is an email address that belongs to the person who runs this website, and
- this is the URL to which to send Webmentions for this page.
The only real constraint is that they need to be on both the root page of your site and on each page that you want to receive Webmentions.
Go to webmention.io, type in your site's base URL under "Web Sign-In", and click "Sign In". It's important that you don't include a path in the URL (good: https://example.org/, bad: https://example.org/blog/my-post). Otherwise the URL for the <link rel="webmention"> we added above won't be correct.
This will take you through a sign-in flow where a login code will be emailed to the email you put on your website above, which verifies that you are in fact the person who owns this website.
Once you're signed in, you'll be redirected to webmention.io/dashboard. I recommend bookmarking this, because for whatever reason there's not an easy way to get there from the main page without signing in all over again.

Once you're at the dashboard, you're good to go—webmentions will be visible there, or you can get them in your feed reader by going to "Settings > Mentions Feed" and copying the mentions.atom URL into your feed reader^[3].

Webmentions from other websites

Whether you're using your blog's built-in Webmention support, webmention.io, or some other system, you can use the brid.gy app to convert replies and comments on a bunch of other social websites into Webmentions on your site. I do this for the Fediverse, and you can see for example a bunch of Fediverse discussion below this post. It's sometimes a little shaky, especially because it doesn't always preserve threading accurately, but it works!

It looks like brid.gy can also act as a Webmention plugin for Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, and Medium. I haven't tried this personally, so I can't vouch for it. But it might work great!

Go out there and get mentioned!

I really recommend getting Webmentions set up. It does involve a bit of silly rigamarole, it's true, but it's worth it to become part of the sociable web. And the more people start using this, the more it'll become a valuable feature for blogging platforms to support without any hassle. And now at least it'll be a bit demystified for those who want to understand what it's all about without reading W3C specifications.

WordPress has been the talk of the town lately for the WordPress.com CEO's non-stop heinous antics, so I hesitate to give it a full-throated endorsement. That said, it's by far the easiest way I know of to get up and running with all the IndieWeb technology from zero baseline knowledge, and fortunately the engine itself is open source so it's unlikely to collapse completely. Just maybe choose a hosting provider that's not WordPress.com. ↩︎
If you do choose to follow this documentation, note that it includes adding &token=... to the hook URL. You can get a token by signing into webmention.app with a GitHub URL, but I don't think you really need to. Without a token, you can only make four requests per URL per hour, but if you're only sending one request per page anyways that won't matter. So you should be able to safely leave off the &token=... bit. ↩︎ ↩︎
There's also a mentions.html URL, but you can ignore that. It uses an h-entry based feed format that's pretty cool, but not at all widely supported whereas Atom is pretty much universal. ↩︎

A Sociable Web

2024-10-19T03:27:07Z

The process of building out this site has inevitably involved design choices about how to engage with various technologies and other people's web presences. It's a truism that you can't solve social problems with technology, but social media has made it just as clear that technology does shape the social dynamics that emerge in the spaces it mediates. This drives me to wonder: as more of my friends and friends-of-friends move to individual websites and blogs, what social dynamics does this give rise to? And what different technical designs could improve those dynamics?

I think it's most interesting to approach this question from the social direction rather than the technological. Our first priority should be a set of social goals for interacting on the internet, and only with that understanding firmly in hand can we start usefully interrogating the way technology gives rise to or fights against the sort of interactions we want. My ultimate aim is to articulate a clear vision of a way to interact with people's websites that's not just a pastime or a research process, but that can meet social needs—to imagine what I'll call a "sociable web".

I'm using the term "sociable web" as a conscious contrast to "social network". Social networks have unavoidably shaped our understanding of what form of socialization is possible online, and I don't even think it's always been for the worse. But now they are fragmenting and rotting, and whatever was good about them—their casual usability, the massive network effect of "all your friends are here"—is falling away like so much decayed flesh. I want to envision something new, and when doing so I often find that a new name can help.

"Web" versus "Network"

I'm not interested in a "network" in the sense either of a single company overseeing many users or a decentralized collection of nodes like the Fediverse that is nevertheless tightly coupled technologically. I don't think either of these forms are sustainable in a capitalist world. They are either fed by boundless venture capital coffers which inevitably move to capitalize their userbase, or they're built on the backs of massive amounts of unpaid labor and poorly-understood power structures. The exploitative conditions under which these networks are produced run downstream and affect their social dynamics.

