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Aaron Parecki

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#Microsub

  • Chris Aldrich https://boffosocko.com/
    The overall idea to make it easier to subscribe to a personal website is certainly a laudable one.

    Sadly the general concept presented here, while it sounds potentially useful, is far too little and misdirected. Hopefully better potential solutions are still not too late.

    First, let’s step back a moment. The bigger problem with feeds was that website designers and developers spent far too long in the format wars between RSS and Atom while the social media giants focused on cleaner and easier UI. This allowed the social silos to dramatically close the gap in functionality and usability. While website owners were spending time on formats and writing long articles about what RSS was, how it worked, and how to use it, the public lost interest. We need something really dramatic to regain this ground and /feeds just is not going to cut it.

    The first problem I see with this is that on it’s face /feeds both looks and sounds like code. No user really wants to interact with code if they don’t have to. Why not simply have a page or button called something much more user friendly like “subscribe” or “follow”? Almost every major social silo has a common pattern like this and has a simple “follow” button on every user’s page. A quick click and one is done with the transaction!

    Instead the solution offered here is to have not only yet-another-page but one that needs to be maintained. (As good as the /now idea may seem, the fact that it needs to be regularly and manually updated makes it a failure out of the gate. I’ll bet that less than half the /now pages out there have been updated in the last 6 months. I know mine hasn’t.) Worse, suppose I click over to a /feeds page, as an average person I’m still stuck with the additional burden of knowing or learning about what a feed reader is, why I’d need or want one, and then knowing what RSS is and how I might use that. I might see a one click option for Twitter or Mastodon, but then I’m a mile away from your website and unlikely to see you again in the noise of my Twitter feed which has many other lurking problems.

    One of the best solutions I’ve seen in the past few years is that posited by SubToMe.com which provides a single, customizable, and universal follow button. One click and it automatically finds the feeds hidden in the page’s code and presents me with one or more options for following it in a feed reader. Once I’ve chosen a reader, it remembers my choice and makes the following pattern easier in future transactions. This is a far superior option over /feeds because it takes away a huge amount of cognitive burden for the user. As a developer, I’ve got a browser bookmarklet that provides this functionality for sites that don’t provide it for me. How nice would it be if browsers went back and offered such a one button collection mechanism?

    Want to give this a try? I’ve got a “Follow Me” button in the side bar of my website. And if that doesn’t float your boat, I’ve tinkered with other methods of subscribing to my content that you can find at my subscribe page. Some developers might not be too scared of what’s on my subscribe page (a /feed page by a slightly friendlier name), but less technically minded people are sure to have a dramatically different perspective.

    The other piece here that I might take umbrage with is the offering to provide feeds to subscriptions to alternate services like Twitter and Mastodon. (This doesn’t take into any account that RSS feeds of social services are positively atrocious, not to mention that attempting to access Marcus’ Twitter feed in RSS Box returns the interminable error message: “There was a problem talking to Twitter. Please try again in a moment.”)

    Ideally I see a future in which every person has the ability to own both their own domain name and their content in a simple manner. If this happens and it’s easier to subscribe to the sites of my friends, then I don’t need corporate social media to intermediate the transactions on my behalf. I also don’t need them to intermediate what I’m actually seeing with their blackbox algorithmic feeds either. Friends, family, and colleagues could simply come to my website and subscribe to all or portions of my content in which they’re interested. While I still presently syndicate some of my content to silos like Twitter and Mastodon for the ease of friends or family who don’t know about the technical side of potential solutions, I post everything on my website first where one can subscribe in a feed reader or by email. Subscriptions in Twitter or Mastodon, while nice to have, are just a poor simulacrum of the real things being served by my site in better ways with more context and a design that better reflects what I’d like to portray online. A /feed page is going to be a failure from the start if you’re going to cede all the subsequent power directly to Twitter, Mastodon, and others anyway.

