The Open Web

The most powerful aspect of the Internet is the open web. From the very beginning, there has been a conflict with on one side walled gardens and closed networks with open standards and interoperability on the other.

My first experience with an online world was dial-up into AOL and exploring their internal experiences. Only rarely did I click the button to go into the unknown and wild internet. AOL controlled everything within their experiences.

For awhile, we had a golden age of blogging. People would comment on each other’s blogs. If you wanted to write a novel in response to someone, you did–on your site. When you did, a trackback or, later on, a pingback would automatically alert the original post and a little ad-hoc social network between two sites was created.

Feed readers provided a place for people to aggregate their blogging experience. From there, easy publishing and content aggregation fell in love and gave birth to social networks. This path wasn’t intended or necessarily in mind when Facebook or Twitter started, but nevertheless.

In all of this, having your home belong to you is important. A business whose online presence is their social media page is placing all of their eggs in one basket hoping that it isn’t in the platform’s business interests to change the system to your detriment. Even on site-builder platforms, which do give you your own website, do not give you any means to take that content with you whenever their platform or your needs change.

Having a home that you control is important, but now you have to maintain your main online presence and your Facebook page and your Instagram account and your Twitter feed and maybe blog on Medium too and so on and so on. The open web is being lost.

I want to see the WordPress ecosystem do more toward building up the new open web. Whether it is directly in Core or experimented with via Jetpack, there is a large user base who would benefit by modern and advanced open web technologies. There is a solid group of folks who believe in an open and independent web who have helped create standards and systems to interoperate, but it’s hard to gain adoption without the baking of something with the heft of Facebook or Twitter.

micro.blog is what turned me on to the modern standards. Micro.blog aims to be, more or less, an open Twitter. You can pay them to run your microblog or it’ll pull in your WordPress site (a special site just for your microblog or, in my case, just a category). Reading more about the tech behind it, such as webmentions–which I had heard of before but never took the time to read up on it–gave me a new excitement for the future of the web that I haven’t had in awhile.

What can we do to help continue this excitement? WordPress has considerable pull. When it supports something, it gets noticed. If we can figure out how many make webmentions work well, would Facebook or Twitter begin to support them in some way?

To this end, I would like to dedicate some of my free time toward exploring this more. Specifically:

  1. Update the PuSHPress plugin. It is currently on WP.com and available for self-hosted sites using an older version of the now-called WebSub W3C candidate recommendation. Automattic already has that much and it gives me a good place to start.
  2. Find small places in Jetpack that we can work toward supporting these efforts in a frictionless way. One example is storing Publicize URLs locally so plugins like Syndicated Links can use that information. In this case, with a Facebook or Twitter link stored in Syndicated Links, a service like brid.gy can better get webmentions sent to your site. It isn’t required, since they’ll likely have links back to your site already, but again, small things to close the gap.
  3. Determine what could webmentions support in WordPress naively look like. What makes sense to be added to Core and how to make it expandable in a way that doesn’t tie our hands down the road. (Post formats, anyone? Pretty soon after they launched, the issue of not enough structure on how they worked ended up resulting in a pretty random experience. 3.6 tried to fix it, but, in many respects, it was too late.)
  4. More broadly, think through how else we can positively include ripe standards. Like a recent Jetpack fix to make our recipe shortcode compatible with Schema.org.

The hard part is keeping the end user in mind. I’ve recently setup a few pieces of indieweb concepts on my site, but it isn’t something that I would expect my wife or a random end user to do. It isn’t obvious why one would do this, it is a bit clunky, the workflows aren’t straight-forward yet. I think they can get there.

The dream isn’t to return to the past before social media, but help make social media part of the web in an organic way. For this post, you can like it or comment it on via this site, WordPress.com, Twitter, or Facebook, but all of the comments will appear here using Webmentions. The closed gardens will still exist, but it’ll make it easier for people to reach out between them.

I know I’m very late to the party after a tiny bit of research I’ve done so far. I’ve seen the same names pop up all over the place. These folks have worked very hard to get where it is now and I’m sure they know of dozens of roadblocks I couldn’t imagine today. But, I hope that, even if I’m late, there’s still room at the table.

How about you? What would you like to see move forward in the evolving open web?


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35 responses to “The Open Web

  1. Jeremy Felt Avatar

    I\’m jazzed about figuring out what\’s next for WordPress and the open web. kraft.blog/2017/06/the-op…

  2. Jonathan LaCour Avatar

    @Kraft great to have you involved! It was good to hear @photomatt’s views at WCEU. I think WP can and should lead by example in IndieWeb. But, it’s going to take movement in core and Jetpack!

  3. Sheilah Schneider Avatar

    I\’m jazzed about figuring out what\’s next for WordPress and the open web. kraft.blog/2017/06/the-op…

  4. manton Avatar

    I was very excited to see this post from Brandon Kraft, about the potential for an expanded role for WordPress in the IndieWeb movement:

    The dream isn’t to return to the past before social media, but help make social media part of the web in an organic way. For this post, you can like it or comment it on via this site, WordPress.com, Twitter, or Facebook, but all of the comments will appear here using Webmentions. The closed gardens will still exist, but it’ll make it easier for people to reach out between them.

    People always ask me how Micro.blog is going. There are many answers to that: from the business side, or how the community is growing, or the technical bits of scaling the backend. But one simple answer is how Micro.blog’s success can be judged in posts like Brandon’s.
    I still believe strongly in the dual nature of success that I posted about earlier this year:

    Key for Micro.blog: it’s a success if more people blog. To provide value it doesn’t need to replace Twitter. But also, it can.