I'm interested in a social form that uses as its foundation the web itself. Where anyone can participate just by having a website. Where the existing networks are, to some degree, part of that form already simply by virtue of being accessible over HTTPS.

"Social" is unopinionated. "Social" is throwing a bunch of people into a room and seeing what happens. A party can be social, but so can a witch hunt. "Social" is thinking about the technology as primary and allowing the social dynamics to fall out from that. When things are built to be merely "social", they force the real humans who use them into chaotic interactions both healthy and harmful, a freeze peach nightmare that only a libertarian could love.

I want more than that. I want things to be sociable, to be friendly, to be fun. I don't mean to try to avoid conflict entirely, which is neither possible nor truly desirable. But to envision a sociable web is to envision a place where interactions that make your world richer are easy to realize, and those that make your life worse easy to curtail. I want to be able to chat in public without the world overhearing, to meet new people and be able to block creeps, and to have conversations without being drowned in a sea of bad faith.

The first step towards understanding what a sociable web could be is to understand the social goals we're trying to achieve. Social media, for all its doomed flaws, is a huge part of millions of people's lives for a reason, and it's not just because it exploitatively monopolizes its users' attention. It meets real needs people have for connection and communication in a space that's decoupled^[1] from physical proximity. If we can identify the healthy interactions and cut them away from the rotten habitat that is (for now) their only home, we can start building a web that is genuinely for us.

Conversation 💬

This is the core of what it means to socialize: saying things, having people hear them, and listening to responses. If you're not saying anything, you're just a lurker—not a bad thing to be, but also not a participant in a social dynamic. If no one hears you, you're just writing a diary. And if no one responds, then you might as well be. Conversation is the fundamental building block of human interaction. Without conversation, you have nothing. Silence. Void.

Conversation, like the libertarian "social", is unopinionated. It can be vapid or it can be enlightening; it can be uplifting or it can be miserable. But this flexibility is also an asset: when conversation can be both silly and serious, comic and tragic, it gives people room to bring their whole selves (or whatever slices or performances of themselves that they want) into the space. This is one reason I make a point of posting jokes on this blog, even when they're incredibly dumb.

Conversations are also (at least in physical reality) local. Even when conversing in a public space or a crowded party, most of the time you're just talking with a small number of people. People may drop in and out, but there's no expectation that everyone in the room will hear everything you say.

...and Technology

I see conversation as one of the key failures of the old-school "blogosphere". You could post all you wanted, but the means of actually turning those posts into a conversation was extremely limited. Comment sections met this need to a degree, but without the ability to make a long-form response to a long-form post and have the original author actually see it a culture of back-and-forth never blossomed.

The classic blog form also felt, for better or for worse, like it had to be long-form and serious—another failure of conversation. I think part of this was just a problem of snowballing cultural precedent, part of it was a failure of performance (which I'll get into below), and part of it was a vicious cycle with the inability to reply in kind. Small posts are compelling to write because they function as an invitation to casually interact with the author. Once that interaction is curtailed, there's far less reason to write small posts; if you write fewer small posts, you'll build up less of a network of people who will interact casually.

Tumblr, to its credit, did solve both of these problems. Its original stated goal was to be a blogging platform that encouraged smaller posts, but it also supported reposts^[2]—and in doing so, ended up metamorphosing from its blog-oriented origins into an out-and-out social media site. I think this is the critical distinction, in fact, between the era of blogs and the era of social media. Blogs are built around a one-way flow of writing, where social media is built around conversation. So how can we bring conversation back to individual websites, which are tied to the blog form at least inasmuch as they aren't part of a tightly-coupled network?

It won't surprise those of you who read my post on h-entry that I think reposting is a key part of the answer. Having a way to interact with people that keeps the context of the conversation intact and encourages other people to participate is extremely valuable. But equally valuable is making sure that the conversation is visible to the existing participants. If I can only see replies from people I'm already following, conversation is stifled. I think Webmentions are the best solution for this that currently exists, and I'm planning a more thorough non-technical introduction to them for a future post.

Performance 🎭

Although talking with people is the most important way of being sociable, I think there's another modality that's subtler but still very relevant: performing for people. I mean "performance" in a very broad sense, covering anything that's fundamentally about creating something for others to appreciate. This can be a long, well-reasoned essay or a silly offhand joke; it can be visual art, a poem, or a css crime. I call it "performance" because my heart is in the theater, and because a critical aspect is not just the creation itself but the two-way dynamic between the creator and the audience.

