More Social than ‘Social Media’

An Independent Web that is More Social than ‘Social Media’ by James Shelley (jamesshelley.com)

The only lasting antidote to social media’s current data monopoly is to create independent networks that are more wholesome, creative, interactive, and, yes, behaviourally reinforcing, than what any corporate AI or algorithm can provide. The Rileys of the world are only going to leave Facebook if the alternative is a manifestly more validating human experience, psychologically and emotionally. The only way this is going to happen in a decentralized network is if a whole bunch of us make thoughtful engagement and amplification of new voices a serious priority. If the independent web is going to survive, it must become a human web.

James, I agree.

POSSE

Speaking as a citizen of the indieweb and not one … by AmandaAmanda (Amanda Unvarnished)

To add to all this, for me, social media, (with the exception of Mastodon and Micro.blog), has, to put it charitably, lost its luster. It’s become a chore, both personally and professionally, and the bad has finally gotten to the point where it outweighs the good for me. On a professional level, publishing criteria are getting so strict that publishing content, (especially when you’re scheduling it so as to not spend all your time staring at a social media client), has become fairly difficult, both because of the publishing rules themselves and because of the inaccessibility of scheduling services and their apps. This is most of the reason why I’m pulling the trigger and going full indieweb later this month. How the closed platforms treat their third-party developers also has some influence on my decision to pull the trigger.

Amanda, I agree, the social platform experiment has become tiring for me. My use of Facebook and Twitter have fallen off dramatically while my use of RSS feeds continues unabated. Even the act of POSSEing my content to social media is a chore. I have almost stopped doing it. And because of concerns about GDPR I no longer back feed comments and like from social silos. I disabled Brid.gy syndication to Facebook and Flickr and only occasionally syndicate to Twitter.

Avoiding syndication to social platforms has made discovery more challenging but I am hoping as the IndieWeb grows, this problem will be solved. We'll find each other the old-fashioned "Web" way. For example, I discovered your post and your website via Chris Aldrich's website.

indiepay.me

indiepay.me by Malcolm BlaneyMalcolm Blaney (unicyclic.com)

I'm sure the blockchain is interesting technology, but I'm also quite happy to show that there's a simpler way to do distributed payment tracking. The key difference is that instead of needing to prove ownership cryptographically, we can claim ownership over our urls.

Indiepay.me is an interesting project. How do you plan on handling record integrity and non-repudiation?