    While I like the volume of the reactions to the post (indicating that there’s not only a readership, but a desire for this sort of functionality), I’m disheartened that so many designers and developers think that the idea of /feeds is “enough” to stem the tide.

    For those who might be truly interested in designing our way out of this problem, I’d recommend looking at some of the design and development work of the IndieWeb community which is trying (slowly, but surely) to improve these sorts of technical hurdles. Their wiki has large number of examples of things that do and don’t work, discussion of where problems lie, and a community conversing about how to potentially make them better through actual examples of things that are currently working on peoples’ websites.

    A good example of this is the increasing improvement of social readers that allow one to subscribe to a variety of sources in a reader which also allows one to respond to posts in-line and then own that content on one’s website. If I can subscribe to almost anything out there in one interface and sort and filter it in any way I’d like, that’s far better than having twenty different feed readers named Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Soundcloud, etc. which I have to separately and independent manage and check. Now I’ve yet to see an IndieWeb reader with a one click SubToMe-type of solution for adding feeds to it, but I don’t think it will be very long before that’s a reality. The slowly improving Microsub spec that splits some of the heavy lifting needed to build and design a stand alone feed reader is certainly helping to make some massive headway on these issues.

    Maybe we’ll soon have an easy way for people to post who they’re following on their own websites, and their readers will be able to read or parse those pages and aggregate those followed posts directly into a nice reading interface? Maybe someone will figure out a way to redesign or re-imagine the old blogroll? Maybe we’ll leverage the idea of OPML subscriptions so that a personal blogroll (maybe we rename this something friendlier like a following page or personal recommendations, subscriptions, etc.) can feed a person’s subscriptions into their social reader? There are certainly a lot of solid ideas being experimented on and in actual use out there.

    We obviously still have a long way to go to make things better and more usable, not only for ourselves as designers and developers, but for the coding averse. I feel like there’s already a flourishing space out there doing this that’s miles ahead of solutions like /feeds. Why don’t we start at that point and then move forward?

    Portland, Oregon • 64°F
    #feedreaders #Microsub #OPML #OPMLsubscription #RSS #socialreaders #UI #webdesign
    Sun, May 31, 2020 5:26pm -07:00 (liked on Sun, May 31, 2020 5:32pm -07:00)
  • Vika https://fireburn.ru/

    Microsub specification says that notifications channel should get handled separately from others (that’s why it has a known UID and is the first). Cool feature of Java (and Kotlin) that allows me to do it: I set my Notifications fragment (that is separate from feeds) to a subclass of MicrosubChannelFragment that sets “uid” to notifications. This prevents duplication of code, makes my channels pretty and saves effort!

    Portland, Oregon • 50°F
    #indieweb #Microsub #Kittybox
    Tue, Jan 7, 2020 4:20am +03:00 (liked on Tue, Jan 7, 2020 6:44am -08:00)
  • Vika https://fireburn.ru/

    So, I'm migrating my YouTube subscriptions to Microsub, thanks to YouTube's RSS support. I think that when I make my own IndieWeb reader, I'll special-case YouTube posts by adding a YouTube embed inside of them. Or maybe by downloading the video with yt-dl and offering it as a u-video. It'll also serve as an archive... but my HDD would explode!

    Brisbane, Queensland • 57°F
    #YouTube #silos #IndieWeb #Microsub #ownyourdata
    Tue, Sep 17, 2019 3:52pm +00:00 (liked on Wed, Sep 18, 2019 7:07am +10:00)
  • Ingo Steinke 🇪🇺 https://twitter.com/fraktalisman
    Tantek Çelik @t : How to "take the web back" and looking back at David Bowie's internet enthusiasm in 1999 at #btconf @btconf 2019 #indieweb #microsub #webmention
    Düsseldorf, Nordrhein-Westfalen
    #btconf #indieweb #microsub #webmention
    Tue, May 14, 2019 8:31pm +00:00 (liked on Thu, May 16, 2019 7:15am +02:00)
  • Aaron Parecki
    Second #IndieWebCamp hack day project: how to quickly get started using an IndieWeb reader.