To be able to see the joy or catharsis or edification your creation brings to people in real time is tremendously heady. At its best, it allows the creator to see their work through new eyes and appreciate it all the more. It can be inspirational, motivational, and even open up whole new avenues of creation—for example, I would have never started helping Zandra with Her Majesty the Prince if she hadn't treated it as a performance she was writing live, chapter by chapter.

The potency of performance can be turned to harm, though. The desire for applause can wrap itself around your heart until everything starts to feel like a performance. Performances can be a great joy and a source of profound connection, and having room for them is crucial. But they cannot be the bread and butter of social interaction. Any healthy social situation must have plenty of room for simple conversations with no thought of an audience beyond the participants.

...and Technology

Performance is the handle by which social media grabs hold of your attention and refuses ever to let go. Performance is the food it feeds you as you scroll your infinite timeline, and the heart of the Skinner box it uses to keep you posting forever. This is harmful. Cohost absolutely made the right call in dramatically minimizing this effect by removing metrics such as like counts for posts and follower counts for people.

But like many vital nutrients, while an overwhelming focus on performance is toxic, you need some to thrive. And this is something that individual web sites struggle with^[3]. You can implement anonymous "likes" like Medium's claps or BearBlog's up arrow, but without names and faces this feels hollow and impersonal. And attaching an identity while still making "liking" a post simple and quick all but requires some sort of centralized account^[4].

I think comments are a critical part of the solution here. Even a simple "hell yeah" or "love this!" comment feels personal, and there are plenty of comment systems that make posting without an account relatively painless. And "making a comment" feels enough weightier than "liking a post" that a small signup flow reads as less egregious, even if the end purpose is the same.

Reposts are even more valuable as a form of "applause". Not only do they bring a post to a new audience, but they're the strongest possible endorsement. Nothing makes me feel more like my writing is appreciated than seeing it show up in a friend's link roundup, and I think the roundups people like Dante, Shel, Nicky, Caoimhe, and many more have been doing are among the most valuable contributions to building a sustainable culture for a sociable web.

And I do think culture is the deciding factor for nourishing performance without letting it become toxic. For sure, there are technological aspects as well: Webmentions are crucial for allowing an author to actually see reposts, h-entry makes it far easier to create a repost and adds a lot of expressive power to Webmentions, and the generally slower pace of web-based posting limits the potential for performance to become toxic. But none of that matters if we don't establish a culture where we tell people when we appreciate their posts and share them if we think our friends will appreciate them as well.

Meeting People 👋

Hanging out with your friends is lovely, but friends don't come from nowhere. Everyone wonderful in your life (other than blood relatives) was once a stranger to you, and there was a moment when you first met them. In order for a social context to fully function, to be more than just a group chat, there must be a way to build new relationships with people you don't already know—to have that moment of meeting and to give it room to grow.

There are two parts to this that are equally important. First, you have to have a way to actually literally see new people in your daily social experiences. If you're only ever interacting with the same group of friends, you'll never meet anyone new. There needs to be some amount of circulation: being introduced to friends-of-friends, going to a party, joining a hobby group for something you're interested in. What are the analogues for these the digital world?

But merely interacting with new people isn't enough. Building an actual relationship with someone requires a capacity for balance. There must be a way to break the parasocial asymmetry of merely "following" someone and to instead put yourselves on equal terms. That's not to say that you have to do this with everyone, or that it has to be explicit—it's rarely explicit in person. But if there are structural barriers from moving from "acquaintance" or "fan" to "friend", then all you'll ever be or have is groupies.

...and Technology

I have met the substantial majority of my friends, including many people I consider "in-person friends", either directly through social media or transitively through other friends whom I met through social media. My life would be immeasurably different if I'd never created a Twitter account, and most of that difference would be the connections I would have never established with people who are now beloved friends. But despite all that, I don't think social media is actually very successful at making it possible to meet people.

There were specific historical contexts in which it worked well, to be sure. The little slice of queer Twitter I was part of in the mid-10s, after the most vicious of the cancel wars but before the algorithmic timeline got really bad, was one of those contexts. I'm sure over the years and across the communities there were many more. These were never perfect—I have come to strongly believe that knowing for sure when someone unfollows you or doesn't follow back is intrinsically corrosive to real friendship—but they did function.

