How should I indieweb?
Like most modern geeks on the internet that just saw Twitter go up in a big flame when Elon purchased it most of us out here are trying to go back to owning our own content again. We got burned by throwing all of our content of Facebook and Twitter and want to go back to having stuff on a website we own and can do what we want with.
Fediverse, indieweb tools and lots of Mastodon has been on my mind lately and having my content live on my site but extend out to the Fediverse is the ultimate goal. Before I can get into that I need to think a bit about how I’m going to structure my content on my website. I’m fully adopting the plugin that Jan Boddez created called IndieBlocks which allows for a modern day WordPress website that uses Gutenberg blog editor to actually be able to support things like webmentions but can also do 2 other things, Notes and Likes. What are these? Let’s find out!
What is a note?
Indieweb.org defines a note as a post that is typically short unstructured* plain text, written & posted quickly, that has its own permalink page.
Creating, publishing, and owning your own notes is a key step towards reducing dependence on Twitter.
*Though unstructured meaning without a heading/title or any other explicit structure, notes can include several lines of text or even lists using “*” or numerical markers due to common whitespace support.
https://indieweb.org/note
So I need to think of a note as what I use to do with a tweet and it doesn’t have a title and that title can even be hidden using Jan’s plugin. I checked all the boxes in the plugin and selected my Permalinks. We’ll see what happens next.
What is a Like?
Lets see what IndieWeb has to say about Likes
like is a popular webaction button and in some cases post type on various silos such as Facebook and Instagram. It is similar to but different from a favorite.
- See likes for how to and examples of displaying likes received on your posts from other sites!
There are multiple reasons people post likes and multiple meanings attached to the “like” action itself
https://indieweb.org/like
- To show the author of the content that you enjoyed/appreciated their work
- To indicate to the author of a post “thank you”, or to acknowledge the receipt of a message or say “I saw this” without further comment in a longer string of back and forth messages. This intent may be better explicitly effectuated on one’s own website by posting a read receipt.
- To make the like counter on the content increase
- To effectuate a bookmark or some other post type intent on platforms which don’t explicitly have that functionality (this is relatively common on Twitter and some indicate it in their bios.) When posting on one’s own website, it is recommended to create a specific bookmark post or other specific post type.
I can see this being used a bunch of ways, the last bit about bookmarks is interesting, Jan’s plugin has support for such Bookmark, Like, Reply and Repost in its Context block. I enabled Links in the plugin so we’ll give that a try as well.
I’m going to need to play around with these a bit and see how liking things out on the web end up working out for my website. I also need to work on h-card to see how that will work for me on my website (mine can be found in my footer of my website jasontucker.blog)