    • start with a blank HTML file
    • add a rel=me link to your GitHub profile, and make sure your GitHub profile links back
    • add a couple `<link>` tags for indieauth.com
    • sign in to https://aperture.p3k.io
    • add the `<link>` tag it generates for you
    • sign in to an IndieWeb reader!

    More details at: https://indieweb.org/Microsub#Getting_Started
    Düsseldorf, Nordrhein-Westfalen, DEU
    6 likes 3 reposts
    #microsub #indiewebcamp #indieweb
    Sun, May 12, 2019 1:55pm +02:00
  • Marty McGuire https://martymcgui.re/

    Loving the Adafruit PyPortal as an IndieWeb-powered photo device.

    Code to come!

    Praha, Hlavní město Praha • 49°F
    #IndieWeb #Adafruit #PyPortal #Python #Microsub #IndieAuth
    Fri, Mar 29, 2019 3:32pm -04:00 (liked on Sat, Mar 30, 2019 7:24am +01:00)
  • Sebastiaan Andeweg https://seblog.nl

    Three things about Readers during IndieWebCamp Nürnberg

    Seattle, Washington • 49°F
    #indieweb #microsub #readers
    Mon, Oct 22, 2018 2:22pm +00:00 (liked on Mon, Oct 22, 2018 6:25pm -07:00)
  • Peter Stuifzand https://p83.nl/
    Retrieve all your subscriptions from a Microsub server

    ek channels | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -n 1 ek follow

    #microsub #tips https://p83.nl/p/933
    Portland, Oregon • 68°F
    #microsub #tips
    Sat, Sep 1, 2018 8:21pm +00:00 (liked on Sat, Sep 1, 2018 1:31pm -07:00)
  • Peter Stuifzand https://publog.stuifzandapp.com/

    Implementing Microsub yourself (part 1)

    Portland, Oregon • 64°F
    #microsub
    Sun, Jul 22, 2018 11:36am +00:00 (liked on Sun, Jul 22, 2018 11:13am -07:00)
  • Peter Stuifzand https://publog.stuifzandapp.com/
    Ekster now supports actual Indieauth to the Microsub channels. It's now possible for example to connect with indiepaper.io and "archive" pages to a channel. But of course the possibilities are endless.
    Portland, Oregon • 88°F
    #ekster #microsub #indieauth
    Sat, Jul 14, 2018 10:54pm +00:00 (liked on Sat, Jul 14, 2018 3:56pm -07:00)
  • Aaron Parecki
    Ohh this is exciting! Congrats https://eddiehinkle.com!
    Portland, Oregon, USA • 78°F
    1 like 1 reply
    #microsub
    Sun, Jun 17, 2018 12:09pm -07:00
  • Indigenous Development Log #1 (eddiehinkle.com)
    #micropub #microsub #indieweb
    Wed, May 2, 2018 10:03pm -07:00
  • An 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 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.
    continue reading...
    39 likes 6 reposts 2 bookmarks 42 replies 25 mentions
    #indieweb #monocle #reader #microsub
    Fri, Apr 20, 2018 9:00am -07:00
  • Tantek Çelik http://tantek.com/
    hosting Homebrew Website Club SF tonight @MozSF!
    RSVP http://tantek.com/2018/080/e1

    Special guest @aaronpk will demo his #IndieWeb reader setup!
    https://aaronparecki.com/2018/03/12/17/building-an-indieweb-reader built on #openweb standards #WebSub #Microsub #microformats2 #IndieAuth #MicroPub #Webmention #Webhooks
    San Francisco, California • 64°F
    #IndieWeb #openweb #WebSub #Microsub #microformats2 #IndieAuth #MicroPub #Webmention #Webhooks
    Wed, Mar 21, 2018 11:24am -07:00 (liked on Wed, Mar 21, 2018 6:59pm -07:00)
  • aaronpk https://github.com/aaronpk   •   Jan 30

    #3 Indicating whether posts have already been responded to

    Aaron Parecki

    I'm thinking about using a new Microsub property in the entry to indicate the response URLs that may exist for this post.