But those contexts were always contingent, small loopholes that were doomed to close. The structure of social media, the arc upon which it bends, pulls towards a world where parasocial relationships are everything, because parasocial relationships are profitable^[5]. The parasocial structure already mirrors the distribution of content for profit, and so is far easier to Midas-touch into the gold standard of the internet era: advertising. X dot com is no longer the hot new kid on the block; it has far fewer users than TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, all of which are fundamentally about sharing media rather than communicating. The only outlier is Facebook, which itself has fan pages and a deeply pernicious algorithm.

This is one place where I think the classic blog structure fares a little better in one key respect: it's very easy to have a balanced relationship with someone. You "follow" someone via RSS or just checking their blog periodically, and this leaves no trace other than the comments or other conversations you explicitly choose to have. It can be parasocial—or at least it could back in the day when there existed very popular blogs with huge followings—but if a blogger appreciates a particular set of comments or reposts they can easily follow the creator's blog, post a few comments of their own, and gracefully unfollow if it doesn't click.

The crucial problem for blogs is the circulation. You need to be able to actually see other people in order to meet them. Friends' reposts and link roundups (which are functionally the same thing) can help you find new blogs to follow, although there's currently not a great equivalent of "hobby groups"^[6]. Comments can help you actually connect with new people you've found, although this really only works if they connect back to the commenter's own web presence, which many out-of-the-box comment solutions frustratingly don't support. I'm sure forbidding homepage links mitigates spam to some degree, but I think it's actively detrimental to establishing new connections, and I encourage everyone to search out comment apps that have a place to fill in the commenter's website (as am I at the moment—there's a lot not to like about CommentBox but this tops the list for me).

Having people repost and respond to your posts is also an excellent way to get a sense of them, because you're seeing them in their native habitat, as it were: on their own blog, writing primarily for their audience. But this does require actually being notified when those reposts happen, which requires the use of a technology like Webmentions on both ends of the interaction.

Avoiding People 🫤

The final pillar is I think the most difficult all around: in a healthy social space it must be possible not just to have healthy interactions, but to avoid unhealthy ones. This is, interestingly, something that's not even entirely solved in person—I imagine that the delicate dance of navigating which of your feuding friends to invite to which parties is a tale as old as the concept of a party itself. But in person you can at least always walk away when someone you can't stand walks up, and if someone is being belligerent enough you can toss them out on their ear.

A healthy social space has to be resilient to both small-scale interpersonal conflict and large-scale bad actors to avoid collapsing under the weight of humans being inevitably human. At the same time, it has to be acknowledged that a perfect solution here isn't possible—someone with a big enough grudge and enough VPNs can harass you through the most robust defense, and it'll never be possible to just edit someone out of your life or community no matter how much they piss you off.

...and Technology

Just like in person, I don't know that any digital platform has come up with a really robust solution here. The state of the art, I suppose, is mutes ("I can't see you") and blocks ("...and you can't see me either") for smaller conflicts and thoughtful human moderation along with suspensions, bans, and IP bans for bigger problems. Unfortunately, all of that depends intrinsically on having a centralized platform.

Even the Fediverse, for all its Twitter mimicry, struggles with this issue. Mutes work fine, blocks mostly work but only on the assumption that other instances play by the rules. Bans only sort of half work—in email terms, you can ban someone from making an account on your server or emailing anyone on your server, and you can ask politely that no one forward anything from your server to them. All of these cross-server conventions are enforced by the extremely coarse-grained threat of defederation, which itself relies on intermediate servers that are not defederated to play nicely. To a degree, it all comes down to little fiefdoms screaming at each other.

And that's still worlds more than you can do on an independent site. Most comment services provide the means of blocking someone from commenting on your blog, but unless it's self-hosted that's the limit. Anything more than that (like making sure they can't cause problems for other people) is up to the comment software's moderation staff, if they have any. If you run your own server and know the IP of someone who's a problem, you can probably IP-ban them, but there's no other way to block them from looking at your site (and even an IP ban is easy to circumvent). There is some intrinsic protection just by virtue of how relatively low-bandwidth the communication channels on individual websites are—it's a lot harder for someone to dogpile you when sending you a message isn't just two taps away for all their followers—but that only goes so far. I don't know if there's a great solution here, especially given that no public presence will ever be truly safe from dedicated harassment.

Smaller-scale avoidance is somewhat easier. RSS readers could in principle filter out reposts from people you don't want to see—the only one I know for sure has this feature is Inoreader (and then only with a paid account), but it's not hard to envision. If all my dreams come true and blogs do truly have a wide resurgence, maybe this will become a valuable differentiating feature. And again, the fact that blogs are much less of a firehose than social media means that it's that much easier to periodically just wince and scroll past a repost of someone you dislike.

