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. → 23/06/2017 6:03am