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Aaron Parecki

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  • An IndieWeb reader: My new home on the internet

    April 20, 2018

    I have a new home on the internet. I don’t visit the Twitter home timeline or the Facebook news feed anymore. I don’t open the Instagram app except when I post a photo. I still have accounts there — I just don’t visit those sites anymore. Instead, I have my own new space on the internet where everything I’m interested in is consolidated, and I can read and reply to things from there. But before I go too far into my new online home — an IndieWeb reader — some background.

    The problem with algorithmic timelines

    It used to be the case that when you opened Twitter, you’d see every tweet from everyone you’re following, in order, with the newest at the top.

    Over the past few years, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and many other services have switched to what’s known as an “algorithmic timeline,” meaning posts no longer show up in chronological order. Instead, these services use proprietary algorithms to decide what to show you and when.

    They now decide what content is more important for you to see, and even interject ads into your timelines.

    You could argue that they’ve done us a favor in one sense. I stopped being able to keep up with my chronological Twitter timeline long ago. But doesn’t it seem wrong that Twitter gets to be the one to decide what to show me? Plenty of people are upset about the new algorithmic timelines, even posting articles like “Instagram is actively ruining my life with its inhumane algorithm” and “14 Ways to Outsmart the Instagram Algorithm.”

    We clearly need a way to take back control of what we’re reading online.

    Evolving RSS readers

    You might remember RSS readers did a pretty good job of giving individuals control of what they are subscribed to. However, over the years, Twitter, Instagram and many other social media platforms have shown us that people enjoy reading and sharing short-form content, not just blog posts.

    Twitter not only provides an easy way to post content online, it also provides a single place to read what everyone else has posted. More importantly, these sites also enable you to quickly respond to the things you’re following. Whether that’s clicking the heart icon to show your support of a post, or writing a reply to something as you’re reading it.

    RSS readers have failed to adapt to the changes in how we create and consume content online.

    They are largely stuck in the blogging era, being used to consume blogs and news sites. If we want to have any hope of the open web and independent websites replacing our own use of Twitter and Facebook, we need to be able to have experiences at least as good as we have on those services.

    Building better readers

    What if you could reply to a blog post in your feed reader, and your reply would show up as a comment on the original post automatically? What if you could click a “heart” in your reader, and the author of the post would see it? What if you had one place to go to follow not just your Twitter friends, but also all of your friends’ blogs, their microblogs, and see the pictures they’re sharing? What if you could have seamless conversations in your reader the way you have seamless conversations on Twitter today?

    These are the things myself and the IndieWeb community have been making huge progress on in recent years.

    Here’s a screenshot of what my current IndieWeb reader looks like:

    My IndieWeb reader looks kind of like a combination of an RSS reader and a Twitter feed. An important difference between this and a traditional RSS reader is that this interface has buttons I can click to reply to posts!

    When I click Reply, the IndieWeb reader creates a post on my website, and notifies the person I’m replying to so their site can show it as a comment.

    Here’s my reply on my website:

    And here’s my reply showing up on the original post:

    I’m pretty happy with how my current IndieWeb reader is working right now! I’ve built it as a thin interface on top of a server-side API that handles all the feed fetching. In fact, there are alternative front-ends that work with the same server. When I’m on my phone, I can use a native iPhone app to see all the same content that I see on my computer.

    How the IndieWeb Reader works

    This separation between the reader interface and the server is critical to developing a new generation of readers. This is what lets us have the choice of using multiple different reader apps, all accessing the same data behind the scenes. This separation is documented in a spec called Microsub.

    The server side of the reader is software selected by the user. This might be built into their website CMS, or could be a separate service they sign up for. Typically, the server side won’t have much in the way of a user interface, likely just enough interface to subscribe to some feeds, but it doesn’t need to be able to display any of the content itself.

    Reader apps can then be built without needing to spend any time dealing with parsing different feed formats or worrying about having enough resources to poll all the feeds people are subscribed to.

    The reader apps become simple clients talking to the user’s feed fetching server.

    Check out my post, Building an IndieWeb Reader, for more details on how all the pieces fit together. If you’re building a reader, check out the Microsub spec to learn how you can participate in this growing ecosystem.

    What's next?

    This part of the IndieWeb ecosystem is still in the early stages. I would love to see more development of both the reader apps and also the backend servers! If you use a CMS, consider installing or writing a plugin to add support for Webmention, Microsub and Micropub. If you’re an app developer, this would be a great time to build new Micropub apps to help people post to their websites, or build new Microsub apps with interesting and unique interfaces.

