Re:Homesteading on the Indie Web (2011)
by AlexDragusin on Thursday August 22, 2019 @11:46AM
(#20769373)
The user couldn't be expected to use FTP, a command line interface, a file system, or any other technologies beyond the browser because doing so would severely limit its accessibility. User interactions had to be limited to filling out web forms and clicking on things.
The financial and time burden of using the tool to both set up and maintain a homestead needed to be minimized as much as possible.
If we eliminate these barriers, we will end up with the type of user that is prevalent on Facebook, Twitter et al thus pointless. Something that comes without effort will not be appreciated at its true value.
I think there has to be a reasonable barrier of entry as to keep these kind of people who are not really interested in bringing anything of value, as they have proven time and time again. The barrier of entry, in all fairness is low even as described above so as the word goes, how low you can go?
Re:Homesteading on the Indie Web (2011)
by apatters on Thursday August 22, 2019 @01:08PM
(#20770246)
This is basically what www.sdf.org is, right? A community where you have to somewhat know your way around the command line to get around. And it's awesome. But by definition communities like this will probably never dominate the market.
Re:Homesteading on the Indie Web (2011)
by CM30 on Thursday August 22, 2019 @04:56PM
(#20772280)
Is this necessarily a bad thing? Is there anything wrong with the Facebook/Twitter/whatever social media crowd moving to the indieweb and running their own sites or what not? Should those who aren't technical/determined enough be screwed over by large corporations operating walled gardens?
Having interesting things to say doesn't necessarily correlate with being willing to overcome barriers to entry, and I feel independent blogs and sites by non technical users could bring all kinds of new perspectives you might not hear otherwise.
Re:Homesteading on the Indie Web (2011)
by wmf on Thursday August 22, 2019 @07:55PM
(#20773469)
The Internet is for everyone. If someone just wants to post lame jokes or keep up with their grandkids, so be it. If anything, the IndieWeb/Fediverse keeps such people from "burdening" the community because there isn't one big community.
Re:Homesteading on the Indie Web (2011)
by atheiste on Friday August 23, 2019 @06:20AM
(#20776042)
I think there are multiple projects that Mark describes. One of the good looking one is https://yunohost.org/#/ for example. I wish the community could join forces, select one solution and make it production ready. Does anyone know about similar projects to yunohost that look promising?
Re:Homesteading on the Indie Web (2011)
by southerntofu on Friday August 23, 2019 @06:55AM
(#20776222)
Yunohost is by far the most advanced and has the strongest community. Any help is welcome (especially python devs)
FreedomBox is slowly making progress, but nothing comparable to Yunohost so far.
FreedomBone is a one-person project that actively researches privacy-enabling self-hosting (Tor/I2P) and off-the-grid mesh networking. It's an inspiring project and the blog is full of good stuff : https://blog.freedombone.net/
Re:Homesteading on the Indie Web (2011)
by southerntofu on Friday August 23, 2019 @07:01AM
(#20776259)
> the fediverse NOW exists!
The fediverse is interesting but it's not the only approach.
XMPP is similar to ActivityPub/ActivityStreams but has more explicit specifications, good reference implementations, and the community has gained lots of experience in running federated systems over the years. Also, XMPP works on different transports (TCP, HTTP..) while ActivityPub is constrained to the web.
The Indieweb takes an interesting low-tech approach to web federation, by using standard web primitives (semantic microformats2 classes and POST requests) so that every body can federate their "dumbest" blogs without having to implement a whole complex dynamic social network.
ActivityPub tries to play on the two fields and therefore facing many challenges to come. Namespaced JSON (JSON-LD) could help it grow as a federation, but the specifications are not always very precise (though they keep getting better) and the fediverse community is constantly reinventing the wheel that email/XMPP folks have perfected over the years.
The two main problems with the Fediverse at the moment in my view:
- no proper decoupling of identity/service providers so you have to create many accounts on many services (Mastodon, Peertube, Plume..) where Indieweb uses the `rel=me` and `IndieAuth` protocols to avoid running many profiles, and XMPP has XEP-0070 for 3rd-party HTTP auth (i.e. authenticating XMPP users from your website)
- most implementations rely on client-side DOM generation (i.e. Javascript that outputs HTML), which is far from efficient (running the same calculations many times over every client) or accessible ; Indieweb federation is based on web primitives and plays well with any browser
These problems can of course be addressed, but they have already been in the Indieweb/XMPP communities for some time. If you want to get a grasp of what people build on top of XMPP nowadays:
The financial and time burden of using the tool to both set up and maintain a homestead needed to be minimized as much as possible.
If we eliminate these barriers, we will end up with the type of user that is prevalent on Facebook, Twitter et al thus pointless. Something that comes without effort will not be appreciated at its true value.
I think there has to be a reasonable barrier of entry as to keep these kind of people who are not really interested in bringing anything of value, as they have proven time and time again. The barrier of entry, in all fairness is low even as described above so as the word goes, how low you can go?
Having interesting things to say doesn't necessarily correlate with being willing to overcome barriers to entry, and I feel independent blogs and sites by non technical users could bring all kinds of new perspectives you might not hear otherwise.
FreedomBox is slowly making progress, but nothing comparable to Yunohost so far.
FreedomBone is a one-person project that actively researches privacy-enabling self-hosting (Tor/I2P) and off-the-grid mesh networking. It's an inspiring project and the blog is full of good stuff : https://blog.freedombone.net/
Quick, someone hop into their time machine, and go back and tell the author that the fediverse NOW exists!
(Note to self: Never dismiss my future self, if...no, when, he comes back to warn me of something.)
The fediverse is interesting but it's not the only approach.
XMPP is similar to ActivityPub/ActivityStreams but has more explicit specifications, good reference implementations, and the community has gained lots of experience in running federated systems over the years. Also, XMPP works on different transports (TCP, HTTP..) while ActivityPub is constrained to the web.
The Indieweb takes an interesting low-tech approach to web federation, by using standard web primitives (semantic microformats2 classes and POST requests) so that every body can federate their "dumbest" blogs without having to implement a whole complex dynamic social network.
ActivityPub tries to play on the two fields and therefore facing many challenges to come. Namespaced JSON (JSON-LD) could help it grow as a federation, but the specifications are not always very precise (though they keep getting better) and the fediverse community is constantly reinventing the wheel that email/XMPP folks have perfected over the years.
The two main problems with the Fediverse at the moment in my view:
- no proper decoupling of identity/service providers so you have to create many accounts on many services (Mastodon, Peertube, Plume..) where Indieweb uses the `rel=me` and `IndieAuth` protocols to avoid running many profiles, and XMPP has XEP-0070 for 3rd-party HTTP auth (i.e. authenticating XMPP users from your website)
- most implementations rely on client-side DOM generation (i.e. Javascript that outputs HTML), which is far from efficient (running the same calculations many times over every client) or accessible ; Indieweb federation is based on web primitives and plays well with any browser
These problems can of course be addressed, but they have already been in the Indieweb/XMPP communities for some time. If you want to get a grasp of what people build on top of XMPP nowadays:
https://salut-a-toi.org/blog/view/[email protected]/@...