Tantek’s Thoughts 2024-1

A couple of days ago in an informal discussion in the #indieweb chat channel about how different people view #Mastodon, the #fediverse, or #Bluesky, and services like #Bridgy & #BridgyFed quite differently, I noted^1 that one big unspoken difference was how things on the web last over time, from the traditional persistent web, vs the newer and growing ephemeral web. There is the publicly viewable #OpenWeb that many of us take for granted, meaning the web that is persistent, that lasts over time, and thanks to being #curlable, that the Internet Archive archives, and that a plurality of search engines see and index (robots.txt allowing). The HTML + CSS + media files declarative web. Then there are the https APIs that return JSON "web", the thing that I’ve started calling the ephemeral web, the set of things that are here today, briefly, gone tomorrow. I’ve previously used the more provocative phrase js;dr (JavaScript required, Didn’t Read) for this #ephemeralWeb, yet like many things, it turns out there is a spectrum from ephemeral to persistent. One popular example on that spectrum that’s closer to the ephemeral edge is anything on a Mastodon server running v4 (or later as of this writing) of the software. (I’m not bothering to discuss the examples of walled garden social media silos because I expect we will continue to see their demise^2 over time.) For example, the Internet Archive version of the shutdown notice for the queer(.)af Mastodon server, is visibly blank: https://web.archive.org/web/20240112165635/https://queer.af/@postmaster/111733741786950083 Note: only a single Internet Archive snapshot was made of that post. However if you View Source, you can find the entirety of that #queerAF post duplicated across a couple of invisible-to-the-user meta tags inside the raw HTML: "**TL;DR: Queer[.]AF will close on 2024-04-12** …" [.] added to avoid linking to a dead domain. Note: such meta tags in js;dr pages were part of the motivation to specify metaformats. To be clear, the shutdown of queer(.)af was a tragedy and not the fault of the creators, administrators etc., but rather one of the unfortunate outcomes of using some ccTLDs, country-code top level domains, that risk sudden draconian rules, domain renewal price hikes, or other unpredictable risks due to the politics, turmoil, regime changes etc. of the countries that administrate such domains. Nearly the entirety of every Mastodon server, every post, every reply, is ephemeral. When a Mastodon server shuts down, all its posts disappear from the surface of the web, forever. Perhaps internet archeologists of the future will discover such dead permalinks, check the Internet Archive, find apparent desolation, and a few of them will be curious enough to use View Source tools to unearth parts of those posts, unintentionally preserved inside ceremonial meta tags next to dead scripts disconnected from databases and an empty shell of a body. All reply-contexts of and replies to such posts and conversations lost, like threads unraveled from an ancient tapestry, scattered to the winds. If you’re reading this post in your Mastodon reader, on either the website of your Mastodon account, or in a proprietary native client application, you should be able to click through, perhaps on the date-time stamp displayed to you, to view the original post on my website, where it is served in relatively simple declarative HTML + CSS with a bit of progressive enhancement script. Because I serve declarative content, my posts are both findable across a variety of services & search engines, and archived by the Internet Archive. Even if my site goes down, snapshots or archives will be viewable elsewhere, with nearly the same fidelity of viewing them directly on my site. This design for longevity is both deliberate, and the default for which the web was designed. It’s also one of the explicit principles in the IndieWeb community. If that resonates with you, if creating, writing, & building things that last matter to you, choose web tools, services, and software that support the persistence & longevity of your work. #persistentWeb #longWeb #LongNow This is post 10 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts ← https://tantek.com/2024/035/t2/indiewebcamp-brighton-tickets-available → https://tantek.com/2024/047/t1/indieweb-major-update-design Post glossary: API (Application Programming Interface) https://indieweb.org/API Bluesky https://indieweb.org/Bluesky Bridgy https://brid.gy/ Bridgy Fed https://fed.brid.gy/ ccTLD (country-code top level domain) https://indieweb.org/ccTLD curlable https://indieweb.org/curlable declarative web https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/webvision/full/#thedeclarativeweb Internet Archive https://archive.org/ js;dr (JavaScript required; Didn’t Read) https://tantek.com/2015/069/t1/js-dr-javascript-required-dead JSON https://indieweb.org/JSON longevity https://indieweb.org/longevity Mastodon https://indieweb.org/Mastodon metaformats https://microformats.org/wiki/metaformats permalink https://indieweb.org/permalink principles in the IndieWeb community https://indieweb.org/principles progressive enhancement https://indieweb.org/progressive_enhancement reply https://indieweb.org/reply reply-context https://indieweb.org/reply-context robots.txt https://indieweb.org/robots_txt social media https://indieweb.org/social_media silo https://indieweb.org/silo View Source https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/view_source/index.html ^1 https://chat.indieweb.org/2024-02-13#t1707845454695700 ^2 https://indieweb.org/site-deaths