    Another fun challenge I’m looking forward to tackling soon is the ability to post and follow private content using our websites. The OAuth 2.0 extension IndieAuth provides us a solid base to work from.

    As always, I’m happy to chat about any and all of this. It’s been a lot of fun already to build this all out and see it working! You can find me in the IndieWeb chat via IRC and Slack.

    This June, we’re hosting the annual IndieWeb Summit in Portland. IndieWeb Summit is for independent web creators of all kinds — from graphic artists to designers, UX engineers, coders and hackers — and is where we brainstorm and create lots of things like the IndieWeb reader. Head over to 2018.indieweb.org for more information and to register!

    Fri, Apr 20, 2018 9:00am -07:00 #indieweb #monocle #reader #microsub
    39 likes 6 reposts 2 bookmarks 42 replies 25 mentions
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    • Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com
      I haven't written about it specifically, but it's all integrated into my personal website and also my IndieWeb reader setup. I did write about that here:

      https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet

      and previously: https://aaronparecki.com/2015/03/05/18/designing-an-indieweb-reader

      and: https://aaronparecki.com/2015/08/29/8/why-i-live-in-irc
      Sun, Nov 20, 2022 5:42pm -08:00
    • Yannick Schutz 🌊 twitter.com/bonjouryannick
      I was adding those kind of things to my own so thanks for the pointers :) For posting, I have been testing indiekit recently
      Tue, Aug 9, 2022 12:25pm +00:00 (via brid.gy)
    • petermolnar twitter.com/petermolnar
      It does - however, it's based in microformats, not RSS: aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/…
      Tue, Aug 9, 2022 11:08am +00:00 (via brid.gy)
    • Chris Aldrich boffosocko.com/author/chrisaldrich
      I used to miss the reading/social aspects of GR until I switched to using my own website in combination with social readers like Aperture and Indigenous. (Aaron Parecki has a good overview of what it looks like; the space has grown quite a bit since his original post in 2018.)

      I heartily agree with @waxpancake that the open web needs some better discovery options.

      Mon, Mar 22, 2021 10:32am -07:00
    • Ravi Sagar www.ravisagar.in
      In reply to https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet
      Thu, Sep 3, 2020 7:41am +01:00
    • Katherine Moss twitter.com/Cambridgeport90
      I just need to figure out the Wordpress equivalent of that. Whether that's adding onto the Micropub plugin for it, or ...
      Tue, Feb 11, 2020 9:58pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Katherine Moss twitter.com/Cambridgeport90
      Otherwise it's really pretty.
      Tue, Feb 11, 2020 9:56pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Aaron Parecki twitter.com/aaronpk
      The granary feeds look great, the trick is replying, which took a bit of fiddling with my website to get it to work seamlessly
      Tue, Feb 11, 2020 9:55pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Aaron Parecki twitter.com/aaronpk
      ooh I will definitely take a look, that's no good. I switched the icons around to load faster and without JS but I don't remember how they work right now
      Tue, Feb 11, 2020 9:54pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Katherine Moss twitter.com/Cambridgeport90
      Speaking of which, I need to open an issue for Monocle; for some reason the action buttons are not labeled properly for screen readers, so all that is spoken is "number". Not sure whether that could be something in laravel?
      Tue, Feb 11, 2020 9:46pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Katherine Moss twitter.com/Cambridgeport90
      Gods I love that article. still trying to figure how you did the Twitter replying, though; even with Granary/Twitter adam, not sure how monocle handles that. I haven't tried.
      Tue, Feb 11, 2020 9:33pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com
      Here's some more details on what kinds of experiences those two specs can enable https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet
      Tue, Feb 11, 2020 1:30pm -08:00
    • Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com
      There sure is!


      https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet
      Wed, Jan 8, 2020 10:21am -06:00
    • Aaron Parecki twitter.com/aaronpk
      Thanks! There's an indiewebcamp coming up in your neck of the woods soon too! You're more than welcome to join! 2019.indieweb.org/nyc
      Thu, Aug 29, 2019 11:16pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • EJ Fox 🌞 twitter.com/mrejfox
      This looks really awesome, thank you for laying all this groundwork. People like you make me hopeful in a time when hope is rare!
      Thu, Aug 29, 2019 10:57pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com
      There's definitely a growing worldwide community doing exactly this right now! #indieweb

      Here are my photos: https://aaronparecki.com/photos

      Here is how everything fits together https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet
      Thu, Aug 29, 2019 3:24pm -07:00
    • Jonathan Jenne inhji.de

      You should check out this post by Aaron Parecki: https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet

      Sat, Jun 8, 2019 12:29am -07:00
    • gRegor Morrill gregorlove.com

      Most of the "big" readers don't support microformats yet, but the #indieweb community is making some progress. Check out @aaronpk's post https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet.

