---
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name: Peter Molnar
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published: '2018-03-18T15:30:00+00:00'
---
> Anyone with me? Am I totes off base?
You are certainly not; the tools provided right now are indeed
technical. However, you have to keep it in mind, that none of the
specifications are finalised in any form - only webmentions are in W3C
recommendation stage. *As it has been pointed out, my wording and
knowledge was off: recommendation is the final, released stage, so I
fixed it.*
> The vast majority of users aren’t going to read the spec., nor care to
> ever do so. \[...\] This should be our (the IndieWeb’s) holy mission —
> empowering all sorts of folks to post content that they get to
> control.
This is where we disagree. There are other, interesting movements, two
of them with very similar goals: Repair Café and Restart Party. As the
name suggests, it's about repairing things, instead of throwing them
away, but both of them share the ideology of teaching people to fix
their own things; to learn about their tools, to value, to own them.
Owning the content is the first step, but it shouldn't be the only step.
I wholeheartedly disagree with WordPress' attitude, making people avoid
technical responsibility[^1] - people should care, they should be at
least be aware of what's happening when they press a publish button.
They needn't have to be capable of doing it from scratch, but providing
the tools only is not a goal I can align with.
If we keep up the attitude of making everything so simple that people
don't have to understand, we'll very soon find ourselves in the chapter
of The Foundation, where the priests keep running technology, without
anyone understanding it.
[^1]: <
https://www.rarst.net/wordpress/technical-responsibility/>