Can we do it?

Is a sociable web even something that's possible to create? In 2024, it's easy to despair at computers in general or the internet in particular being usable for anything good at all, and yet here you are reading my words, hoping to make some sort of connection with me or with my ideas. I believe in the power of those connections. It may be true that no corner of the world is safe from the corrosive power of capitalism, but so too is no corner of the world impervious to human flourishing.

I think we can do it. In fact, I think we will—but whether that starts now or years from now depends on us. What precisely a sociable web will look like, I'm not sure. That's why here I've chosen to focus on the social goals first and make the technology secondary. But I do believe that enough technology exists today to at least take a stab at it, and I want you to join me in that.

The deepest virtue of independent websites communicating with loosely-coupled conventions and protocols isn't anything technical. It's the fact that you can just do it. You don't need a platform to exist, you don't even need anyone else to be doing the same thing (although it's more fun that way). You can write a blog and people can read it via RSS or just by loading it up every now and then^[7]. You can hook up as much IndieWeb technology as you want^[8], or just focus on the cultural aspect by writing link roundups and leaving comments on the stuff you read.

The crucial part is that you participate, and help to shape the web you want to exist in. Don't just let the dictates of some megaplatform constrain the way you connect with people. You have the power to make the web a place for people.

To a degree. Language barriers, time zones, networks of existing friends, and barriers to technological access all put some pressure even on the internet to make friends with people physically close to you. But at the very least it expands "close" from "your city" to something more like "your country" or even "your hemisphere". ↩︎
To the best of my knowledge Tumblr introduced the concept of "reposting", although I haven't done any research to verify this so I'm putting that statement down here in an uncertain footnote rather than boldly stating it in the main text. ↩︎
Adding analytics seems at first blush like a solution to this, albeit one that's usually quite invasive. But I think it doesn't address the core issue, because it only measures passive behavior, not active feedback. It's the difference between reading ticket sale numbers in an office and hearing the applause on stage. ↩︎
The Webmention protocol combined with h-entry can explicitly express a "like", but to like a post you must establish a long-lived link to it on a site you control which is absolutely not simple. You could make a generalized "Webmention like" app that's just designed to do this, and it would be usable enough as a browser extension or dedicated button, but that's basically just reinventing a centralized account. ↩︎
One might hope that the fediverse would avoid this issue by not having a profit motive. It certainly is better, to the degree that it explicitly avoids an algorithmic timeline—although I would contend that the global and local timelines pull in the opposite direction. But it (or at least all its most popular instantiations) is so heavily influenced by the structure of Twitter that it inherits its failures as well. And just so we're clear: even classic Twitter was never good, it was just not yet bad enough to completely preclude pockets of valuable community from forming. ↩︎
Back in the day there was a concept of "feed aggregators", often focused on a particular topic, which would take a bunch of RSS feeds—sometimes just posts tagged with a particular topic—and combine them into one output feed. I'd love to see this become a thing again. Blackle's Sortition Social is the only one I know of right now, although it's not at all topic-specific. ↩︎
I learned recently that this is how my girlfriend has been reading this blog and it blew my mind. I have since promised to give her a personalized introduction to feed readers. ↩︎
If anyone wants help with this by the way: open invitation. I would love to get more people up and running with h-entry and Webmentions. ↩︎

2024-10-18T22:29:11Z

Obspogon asked:

How do I reblog from you, webmention style?

I want to test out webmentions since I added h-card markup to my blog thanks to your posts. How do I reblog a post from you? What HTML and classes do I use? I'm using a static site generator.

I'll make a more thorough post about this at some point, but the short answer is that all you really need to do is tell my Webmention receiver the URL to your post and the URL to the post it's reblogging. You can do that manually by pasting the link to your post in the little webmention form beneath each of mine, or automatically by hooking up your blog's RSS feed to webmention.app.

The only bit of markup that can help here is adding either class="u-repost-of" or class="u-in-reply-to"^[1] on your post to indicate what it's reposting or replying to. Use u-repost-of if it's just a plain repost without any additions, and u-in-reply-to if you're adding any additional content. You can put these on:

A simple <a> tag whose href is my post.
The root element of an h-cite that provides more metadata about my post.
The root element of an h-entry fully embeds my post in your blog. (This is technically non-standard but it's what I do and it seems to work with everything I've tested.)