      I use https://granary.io to convert my h-feed to Atom. It's more DRY than maintaining a separate XML file.

      Sat, Apr 6, 2019 3:31pm -07:00
    • Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com
      Not at all! I wrote up a bunch about how this works here: https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet
      Wed, Feb 20, 2019 1:52pm -06:00
    • Aaron Parecki twitter.com/aaronpk
      hmm I don't think I understand, there's already a page but it appears to be a copy of the Wikipedia page, which isn't actually a very good description everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/I…
      Wed, Feb 20, 2019 3:35pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Aaron Parecki twitter.com/aaronpk
      Those specs are arguably not the best introduction to the concepts which is why I linked the blog post instead 😊
      Wed, Feb 20, 2019 3:33pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Aaron Parecki twitter.com/aaronpk
      You don't need to explain decentralization to me ;-) I am literally the author of several W3C specs that are being used to build decentralized social networks!

      w3.org/TR/webmention/
      w3.org/TR/micropub/
      w3.org/TR/websub/
      w3.org/TR/indieauth/
      Wed, Feb 20, 2019 3:32pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Larry Sanger twitter.com/lsanger
      Neat! Do you have to use indieweb.com in order to “join the movement”? If so, it’s not decentralized. And it also needs independent standards, or it won’t have the ultimate effect—it’d remain a front end to existing services. Anyway, I will definitely read up on this.
      Wed, Feb 20, 2019 3:18pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Everipedia twitter.com/Everipedia
      hey aaron! you should create the indieweb page on everipedia, we can tweet it!
      Wed, Feb 20, 2019 3:12pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com
      You should come check out what we're doing on the #IndieWeb, it's basically exactly this, built with many W3C standards! Here's a writeup about my current social media experience, I stopped using Twitter ages ago:

      https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet
      Wed, Feb 20, 2019 7:13am -06:00
    • Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com
      Totally agreee! We've been working on stuff like this in the #indieweb community for a while! It's getting there, still a long ways to go, but here's my current reading experience using Open Web technologies: https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet
      Sat, Feb 9, 2019 7:36am -08:00
    • Aaron Davis readwriterespond.com
      💬 Where’s my Net dashboard?
      Mon, Dec 3, 2018 4:43pm +11:00
    • Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com
      I haven't seen exactly a curated list, but here are some links:

      posts from IndieWeb people stream.indieweb.org

      posts about the IndieWeb news.indieweb.org/en

      a bunch of peoples' websites indieweb.org/chat-names
      Mon, Oct 29, 2018 2:14pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Peter Majmesku mobilefish.de
      Thanks. The sharing functionality in addition to RSS features, sounds promising to me. Is there any curated list with websites, that are offering IndieWeb support? I would like to see how others are using IndieWeb in action.
      Mon, Oct 29, 2018 12:22pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com
      I wrote a bunch about exactly that here: https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet
      Sun, Oct 28, 2018 2:25pm -07:00
    • Chris Aldrich www.boffosocko.com
      Maybe it's just me, but it looks like your Tweet copy didn't thread into the conversation properly...
      Tue, Sep 4, 2018 7:10pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com
      It's still early days for sure, but there are some fun things already:

      https://news.indieweb.org/en
      https://indieweb.xyz/en
      https://microcast.club
      https://indieweb.org/indiewebring

      Not to mention that everything I read online gets funneled through this tech: https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet
      Tue, Sep 4, 2018 11:37am -07:00
    • Chris Aldrich boffosocko.com
      Reply to Jan Cavan Boulas about WordPress Microsub feed reader
      Tue, Aug 28, 2018 5:46pm -08:00
    • Glenn Dixon glenn.thedixons.net/author/donblanco
      IndieWeb Future
      Sun, Jul 22, 2018 3:08am +00:00
    • Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com
      That's basically what I use "channels" in my "social reader" for. I do feel like it's about time to implement a more formal workflow for it now that it's been working well as is. https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet
      Wed, Jul 18, 2018 8:44pm -05:00
    • Brad Enslen ramblinggit.com
      Aaron fantastic article. That was one of the articles I read a few weeks ago and I said, "I'm in. Even if it's not ready right now, I have to join this Indieweb." It sold me. Thanks.
      Thu, Jul 12, 2018 11:32pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com
      It already has Microformats, so you can follow it from a reader that supports that, like any of the indieweb readers! https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet
      Thu, Jul 12, 2018 4:22pm -07:00
    • Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com
      Ah, I can see why css/js could be an issue for some uses.

