I’ve noticed a growing conversation in some spaces on the web about the ethics and choices surrounding how the web is used. Or maybe not—perhaps I’m just reading into it. A recent blog entry by Manuel Moreale about how he chooses to allow readers to interact with his "content"1 got me thinking about how I choose to engage via the OpenWeb.
My content lives here, on my site. Everything in here is under my control and it’s then distributed through three distribution channels.
The first—and most obvious—is the web itself. My content is distributed to you via the Internet. You can ask your browser to get this page you’re reading right now and get access to my content.
The second is RSS. You can tell your RSS reader to fetch the content available on my website and you can then consume my content inside your app of choice.
The final one is email. I send my posts via email because some people prefer to stay up to date that way and who am I to prevent that from happening?
While I’m sure some readers have added my blog’s RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed to their reader applications or RSS aggregators, the vast majority of my visitors find me via random Google searches. My search engine optimisation (SEO) skills must be quite good. 😄
It used to be that automated link-sharing on Twitter and Facebook brought me the most traffic. However, after Facebook shut down API access to personal timelines (April 30, 2015) and Twitter did the same through its pricing model, I could no longer auto-share links to those platforms. Manually sharing links has become a chore.
During the pandemic (and possibly before that), I started using social media platforms less. But in 2019, I created a Mastodon account and began auto-sharing there via ActivityPub. Mastodon has since become the social platform I engage with the most. Over time, I imagine Mastodon link referrals will replace the traffic I previously received from Twitter.
After Google search referrals, the next largest segment of my web traffic comes via WordPress Reader. WordPress Reader acts as an RSS aggregator for WordPress.com, but it also allows users to add any RSS feed. With the JetPack app, I can read the latest posts from blogs I follow, interact via the comments (if enabled), and discover new blogs or topics.
You don’t need to blog on WordPress.com to use Reader, but you do need a free WordPress.com account. In many ways, Reader is a social RSS reader. If it supported webmention, it would be even more awesome!
For me, email is synonymous with work. Corporate America generates a lot of it. After a day of sending and responding to emails, I have no patience for personal emails. My spam filter can barely keep up with the deluge of unwanted emails, and I don’t want to invite more by discussing blog posts via email. Additionally, email correspondence lacks the historical connection to the original blog post that comments or social interactions can provide.
I often share links to other people’s blog posts on social platforms. This draws attention to their content and encourages discussion. While POSSE (Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) is widely known, I propose an alternative acronym for cases where only a link is shared: LINCS (Linking Indirectly, No Content Shared).
Given that "The point of putting content out there is to connect, to interact with others, to exchange ideas, and to grow," sharing links to my blog post and enabling my website to allow interaction via comments—or on the social platform where the link is shared—seems perfectly reasonable. By leveraging technology like webmention, I can bring those comments back to my website, creating a cohesive discussion.
If you’re curious about engaging with the OpenWeb, start small by subscribing to blogs via RSS or setting up your own Mastodon account. The OpenWeb is more vibrant when we all connect and share in ways that respect both creativity and autonomy. I am trying to avoid using the word "content," but it seems unavoidable. I am not a marketing, media, entertainment, or social media worker. I am just me. ↩ View on Like this:Like Loading... Technology ActivityPubIndieNewsIndieWebIndieWebNewsPOSSERSSRSS AggregatorSocial RSS ReaderWebmention#indienews
Your h-entries should have, at minimum, the following properties:
e-content — the main content of the post
p-name — if your post is an article with a name, use this classname.
dt-published — the datetime the post was published at, in ISO8601 format, with a timezone
u-url — the canonical URL of the post, especially important on pages listing multiple posts
It’s a common convention for the published datetime to be a link to the post itself, but they can be separate if you want.
There should also be some way to discover the author of the post — either link to your homepage (which should have your h-card on it) from anywhere within the body of the page with rel=author, or optionally embed a p-author h-card in the h-entry.
The web is an expressive medium, and as such there are many other properties which you can add to your posts. Check out the h-entry documentation for a full list.
Want to be able to use h-entry data in your code? Check out the open-source implementations.