    {
      "type": "entry",
      ...
      "_like": "https://aaronparecki.com/xxxxxxx",
      "_repost": "https://aaronparecki.com/yyyyyyyy"
    }
    

    alternately:

    {
      "type": "entry",
      ...
      "_actions": {
        "like": "https://aaronparecki.com/xxxxxxx",
        "repost": "https://aaronparecki.com/yyyyyyyy"
      }
    }
    

    For likes and reposts, from a UI perspective, we want to know whether the user has already liked or reposted a post (a boolean yes/no), in order to style the like/repost button differently, so in that case it makes sense to have those be a single string. (The client could send a Micropub delete request with the URL if the user taps the button again, to delete the like/repost.)

    For replies, I'm not sure what we actually want the client to indicate. Long-term it would be great if the client had the ability to show the full conversation thread, so in that sense it makes sense to handle replies differently from likes and reposts. Maybe we can handle this question separately for replies.

    In the case of likes and reposts, we only care about the URLs of the user's own like/repost posts. Showing other people who have liked or reposted a post is a different problem, since that does not affect the state of the action buttons.

    In thinking through this, I'm leaning towards the second JSON option above, nesting the data under _actions, since this data is limited in scope to help indicate the state of the action buttons. It is not meant to cover displaying all responses to a post.

    • 43°F
    #microsub
    Wed, Mar 14, 2018 8:13am -07:00
  • aaronpk https://github.com/aaronpk   •   Jan 30

    #4 Tracking read state or position

    Aaron Parecki
    This has been implemented in Aperture, Monocle, Together, and Indigenous, and documented at https://indieweb.org/Microsub-spec#Mark_Entries_Read so I'm going to close this issue. Let's open new issues for any future discussion about the specific behaviors within read-state tracking.
    Portland, Oregon • 43°F
    #microsub
    Wed, Mar 14, 2018 7:49am -07:00
  • Building an IndieWeb Reader

    Over the last several months, I've been slowly putting the pieces in place to be able to build a solid indieweb reader. Today, I feel like I finally have enough in place to consider this functional enough that I am now using it every day!
    continue reading...
    60 likes 12 reposts 5 bookmarks 37 replies 40 mentions 1 RSVP
    #indieweb #monocle #aperture #microsub #micropub #watchtower #reader
    Mon, Mar 12, 2018 5:03pm -07:00
  • Aaron Parecki
    Just made Aperture download a cached copy of avatars and other media it finds in posts! Now the images will always be available over https, and images from old posts won't disappear!

    If you're running your own copy of Aperture, it'll take an extra step of setting up a subdomain to serve the images from the storage folder. They're not served from the main domain for security reasons.
    Portland, Oregon • 61°F
    2 likes 2 replies
    #aperture #microsub #indieweb
    Mon, Mar 12, 2018 11:11am -07:00
  • Aaron Parecki
    Monocle just got real fancy. I can now set a default account for each channel from which responses should be sent. (Stored in my Microsub server, not in Monocle, so it can work across clients). Monocle recognizes when alternate accounts are available and provides an account switcher UI in the footer. Any "like/repost/reply" actions are then sent via that account instead of to my main site!
    Portland, Oregon • 49°F
    2 likes 1 reply
    #microsub #monocle #aperture #p3k
    Thu, Mar 8, 2018 2:54pm -08:00
  • https://github.com/indieweb/microsub

    Add method to remove entries from a channel

    Users may want to remove an entry from a channel for various reasons. Since #4 tracking read state means we now have referenceable entry IDs, we can use those to also remove entries from a channel.
    continue reading...
    #microsub
    Thu, Mar 8, 2018 9:20am -08:00
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Hi, I'm Aaron Parecki, Senior Security Architect 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 and dabble in product design.

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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