I've set up my site so that it hides Webmention likes and reposts, but displays replies as comments below the post. See this post for an example of that in action.

Technically you can also do class="u-like-of" to indicate a like but that's not something that makes a lot of sense in a static site context. ↩︎

2024-10-10T06:09:15Z

Ryan asked:

Have you played with WebC? Like a lot of 11ty stuff they're not super well documented, but they seem like a good way to do code reuse without having to send JS to the browser (unlike web components or HTMX or things like that). I recently ported my blog over and while there's some weirdness that I had to get over, they're a good experience overall.

I haven't seen this, and it does look pretty cool. I appreciate a take on the web component idea that's legitimately built around running on the server and sending down normal HTML. That said, while I'm also not a huge fan of web components as a dev pattern either. I tend to pass a bunch of parameters to my components and that's intrinsically kind of messy with HTML.

I'm also rotating in my mind the possibility of pulling some of my embed logic out into re-usable packages, and if I do that I'd like to make them as general-purpose as possible. The less I can lock them into the Eleventy ecosystem, the happier I am, and this seems very tightly bound to 11ty.

2024-10-09T23:57:12Z

alice slimelia asked:

HIII just wanted to say thank you for bringing h-entry to my attention! I've added it to my own static blog generator and, by extension, my blog! there's so many things out there in the world you just never know about and would never stumble upon without someone going "hey look at this cool thing"

hell yeah glad to see more people doing it! consider also annotating your p-author with an h-card so you can provide an avatar—I had to pull this one manually from your tumblr

2024-10-09T22:14:57Z

bcj wrote:

An Annoying thing about feed readers

I've put some effort into making my site look as close to not bad as I know and to make things from friends I reply to look distinct and then feedbin just presents it as largely-unstyled text. Hmm, I guess technically my own feed is probably missing most of that styling now that I think about it

My friends have spent time making their pages look actually good and then unless I click through I don't get to see that.

I guess I could consider a deeper look at alternative feed readers

yeah I add inline styles and everything to make my embeds look nice in the pared-down feed reader rendering, and my reader just strips everything. not even a token effort to allowlist safe styles. it will load iframes though! insane

2024-10-04T23:20:06Z

Natalie wrote:

my least favorite thing about all my friends' BearBlogs is the total lack of avatars. if I don't have a fursona or selfie or silly little guy next to a post who I can imagine reading it to me, what's even the point

Robert Birming wrote:

@c_rakestraw @nex3 Saw your posts about avatars and Bear blog. Just wanted to let you know that you can with the Bearming theme I’ve created. See live example and code here: birming.com/bearming/

bitchin'

2024-10-04T05:25:12Z

my least favorite thing about all my friends' BearBlogs is the total lack of avatars. if I don't have a fursona or selfie or silly little guy next to a post who I can imagine reading it to me, what's even the point

2024-10-02T22:41:49Z

li (occuring) wrote:

however. please 😮‍💨 at me if i am only ever posting about computer or website. to lightly paraphrase something a friend pointed out… the real tragedy of october 1 is that a lot more of the people who i will be seeing online in this way will be… computer touchers. programmers. (although now that i say this: it would be interesting to do a little audit of my actual blogroll. because i can think of Several who are not this.)
…

I'm really happy to see a bunch of the less-technical people I followed on Cohost setting up blogs with Bear or Ghost or WordPress. It's been fun for me to set this site up as a playground for what could be possible as far as bringing the aspects of social media I value to the web, but truly one of the biggest virtues of social media sites is making it so so easy to get set up and start posting. At the same time, it's also one of its biggest downfalls, because it's the same thing that makes it so easy to get sucked into the quicksand of corporate lock-in.

House of Nettles: #web

Using the StoryGraph

A Non-Technical Intro to Webmentions

What can you do with Webmentions?

Notifications

Replies as comments

Reposts and likes

How do I send Webmentions?

How do I receive Webmentions?

Webmentions from other websites

Go out there and get mentioned!

A Sociable Web

Sociable Web not Social Network

"Web" versus "Network"

"Sociable" versus "Social"

Social Pillars

Conversation 💬

...and Technology

Performance 🎭

...and Technology

Meeting People 👋

...and Technology

Avoiding People 🫤

...and Technology

Can we do it?

How do I reblog from you, webmention style?

An Annoying thing about feed readers