2019-12-24 - Praxis and Indieweb (response to Tomasino)
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Tomasino wrote about his reacquaintance with the Indieweb over on
his gopher.black site[1], and asked of the gopherverse:
> Are any of you running IndieWeb goodness? Have thoughts or
> suggestions? Wanna vent? Send me a mention in the lovely gopher
> style!
So here goes.
To begin, and before I get into anything else, I need to state this
loudly and clearly: I like the Indieweb movement. I like the
aspirational statements which underpin the movement. I like the
people involved, I've interacted with more than a few of them and
have found them to be, almost without exception, among the most
earnest, polite and encouraging people I've ever met online.
However (and yes, there was always going to be a but) I've come to
believe that the movement as it is currently structured can never
move into widespread acceptance, that it is both target blind and
exclusionary, and that, as a consequence, I don't want to devote
more of my time to it.
To take the first criticism - that the movement is target blind -
I'd suggest that you take a look at the indieweb.org site, which
sets out the basic principles of the thing, and talks about owning
your own site. It then goes on to describe "posts" as the essential
building block of the site, and offers a bewildering and lengthy
categorisation of the types of posts -
https://indieweb.org/posts
Almost every one of those "types" is essentially a replication of
the offerings of the various Corporate Silos. When a new feature
is added to one of the corporates, say polls on twitter, or
instagram's private stories, then the indieweb people set about
replicating that feature on their own sites. In every case that
I've looked at, other than the basic "article" case, these
features inclusion in the indieweb are predicated on their use &
exploitation by the corporates.
In allowing the movement to be dominated by this effort to
replicate the corporate silos, the indieweb has engaged in a
sisyphean task which it simply can never finish. Corporate silos
spend *millions* of dollars inventing new ways to keep people
hooked on their sites, it is the business they are in. A collection
of volunteers cannot ever hope to compete, much less complete.
That's before you address one of the key central logical constructs
of the indieweb movement: POSSE - Publish Own Site, Syndicate
Elsewhere. Again, the basic intention of this construct *is
praiseworthy*, by publishing on your own site first, then "pushing"
that to the corporate site, you remain in control of what you've
published.
The problem is that this construct fails in two key ways, legal and
conceptual. Legally, any and all content that you post to a silo is
no longer "your content". To quote a lump from the twitter
boilerplate:
> By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the
> Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free
> license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce,
> process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute
> such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now
> known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for
> example, curating, transforming, and translating.
To claim that you are retaining authorship rights in what you
publish on your own site, while facilitating posting the same
content to someone to whom you grant a "worldwide non-exclusive
royalty-free license" which includes "copying and adapting" is
nonsensical.
Conceptually, posting something from your own site to a third-party
service is always, *always* at the mercies of that service. As
twitter becomes ever more closed, for example, this construct will
become ever more meaningless. If a service goes away, like google's
services have a habit of doing, then the "exposure" which was
previously granted withers and dies.
That feature of third-party services brings us to one of the most
glaring problems of the indieweb movement - one which Tomasino has
already met - the "Single Point of Aaron".
When you dig into the various "indieweb technologies", you come to
realise, very quickly, that these are better described as "parecki
technologies". Webmentions.io, for instance, that's an Aaron
Parecki site. Aperture, the microsub reader Tomasino mentions,
that's also Aaron's. The Microsub spec is written by Aaron, much as
the Webmention spec was.
While its wonderful that these things are there, they and each of
them individually are inherently biased towards Aaron's own coding
preferences. Aaron, when he's not indiewebbing, is one of the
authors of the Oauth2 specification, and works professionally in
that field. So, guess which auth/validation scheme is used almost
uniformly by the indieweb? (The answer will not surprise you!)
If something isn't written by Aaron, then its usually written by
Tantek Çelik or one of the other leading luminaries, and it
follows their own preferences. Ryan Barrett, for instance, works
for google, and all his indieweb components use Google's Compute
Engine. These guys all work for tech companies, to some extent, and
their choices reflect this.
