What about the IndieWeb and RSS?

Dave Winer wrote a post with the title “IndieWeb should love RSS” recently, with one of the themes being that the IndieWeb has a lack of support for RSS. I would like to provide a little background from my participation in the IndieWeb community.

In January 2014, I attended a Homebrew Website Club meeting. This was (and still is) a gathering of like-minded people to discuss personal websites and making updates to them. The lead person was Aaron Parecki, one of the IndieWebCamp co-founders. We all introduced ourselves, and shared various opinions on web site development and talked about our individual sites. One of the things mentioned was the use of microformats as a technique/technology for building websites. I had not heard of this before, and looked into it more after the meeting. I then wrote a post on what I was interested in exploring, and one of the items was “following other sites”. What I found in looking at other Indieweb-type sites was that they did not have any RSS feed for posts. Specifically, the two co-founders, Aaron Parecki and Tantek Celik, did not have feeds available for their sites. In the next meeting I attended, I brought this up. The response was that they were using microformats to encode data within their websites, and that there were microformat parsers which could read that formatted data and present it in a feed reader application. Aaron Parecki even did a hack on the Selfoss feed reader application to allow it to parse microformats-based sites and present site updates like a RSS feed reader would. I even wrote up some instructions on how to set this up (after the fact). In the meeting, however, I asked how the attendees expected people to keep up with site updates without some type of feed to monitor. Aaron’s response was that more people needed to adopt microformats. I said that this was a “boil the ocean” strategy and that people who use feeds to monitor sites expect to use RSS and Atom, not microformats.

Sometime after that, I noticed that both Aaron Parecki and Tantek Celik started providing a feed for their sites, although it was really a feed generated by some other application that was parsing their microformats stuff. For the next several years, though, the general trend in the group of websites that considered themselves to be part of the IndieWeb community focused on microformats and technologies that built on microformats as a building block. Over time, this overt position against RSS/Atom feeds has subsided, and (per the IndieWeb website), I would say the current focus is on the principles of (1) principles over project-centric focus, (2) publish on your site, and (3) design and UX come first, then protocols and formats are developed second. In that list, RSS and Atom become part of a “plurality of projects“, acknowledging that there can be “more than one way to do it”, as Perl devotees like to say.

The more active IndieWeb members (Aaron Parecki and Tantek Celik leading the way) have created a number of standards based on technologies grown from implementations on Indieweb websites (Webmention, Microsub, and Micropub). Time will tell if these develop into more mainstream technologies. I think Webmention (supporting site-to-site communication/commenting) is the furthest along (I have it enabled through WordPress plugin on my main site), but I am interested in exploring the others. RSS, though, has stood the test of time, and is still powering feed readers and podcast clients throughout the world. Dave Winer should rightly feel proud of his contributions in this area. RSS and podcasting are a crucial part of what I call (and others have called) the “independent web” (websites and web presences that are not part of a silo like Twitter, Facebook, etc, where people own their data and control it (also an IndieWeb principle)). The two areas (IndieWeb and independent web) share some features, but in my opinion, should not be considered “the same” – there are differences. My hope is that they can coexist and at times even work together, but always with respect (as the IndieWeb code of conduct states: “Be respectful of other people, respectfully ask people to stop if you are bothered….”).

Checking out IndieBlocks for WordPress

This weekend, I tried out the IndieBlocks plugin for WordPress websites. In 2019, WordPress moved to a new editor for weblog posts called Gutenberg, which uses “blocks” to insert different types of post formats (text, formatted text, video, embeds, etc.). IndieWeb developers had developed a plugin to support different post types, but it used the Classic Editor (now called), and did not support the Gutenberg editor. I played with the “Context” block, and was able to create bookmark, like, and reply posts. I did have a problem with creating a standalone Note using the IndieBlocks plugin (I created it, but it did not appear on the home page). However, the developer said that he is working on the issue.

The end of podcasting, chapter 59

This week, a Substack newsletter was posted about problems that podcasts from former podcast studio Gimlet Media were experiencing (getting cancelled). In 2019, Spotify purchased Gimlet Media for $230 million dollars (more here on other Spotify podcast acquisitions). Why did people think being acquired by a big company was going to allow them to keep their artistic freedom and continue to do things the way they had done them? Demonstration of control of the channel (a la CBS/NBC/ABC of the 60s/70s/80s – you had to convince them to approve your show to get on the air) – maybe go back to producing podcasts yourself? After all, you must have a lot of money after that acquisition. Chapter 57 of this story discusses the Joe Rogan move to Spotify, and I wrote in 2019 about how to avoid the corporate takeover of podcasting. As Joel Grey and Liza Minelli sang in the musical “Cabaret“, money makes the world go around. If people want to produce podcasts to make money, there are ways to innovate, but the best place to start is to make great podcasts.

Wrapping up the January 6th Committee hearings

My wife and I watched the final hearing this week from the House January 6th Select Committee on the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 (also, see C-SPAN archive collection. It was a day that I remember well, having kept a liveblog of the day’s events (also see posts here and here). I think that the committee has done an excellent job of telling the story of what led up to this event and how Donald Trump was the central figure in trying to overturn the 2020 election. My fervent hope is that the Department of Justice is going to pursue Trump and hold him accountable for his crimes (i.e., indict, arrest, and convict him!). The site JustSecurity.org has a January 6 clearinghouse of information on this event, well worth checking out, as well as a citizen’s guide to the evidentiary record.

The most striking part of the hearing was the documentary video of the congressional leaders at Fort McNair filmed by Alexandra Pelosi (Nancy Pelosi’s daughter). CNN also carried more of this footage the evening of the hearing (also here). It was riveting. One question came up in my wife and I discussing the hearing – how was it that Alexandra Pelosi came to be there that day? And for myself, how is it that this is the first time this footage is coming to public view? Was she planning to make a documentary with this? Her Wikipedia page says she works for HBO, but she has not released any documentaries since 2020. I hope that some journalist will dig into this a little more.

Using non-violence techniques to achieve goals

In a recent post on Waging Nonviolence, organizer George Lakey related a story about use of non-violence training and techniques in a boycott of South African sport teams during the apartheid era. Through these trainings, anti-racism and anti-apartheid groups were able to work together to come up with a plan to stage de-centralized civil disobedience events. The New Zealand government could not handle this approach, and cancelled a tour by the South African rugby team.

With the upcoming mid-term elections, there may be problems resulting from election protestors and disrupters. These techniques may be of use in this troubled time. We will have to wait, watch, and perhaps take action to preserve our democracy through civil disobedience.