Similar to @paulgraham.com (@paulg@mas.to @paulg)’s 2008 observation about trolls^1, there’s a sort of Gresham's Law of developers (vs users): developers are willing to use a forum with a lot of users in it, but users aren’t willing to use a forum with a lot of developer-speak. Whether such forums are email lists, chat (IRC, #Matrix, #Slack, #Discord), or, well, online forums (#Reddit, #HackerNews), when discussions either start or shift into technical details, jargon, or acronyms, users (in a very broad sense) tend to stop participating, and sometimes leave, never to return. Users in this context are anyone with a desire (or a preference) not to chat or even be bothered spending time reading about technical plumbing & #jargon, and see such discussions as a distraction at best, and more like noise to be avoided. Paraphrasing Paul Graham again: once technical details, jargon, acronyms “take hold, it tends to become the dominant culture” and discourages users from showing up, discussing user-centric topics, or even staying in said forum. The #IndieWeb community started in 2011 as a single #indiewebcamp IRC channel (no email list^2) because it was tightly coupled to IndieWebCamp events, which were both highly technical and yet focused on actually making things work on your personal site that you need^3, that you will use^4 yourself. Conversations bridged real world use-cases and technical details. It only took us five years after the first IndieWebCamp in Portland to recognize that the community had grown beyond the events, and had a clear need for a separate place for deep discussions of developer topics. As part of renaming the community from IndieWebCamp to IndieWeb^5, we created the #indieweb-dev (dev) channel for such technical topics like protocols, formats, tools, coding libraries, APIs, and any other acronyms or jargon. The community did a good job of keeping technical topics in the dev channel, and encouraging new folks in the main #indieweb channel who started technical conversations to continue them in the dev channel. Still, it was too easy for user-centric topics to veer into technical territory. It often felt more natural to continue a thread in the channel it started rather than break to another channel. There was also a need for regular community labor to nudge developer conversations to the developer chat channel. We had already started documenting IndieWeb related jargon^6 on the wiki and turned it into a MediaWiki Category so we could tag individual pages as jargon and have them automatically show-up in a list. Soon after, @aaronparecki.com (@aaronpk@aaronparecki.com) added a heuristic to the friendly channel bot Loqi to recognize when people started using jargon in the main IndieWeb chat channel and nudge^7 them to the development channel. Having Loqi do some of the gentle nudging has helped, though it‘s still quite easy for even the experienced folks in the community to get drawn into a developer conversation on main as it were. We’ve documented both a summary and lengthier descriptions of channel purposes^8 which help us remind each other, as well as provide a guide to newcomers. Both experienced community members and newcomers share much of the user-centric focus of the IndieWeb, the IndieWeb being for everyone^9, whether developer, hobbyist, or someone who wants an independent presence on the web without bothering with technical details. Whether some of us want to code or not, we all want to use our IndieWeb sites to express ourselves on the web, to use our sites instead of depending on social media silos. That shared purpose keeps us focused. It takes a village: eternal community vigilance is the price of staying user-centric and welcoming to newcomers. The ideas behind this post were originally shared in the IndieWeb meta chat channel.^10 This is post 8 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts ← https://tantek.com/2024/033/t1/earthquake-sanfrancisco-shifted → https://tantek.com/2024/035/t2/indiewebcamp-brighton-tickets-available Post glossary: development channel (indieweb-dev) https://indieweb.org/discuss#dev Discord https://indieweb.org/Discord format https://indieweb.org/format Hacker News (HN) https://indieweb.org/Hacker_News IndieWeb https://indieweb.org/IndieWeb IndieWebCamp https://indieweb.org/IndieWebCamp IRC https://indieweb.org/IRC jargon https://indieweb.org/jargon Loqi https://indieweb.org/Loqi main IndieWeb chat channel (on main) https://indieweb.org/discuss#indieweb Matrix https://indieweb.org/Matrix meta chat channel https://indieweb.org/discuss#meta MediaWiki Category https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Categories plumbing https://indieweb.org/plumbing protocol https://indieweb.org/protocol Reddit https://indieweb.org/Reddit tools https://indieweb.org/tools Slack https://indieweb.org/Slack social media silos https://indieweb.org/silos ^1 https://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html (2008 essay, HN still succumbed to trolling) ^2 https://indieweb.org/discuss#Email ^3 https://indieweb.org/make_what_you_need ^4 https://indieweb.org/use_what_you_make ^5 https://indieweb.org/rename_to_IndieWeb ^6 https://indieweb.org/jargon ^7 https://indieweb.org/Category:jargon#Loqi_Nudge ^8 https://indieweb.org/discuss#Chat_Channels_Purposes ^9 https://tantek.com/2024/026/t3/indieweb-for-everyone-internet-of-people ^10 https://chat.indieweb.org/meta/2024-01-22#t1705883690759800