      I'm using this on the server side of my new [social reader](https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet) application so that all image/video URLs presented to the reader apps are https and from the same origin. The videos come from either Instagram, Twitter, or peoples' own blogs hosting video files directly. Because the majority of the content is twitter-like short posts, the video files are normally always under a minute long so they aren't actually that big.
      Wed, Jul 4, 2018 2:02pm -07:00
    • Chris Aldrich www.boffosocko.com
      Here's an article I wrote a year ago that outlines a version of a reader that's somewhat similar to @aaronpk's and discusses a tiny bit of what commercial ones have that approach the functionality. We have a long way to go still.
      boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how…
      Tue, Jun 19, 2018 5:44pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Greg McVerry jgregorymcverry.com
      I also think church groups such as yours should embrace #indieweb philosophies and tools to ensure your voice and perspectives aren’t lost in the cacophony of “critical media” I disagree with @zephoria that these efforts can not (or haven’t yet) have a… jgregorymcverry.com/3647-2/
      Tue, Jun 19, 2018 5:27pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Vance Lucas vancelucas.com
      That post gave me a MUCH better idea of what IndieWeb actually is than IndieWeb’s own website. Thanks for sharing.
      Tue, Jun 19, 2018 2:51pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com
      I agree! https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet
      Mon, Jun 18, 2018 9:25pm -07:00

    Other Mentions

    • Denny twitter.com/denny
      "It used to be the case that when you opened Twitter, you’d see every tweet from everyone you’re following, in order, with the newest at the top. Over the past few years, Twitter and many other services have switched to an 'algorithmic' timeline." aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/…
      Tue, Dec 27, 2022 1:53pm +00:00 (via brid.gy)
    • @edent
      Naming things is hard - DNS for the Federated Web
      Mon, Dec 26, 2022 5:00pm -07:00
    • Juan Fernandes (he/him) twitter.com/juanfernandes
      Just read: "An IndieWeb reader: My new home on the internet" aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/…
      Mon, May 9, 2022 6:51pm +00:00 (via brid.gy)
    • Inhji 🚲>🚙 chaos.social/@inhji

      An IndieWeb reader: My new home on the internet https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet

      I have a new home on the internet. I don’t visit the Twitter home timeline or the Facebook news feed anymore. I don’t open the Instagram app except when I post a photo. I still have accounts there — I just don’t visit those sites anymore. Instead, I have my own new space on the internet where e..#Webdev #IndieWeb(https://inhji.de/notes/an-indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet)

      indieweb webdev An IndieWeb reader: My new home on the internet
      Tue, May 3, 2022 11:12am -07:00 (via brid.gy)
    • Chris Aldrich boffosocko.com/author/chrisaldrich
      A Twitter of Our Own
      Tue, Feb 9, 2021 5:48pm -08:00
    • Jonathan LaCour twitter.com/cleverdevil
      Joanna continues to do incredible work shining a light on the challenges of living as a user of the modern social web. My advice? (1) Delete Facebook (2) Use chronological timeline on Twitter (3) Get a domain & website you control (4) Use a social reader aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/…
      Sun, Jan 17, 2021 7:14pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Kimberly Hirsh twitter.com/kimberlyhirsh
      🕸️ Read An IndieWeb reader: My new home on the internet by Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/…
      Sat, Jan 11, 2020 2:36am +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Kimberly Hirsh kimberlyhirsh.com

      🕸️ Read An IndieWeb reader: My new home on the internet by Aaron Parecki

      Fri, Jan 10, 2020 9:36pm -05:00
    • Neil Mather doubleloop.net/author/neil
      I’m reflecting on my information strategy and how to improve it at the moment. Here’s the intro post to that, giving a bit of context.