    Of course, “if more people blog” is a simplification that leaves out what naturally happens next: the spread of more web standards and better tools for microblogging. If Micro.blog has played even a small part in encouraging IndieWeb standards within WordPress itself, that is great progress. I’ll be happy to raise the bar for what success looks like.

  5. Stephen Pieper Avatar

    Reposted: The Open Web – Brandon Kraft

    The hard part is keeping the end user in mind. I’ve recently setup a few pieces of indieweb concepts on my site, but it isn’t something that I would expect my wife or a random end user to do. It isn’t obvious why one would do this, it is a bit clunky, the workflows aren’t straight-forward yet. I think they can get there.

    If any group of people can bring IndieWeb concepts to the mass of users it’s WordPress. As I’ve said elsewhere I don’t know one line of code from another. Plugins are helping me get more connected.

  6. Stephen Pieper Avatar

    Reposted: The Open Web – Brandon Kraft

    The hard part is keeping the end user in mind. I’ve recently setup a few pieces of indieweb concepts on my site, but it isn’t something that I would expect my wife or a random end user to do. It isn’t obvious why one would do this, it is a bit clunky, the workflows aren’t straight-forward yet. I think they can get there.

    If any group of people can bring IndieWeb concepts to the mass of users it’s WordPress. As I’ve said elsewhere I don’t know one line of code from another. Plugins are helping me get more connected.

  7. Stephen Pieper Avatar

    Reposted: The Open Web – Brandon Kraft

    The hard part is keeping the end user in mind. I’ve recently setup a few pieces of indieweb concepts on my site, but it isn’t something that I would expect my wife or a random end user to do. It isn’t obvious why one would do this, it is a bit clunky, the workflows aren’t straight-forward yet. I think they can get there.

    If any group of people can bring IndieWeb concepts to the mass of users it’s WordPress. As I’ve said elsewhere I don’t know one line of code from another. Plugins are helping me get more connected.

  8. David Bisset Avatar

    ICYMI: Some thoughts of me about WordPress and the Open Web. What can we do together? kraft.blog/2017/06/the-op…

  9. Matthias Pfefferle Avatar

    Thanks for your support, this is great news! Let me know if I can help in any way.

    If you plan to reactivate developing on PuSHPress, perhaps we can join forces and merge both PubSubHubbub plugin into one:

    https://github.com/pubsubhubbub/wordpress-pubsubhubbub
    https://wordpress.org/plugins/pubsubhubbub/

    The plugin still supports WebSub and has support for custom feeds, to support for example OStatus (Mastodon) and the IndieWeb:

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/ostatus-for-wordpress/
    https://indieweb.org/WebSub

    I am also curious to see WordPress.com supporting the OpenWeb/IndieWeb.

  10. Matthias Pfefferle Avatar

    I\’m jazzed about figuring out what\’s next for WordPress and the open web. kraft.blog/2017/06/the-op…

    1. Ron Avatar

      I found this article from a link on micro.blog by @eli. Keep up the good work!

  11. Colin Walker Avatar

    Well, yesterday’s post caused a bit of discussion (and, frankly, that was always the intention) but it was largely denied that there was any kind of existential crisis within the indieweb community.
    I may have used the term for a bit of dramatic effect but I believe the point still stands.
    I’m not alone.
    The main argument against my point seemed to be that the different generations of indieweb users are well understood and documented.
    The page states the division into generations allows advocates to “build tools for and create language to encourage growth” but this is a primary issue: the current tools are not simple enough and the language used is definitely confusing to most non-developers.
    We may be seeing moves into Generation 2 with bloggers adding indieweb functionality to their sites but I would argue, due to the amount of manual intervention required to achieve a satisfactory result, they are still borderline Generation 1.
    There is talk about trying to get certain indieweb technologies into WordPress core or the Jetpack plugin and this would be fantastic; it would be the start of “adoption by stealth” that I wrote about before.
    Were this to happen we could effectively be skipping Generation 2 and going straight to Generation 3: those with personal domains managed by third parties, e.g. wordpress.com.
    But, as I also wrote, were this to happen it would probably not be couched in indieweb terms and the responsibility for creating the language to encourage growth would be passed on.

    <a href="https://colinwalker.blog/2017/06/23/23062017-0602/">→ 23/06/2017 6:03am</a>

  12. Tim Chambers Avatar

    I\’m jazzed about figuring out what\’s next for WordPress and the open web. kraft.blog/2017/06/the-op…

  13. Amanda CAARSON Avatar

    I know I’m very late to the party after a tiny bit of research I’ve done so far. I’ve seen the same names pop up all over the place. These folks have worked very hard to get where it is now and I’m sure they know of dozens of roadblocks I couldn’t imagine today. But, I hope that, even if I’m late, there’s still room at the table.

    Source: The Open Web, by Brandon Kraft
    It’s never too late to join the indieweb. The more people who join, the better, and I would personally love to see all the indieweb technology become part of WordPress core and/or Jetpack. And I think the point of the indieweb is that everyone shouldn’t just rent their seat at the table, but own it.
    This is the most accessible implementation of webmention and reactions I’ve seen so far. The little faces have alt text associated with them, (the names), and all the reactions are identified, with their post kind. Now I need to get this set up on my own sites. 🙂

  14. Bill Bennett Avatar

    I’m interested to know what an everyday blog owner can do next to help this work.

  15. Chris Aldrich Avatar

    This Article was mentioned on boffosocko.com

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