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Going Silo-Private to Prefer the IndieWeb, Leave Silo Publics, and Pioneer Privacy on the Independent Web

I changed my silo (social media) profiles to private today to:

Direct new people to my indieweb site (instead of silos) where people can read my posts directly, or get automatic updates using new IndieWeb readers like:
- Woodwind
- Monocle
Deliberately step back from silo “public discussions” which have descended into anywhere from:
- Twitter: “Too many people have peed in the pool”
- Instagram: blocking spam accounts nearly daily (yet they still show up in lists of likers on my photos)
Take an incremental step toward outright leaving silos, as others have:
- IndieWeb: People quitting silos, 2013-2016
Treat Instagram in particular as primarily a means to the ends of processing/posting photos and videos on my own site.
- Though I continue to admire (and document) their “reading” user experience: how much more focused, primarily positive (perhaps choice of followings), and just overall pleasant it is to follow posts from people on Instagram.
To be an indieweb canary. Many of the tools and services we have built in the IndieWebCamp.com community are designed for public posts and interactions, including with silos. I changed my silo profiles to private, or to make private posts by default, e.g. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Flickr and documented how to do so here:
- indiewebcamp.com/private-account
- indiewebcamp.com/privacy
To learn firsthand what the challenges are, both user experience and technical, e.g.
- How do people interact with private POSSE (syndicated) copies of public indieweb original posts?
- What are the personal challenges of understanding the different publics of mixed private silo vs public indieweb posts?
To start better understanding existing private account and privacy user experiences & expectations, and documenting them to accelerate indieweb “best of the best” privacy & private publishing design.

In that last respect, this is just one of many private vs. public experiments I will be conducting, including with my own website and posts, to gain real world experience of the privacy design challenges and opportunities for individual or small group independent web sites, inspired but not burdened by existing silo designs.

Starting in 2010-2011 we the IndieWeb community pioneered and documented details and best practices of how to POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) by doing so live on our own sites to various silos like Twitter.

By 2015, POSSE had grown far beyond the indieweb community and became an accepted open independent web practice, with many others reconceptulaizing or redeveloping it, e.g. POSSE to Medium by “Creating Medium stories via RSS”.

It’s now 2016, and just as 2010 felt like the right time to develop and show POSSE (and outdo silos at & with it), now feels like the right time for those of us with our own indieweb sites to take steps with those sites to pioneer, develop, document, and show how the independent web can do better at private accounts & posts, improving upon silos both technically, and more importantly, with better user experiences.

Read more at IndieWebCamp.com, and join the discussion at #indiewebcamp.

Thanks to Ben Werdmüller for reviewing and providing feedback on this post.

Twitter post 700145919568687104

On Acceptance & Healing Post Injury: http://neverstopexploring.com/2016/01/22/the-north-face-ultrarunner-stephanie-howe-talks-acceptance-and-healing-post-injury/ Having trouble with acceptance. Stuck on frustration and anger. It’s been over 2 months since I went for a proper run. I can’t say I've reached anything remotely close to a peaceful state of acceptance. At this point only sheer force of rational will is keeping me fairly disciplined about letting my knee heel fully (then wait 2 more weeks) before I run again. Not acceptance. Every day I take all the frustration driven impatience and force myself to think it through: The quickest way to running at my peak again is to let my knee fully heel, until it feels *the same* as my other (healthy) knee, no difference in swelling or pain, and then wait two more weeks just to be sure. Despite icing, every night I go to bed knowing I still can’t run, and every morning I wake up (sometimes hours too early) to the same. I cope through a mental exercise of gratefulness. Breathing deeply I am grateful for overcoming asthma as I did the past year (by running, ironically). I am grateful that I can walk smoothly, even quickly, without pain or asymmetry. That works for a while, and eventually the frustration returns. Fortunately I have found exercises that are fairly easy on my knee, yet strenuous enough to push myself physically. I am greatful for stationery body-weight exercises. I am grateful for being able to do yoga, by myself or in a class. I am grateful I know my body well enough to adjust poses as needed. I am grateful my knee has recovered enough boulder. I try to relax, reflect on all the feelings of anger and frustration, and use them to build motivation, drive, and intensity into workouts like a deck (tantek.com/t4fL2), or Sebastians (tantek.com/t4fT1). I confess the anger helps me push through, to keep pushing despite feeling short of breath, or muscles burning with fatigue. Setting a PR (personal record) this way is bittersweet. Whether by a few seconds or burpees, every such PR feels great. And yet, it’s hard to fight the feeling that it was achieved partially as a response to something negative. I’m not sure what else to do. I’m too stubborn to just give up, which is what “acceptance” feels like. Maybe it’s this emotional cycle that I should accept, rather than my injury. Nearly every day I now feel improvements in my knee. A little less pain or soreness in the morning. A little more flexibility and range of motion in yoga poses. Or walking a flight of steps, not realizing til afterwards that there was no pain. I am grateful for healing. I am grateful for the knowledge that I will run again some day, and when I do I will be stronger than ever before. I try to appreciate these improvements and yet it’s still too easy to feel impatient and wonder. When will I be able to run a mile around my neighborhood again? Run to and in @Nov_Project_SF? Run up & down hills? Train for my next race? Will I recover in time to train for my next race? (Bay to Breakers in May). I can already tell those last two weeks will be the hardest.