      In this particular post I’m going to chat specifically about discovery, AKA using the Intertubes to find out about interesting things. I can’t help but call my strategy for this my discostrat, apologies for that. I’ll talk a bit about how I’ve had it set up for a while, and some recent tweaks I’ve made to it, and maybe some ways I want to improve it more.

      Photo by Vale Zmeykov on Unsplash

      What’s in a discovery strategy?

      I’m no expert, just brainstorming really, but I guess it breaks down into: the content of the information that I’m pulling in, the sources I get it from, and how I organise those sources logically (like how do I group it together somewhere I can read it).  Additionally, there are the more mechanical and physical concerns, so to speak – basically what tools do I use to do the pulling and the grouping of the info.

      The content

      So for discovery sources I’ve been using a mish-mash of Fediverse and IndieWeb for a while. I’ve definitely been finding out about plenty of interesting things from them both, but I think it’s fair to say it’s on a fairly niche set of topics.

      Niche topics

      Via the Fediverse I get a good dose of info and thoughts on free software, free culture, lefty political theorising, amongst other things. IndieWeb still feels fairly ‘inside baseball’, so to speak, in that the early adopters are predominantly web developers, so there’s lots of webdev and adjacent stuff. Which I like, but I do want more than that. It’s breaking out of that though for sure, and I probably also just need to widen the circle of people that I follow a bit.

      General topics

      One example of something I’ve been missing a little from both is insights into general current affairs. General as in, the kind of stuff that makes it onto the 6 o’clock news. I like to try and keep up on my local and global political happenings, but quite a lot of people don’t want that on the Fediverse (I think because it can become toxic quite quickly), so it’s usually content-warning’ed, and just seems less prevalent in general. From the IndieWeb, it might just be my follow list, but I also see very little politics on there. I find this is one spot where institutional feeds come in handy – usually medium-to-longform articles with a bit of editorial overview can be less despair-inducing than a barrage of microblogged hot takes thrown over a parapet. I do also occassionally pop over to the Guardian and the BBC to scan the headlines and see what the world is in a fuss about today.

      Human stuff

      This is purely anecdotal, but I feel that from people’s personal blogs I see a bit more posting about hobbies and individual passions. People on blogs feel slightly less performative than people on big social networks. That’s just a hunch though – maybe there’s a rich seam of that stuff elsewhere too and I just don’t tap into it. But anyway, I love people’s hobbies and the human stuff, so that’s really important. I don’t want a pallid world of professional thoughts and LinkedIn profiles.

      For individual people’s thoughts on the less esoteric topics, or for more geographically local stuff, I seem more likely to find people who talk about that on Twitter. I guess just because it has got more critical mass right now. Like I’m more likely to find out about something cool happening in the local town at the weekend from someone on Twitter than elsewhere, right now.

      So yeah, I guess the type of info I want is a combo of niche topics, non-mainstream and mainstream views on general current affairs, local happenings, and the minutiae of people’s lives. And that comes from a variety of sources.

      Getting it and organising it

      As Ton says:

      I think of feed subscriptions as subscribing to people. I don’t follow your blog, but I follow and interact with you

      I like this. And something I like about the IndieWeb reader approach is that its fairly platform-agnostic – I can pull in feeds (and therefore people) from all over the place, as long as the medium in question provides one or can be shoehorned into one by a bridge such as brid.gy. That said, not everything I subscribe to is the output of a single person.

      Tool-wise, for Fediverse I’ve been tending to use the default Mastodon interface (i.e. multiple timelines, pings!, scrolly scrolly, infinite), and for IndieWeb and standard site feeds I’m using an indie reader setup (like an old school RSS reader; but more social and yet less haranguing than other social readers).

      Sad to say that with Mastodon out-of-the-box, I found myself often ending up on the scroll treadmill. As a technology Mastodon has no vested interest in unstoppably grabbing your attention (noone’s profiting from it, at least), so I think it’s partly just a problem with the medium. A constant stream of short nuggets of info, some of which contain gold… it’s easy to spend too much time scrolling through. Partly too it’s a PEBKAC issue – I think I just get a bit compulsive about it sometimes.

      Either way, I want an alternative to that.

      In general, I find the indie reader style works better for my brain. Couple that with the fact that I can pull in feeds from various places and it’s a double win. Anywhere where a person posts their stuff is a valid home on the web if it works for them.

      So I’m trying to transition to just using the indie reader. (Aaron’s post An IndieWeb reader: My new home on the internet is a good intro to indie readers.)

