@jkphl Thanks for the thoughtful post. It's great to hear this perspective from someone. Also congrats on your progress on your own site, it looks like you have webmentions working!
It seems that the #indieweb community is growing significantly in the past few months, which is always a challenge for any sort of community. We've taken the approach of setting intentional barriers to entry, (primarily have your own website and use it to sign in to the wiki to RSVP to events), as a way to discourage non-productive people from distracting everyone who is interested in actually building things. As you noted here, http://jkphl.is/articles/indie-as-in-individuality/##erecting+unnecessary+entry+barriers, while this may seem harsh at first glance, it has allowed us to make a significant amount of progress rather quickly, without getting bogged down in many of the problems that plagued previous efforts at a more open and decentralized web.
That said, there have been a few recent occasions where I feel the situation could have been handled better by people in the community, so I apologize for that, but you have to understand where it comes from.
Please don't conflate the idea of "being indie" with participating in the IndieWebCamp community.
Re: http://jkphl.is/articles/indie-as-in-individuality/##why+make+these+things+a+requirement The intention is not to prescribe specific technology in order to be labeled "indie," it's not a requirement to support Webmention in order to be considered "indie". However, Webmention is a great way to communicate with people on our own sites without relying on silos!
POSSE isn't a specific technology, it's just the idea that you should own your content and syndicate to other silos. I do think that is a requirement for being "indie," otherwise you are letting silos control your identity.
Re: http://jkphl.is/articles/indie-as-in-individuality/##without+infighting Even within the IndieWebCamp community, there are many people with conflicting ideas, which is great, because it means people are exploring different approaches at the same time and often leads to better results in the end. Everyone there has been fine with accepting differences of opinions on things, and finding other common goals to work towards.
So thanks for your thoughts, and I hope you continue to make progress on your own site, and hope that you will drop in to the #indiewebcamp IRC channel and say hi!
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