By the way, that use of "guys" is hardly pejorative - with a few
notable exceptions, the indieweb is almost entirely white, male and
north american. Theses have been written on why the tech industry
is so strongly typed this way, and the indieweb seems to take that
a step further. I have no idea why, and don't mean this as a
criticism.
What I can criticise, however, is the movement's concentration on
what it terms "1st Generation Indiewebbers".
https://indieweb.org/generations#IndieWeb_Generations
> Capable of building a CMS, custom blogging software, understands
> SSL, git, SSH, APIs, domain registrars, DNS, nameservers,
> communicating over IRC, and editing wikis, and is comfortable
> running a server to host their own content, and knows at
> least one basic web-based programming language. Comfortable with
> lengthy documentation.
I would consider myself fairly well versed in computers. I can do
much, but not all, of the above, and I can do a fair number of
things not on that list.
I can still barely function in the Indieweb as it is presently
formulated. There is a complete dearth of simple, essential
programs/tutorials/guides to accomplishing the basic tasks of the
Indieweb. The movement is built around what is called "dogfooding",
creating the tools to make it work yourself, and using it. In this,
it shares some features with FLOSS generally, the cult of the
individual programmer.
There are scarcely any examples of moving *past* self-dogfooding,
providing scraps from the table for people to use. There should, at
a minimum, be clear and established routes to achieving the goals
of the indieweb ideal, presented as clear and unambiguous format in
a range of programming languages. Currently, that simply does not
exist.
I did write a micropub server (that's another tech for your list,
Tomasino!), the part of the indieweb which allows you to post on
your own site from other sites (again mostly aaron's) like Quill. I
smashed my head firmly at the upper bounds of my capabilities,
though, and I'm still not entirely happy with the code which I had
to use to offer a full-featured experience.
When I soured on twitter I removed the code in my server (nanopub)
for cross-posting to that sile. I promptly received abuse for doing
so. If my server, as poor as it is, was at that time the best thing
someone could hope for to allow them to post, then there's
something clearly off in the indieweb movement.
As it stands, the Generations diagram is wholly exclusionary. While
it allows for people of less facility in computers to play a role
in the movement, it affords little or no understanding of what
those people are. In short, it doesn't describe people in the "real
world" (what on earth is Softalicious?) nor does it encompass
people of lesser means.
If a movement has at its core a significant barrier to entry, then
it is always exclusionary. While we've already seen that the
movement has barriers at ability and personality, it is also true
that, as of 2019, there is a huge barrier in terms of monetary
resources.
One of the key features of the movement is owning your own domain,
something that may be cheap for some, but is a repeating hurdle;
presuming you even know how to go about obtaining one, you also
need to have a method of payment, something that's just not always
true and shouldn't be presumed. Purchasing a domain name also
requires (in most cases) a contact number and a postal address,
again, these are not things which should be presumed to be
available.
Once you have that domain, you also need something to host your
site on. As presently arranged, most all of the Indieweb options
require either access to the server at a command-line level, or the
use of Wordpress.
Even the "easy" option, using Wordpress, requires access to
the Wordpress installation at an administrative level, this is
something which is not always available.
(aside: I want to take a moment to applaud, wildly, the work of
David Shanske and Matthias Pfefferle in their work on the Indieweb
Plugin)
There is too much wrong, there is too much exclusion. There are
projects which attempt to repair these flaws, but, as with
everything else, these are individual efforts.
I know I've gone on excessively here, and much of what I've written
may be seen as contrary to how I started, but I don't mean to carp
from the sidelines. I believe strongly in regaining ownership and
control of our online presences. I believe that this cannot be done
in collaboration or appropriation of the corporate surveillance
web. The indieweb project does both, while being exclusionary by
its very nature.
As you've probably gathered, I have lots of opinions on this. I
have tried, and tried and tried, to make my personal site use as
many Indieweb Technologies as possible. I just don't think its
worth the effort any more.
[1]:
gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20191223-webmentions-and-microsub