      If you’re a Fediphile then there’s undoubtedly a Fediverse solution to these challenges too. I just happen to be a bit more indieweb oriented at the moment I think. I used Brutaldon for a while (‘a brutalist interface for Mastodon’) and it’s really good, worth giving it a go if you’re perusing the Fediverse via a browser. There’s no infinite scroll, no bleeps and bloops letting you know something has just happened that you really should look at, etc.

      Worth noting too that if you just wanted to be discovering posts, you could achieve most of this in a normal RSS feed reader I’m sure. I’m using the social reader style of things so that I can interact with posts in the reader too, like you would do in Twitter or Mastodon for example. (Hmm, I think I want interaction within the reader to be part of my information strategy, though I’ll admit I haven’t given that that much thought, I just kind of accepted it as a net positive… to be revisited.)

      Tweaking my discovery tools

      I’ve done a few things to make my reader get me a bit more into the zone of ‘time well spent’.

      The structure

      First up is using a simple version of Ton’s way of organising feeds. (Please do read Ton’s posts on this, as he’s been thinking about his infostrat and refining it for a long time – I’m an infostrat toddler right now!)

      Prior to doing so, I had my channels set up as ‘topics’ – for example an IndieWeb channel, a Tech channel, Environment, Politics, Fixing, etc. In those I would put all feeds related to the given topic – these could be feeds from people’s (indie)web sites, Mastodon profiles, RSS feeds of articles from big organisations, or Twitter feeds. Doing things this way I usually ended up with just a big load of unread counts, and the stuff from the people I care about just lost in the flood somewhere. Personally right now I want to get deeper knowledge about less things, rather than shallower knowledge about more things, and the firehose approach definitely pushes you towards the latter.

      So I’ve changed it now to be more priority-based (Ton uses the term social distance), rather than topic-based. Certain people (or orgs) that I read or interact with a lot and don’t want to miss their postings, I put in a place where I will look first and most frequently.

      I made two new channels. For reasons not yet entirely clear, even to myself, I’ve currently called them DiscoBall A and DiscoBall B. But naming things is hard, and disco balls are fun, so there we go. The channel known as DiscoBall A, is to hold a small number of people I know well (either from in person or online, for some loosely defined definition of ‘know’). The other channel, DiscoBall B, is people I know a bit more loosely but find what they post interesting and like to keep abreast of. For these two new A and B channels, I moved the relevant feeds out of my existing general ‘topic’ channels and into these new ones.

      Everything else I’ve just left as it was for now. So the ‘topic’ channels still exist as they were before, I just don’t intend to feel compelled to check inside of them so frequently.  Aperture has a nice feature where you can, per channel, turn off ‘unread’ notifications, so I’ve turned them off for these extra channels. I’ll have a peep into them from time to time, but generally the idea is to just read the A and B channels and dip into the rest if time permits or I’m feeling lucky. In principle though I think I prefer to use that ‘extra time’ to read through one of the articles I’ve already discovered previously and saved somewhere for later, e.g. with Wallabag. I have a huge backlogs of those.

      The mechanics

      So as I said the feeds come from websites, Mastodon, and Twitter. I’m using Aperture as my Microsub server, combined with Together as a web client to read the feeds and Indigenous as a mobile client. These are ‘social readers’, in that I can also interact with the posts (like, reply, repost, etc) directly in my reader. Aperture does the heavy lifting of pulling in content, and leaves the display and interaction to the clients. (If you just wanted to view posts, you could achieve most of this in a normal RSS feed reader).

      To subscribe to an IndieWeb feed is simple – just point Aperture to the person’s homepage and pick out their feed (whether its microformats or RSS or Atom). To get a Mastodon feed, you can either grab it as Microformats by plugging in the person’s URL from their home instance, e.g.

      https://social.coop/@neil/

      or using that same URL with .rss or .atom appended to the URL, e.g.

      https://social.coop/@neil.atom

      I’m using the Atom feeds at the moment, something seemed a bit funky about the Microformats feed, but I haven’t tested it thoroughly yet.

      To get a Twitter feed is a bit more work, as they don’t provide feeds anymore like they used to. I use granary.io to get Twitter feeds (more info on that in a previous post). It would be possible to subscribe to each person individually and put them into the A and B channels that way – but that’s more taxing on granary and Aperture (both awesome and freely provided hosted services). So for my A and B lists I’ve created Twitter lists and put people into those lists there, then just add those two feeds to the channels via granary.

      (As a side note, even though you don’t need to technically speaking, I think it’s probably good etiquette to ‘follow’ the person in the Fediverse or Twitter if you’re adding their feed to your reader. How people post might be affected by who is following them, so probably good to make it explicit.)

      The cons

      So – one downside so far with this set up, is I feel like I’m probably reenforcing my filter bubble somewhat, if I’m reading a smaller group of people that I know I already like the cut of their gibs. Dipping into the wider group from time might ameliorate that, or maybe I should throw in a couple of wildcards into each channel that challenge my views regularly? Not sure about that yet.

      Summary

      Using social readers organised by priority / social distance, I’m still discovering plenty of interesting things, but I’m not getting caught in infinite scrolling and doing less zombie mode. It’s helped with information overload. Still some ways to go but I’m feelin’ good discostrat vibes so far.

      Photo by Rogier Schutte on Unsplash

      The next thing to talk about is the reflection part of my infostrat. What do I do with this information once I’ve discovered it?

      https://doubleloop.net/2019/10/05/discovery-strategy/

      Sat, Oct 5, 2019 1:20pm +00:00
    • Larry Sanger twitter.com/lsanger
      I would love to read an analysis of how well this project satisfies the vision of a decentralized social media architecture. I might not be able to get around to doing such an analysis myself for a while.
      Wed, Feb 20, 2019 3:22pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com
      Blocking Domains in webmention.io
      Mon, Dec 17, 2018 1:24pm -08:00
    • Jacky lives on @jalcine@playvicious.social now. jacky.wtf
      yeah we just need a #indieweb #microsub client.

      if that doesn't make sense, look at this aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/…
      Mon, Oct 22, 2018 9:29pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Lobsters lobste.rs
      An IndieWeb reader: My new home on the internet
      via @ninjatrappeur
      lobste.rs/s/zouoim #web
      aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/…
      Thu, Oct 18, 2018 2:20pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Eddie Hinkle eddiehinkle.com
      Following in the IndieWeb: The Next Frontier
      Wed, Oct 17, 2018 4:55pm -04:00
    • Jacky Alciné 🇭🇹🗽🌇 playvicious.social/@jalcine

      My goal by the end of the year is to have something like what @aaronpk outlines here in https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet. His system is nice but I want to put my own spin on it.

      Mon, Oct 1, 2018 8:56am +00:00
    • Brad ramblinggit.com
      New Aperture WordPress Plugin for Indieweb
      Tue, Aug 14, 2018 4:12pm +00:00
    • Julien Deswaef | @xuv@mastodon.social xuv.be
      RT @baldur@toot.cafe
      “An IndieWeb reader: My new home on the internet”
      aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/…
      toot.cafe/@baldur/100107…
      Mon, May 28, 2018 3:40pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • @baldur@toot.cafe www.baldurbjarnason.com
      “An IndieWeb reader: My new home on the internet”
      aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/…
      Mon, May 28, 2018 2:57pm +00:00 (via brid-gy.appspot.com)
    • Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com
      You're Invited to IndieWeb Summit!
      Sat, May 26, 2018 6:40pm -07:00
    • Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com
      Building an IndieWeb Reader
      Mon, Mar 12, 2018 5:03pm -07:00 (via www.downes.ca)
    • cdevroe.com
      Fri, May 17, 2019 10:32am -07:00
    • My Url Is myurlis.com
      My Url Is aaronparecki.com (Episode 1)
      Wed, Oct 3, 2018 6:15am -07:00
    • My Url Is myurlis.com
      My Url Is aaronparecki.com (Episode 1)
      Wed, Oct 3, 2018 6:24am -07:00 (via tracking.feedpress.it)
    • joe jenett the.dailywebthing.com/topical-set-decentralized-web
      topical set: decentralized web
      Mon, Apr 5, 2021 4:29am -07:00
    • cdevroe.com
      Mon, Oct 31, 2022 3:59am -07:00
Posted in /articles

Hi, I'm Aaron Parecki, Director of Identity Standards at Okta, and co-founder of IndieWebCamp. I maintain oauth.net, write and consult about OAuth, and participate in the OAuth Working Group at the IETF. I also help people learn about video production and livestreaming. (detailed bio)

I've been tracking my location since 2008 and I wrote 100 songs in 100 days. I've spoken at conferences around the world about owning your data, OAuth, quantified self, and explained why R is a vowel. Read more.

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