I appreciate Marty McGuire’s pushback on the IndieWeb pushback. I’m glad Manton shared it.

A lot of complaints about IndieWeb, to me, completely miss the mark. I emailed Manu on this topic after he posted about Yelling at the Web Clouds.

One excerpt from what I sent Manu was about what makes IndieWeb distinct from “just have your own website”:

I think it’s about the second bullet on the main page: indieweb.org :

You are better connected

Your articles and status messages can be distributed to any platform, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone. Replies and likes on other services can come back to your site so they’re all in one place.

The intent is ownership, connection, and control.

I love blogs, obviously. And I love personal websites, hopefully also obviously. I’m thankful that folks like IndieWeb are around. They’re experimenting with figuring out “Why do people choose siloed web applications over the web? How can we close that user experience gap?” The goal is not building a smooth product– that’s left to folks like Micro.blog– but tinkering with and trying to understand what are the interaction primitives that are offered by web applications that lead to mass adoption. IndieWeb observes, “People like to reply to each other’s posts. We’ve had email and comment sections for years, but as soon as ‘native’ replies in web applications came along, it dwarfed email and comments. How can we bring that experience to websites we own and control.”

And that’s just one example.

You may think, “everything that’s wrong with the internet are the interaction paradigms of social web applications.” Great! IndieWeb is less for you. The ownership and control ideas apply and appeal, but connection does not– at least as a newer technology.

But if instead what you think is, “I, too, like or liked those social web applications. I want to enjoy my blog and the experience with it more than that,” then some IndieWeb stuff may help you out.

Now, if you’re not a developer really building your own site, then I don’t think you fully fit what IndieWeb means by control. You are someone ready to take advantage of what we’ve learned from IndieWeb and probably want to use a service like Micro.blog or some of the plug-ins built into Wordpress, for example. But if you’re a developer, you may want to dig in further and start to use and build and alter tools folks have put together.

There’s this beautiful world where Integration is Not Your Problem, but we don’t live in that world. Not only are RSS/Atom feeds not generally supported by other systems, there’s little to no reason to ever expect them to be. Even API entry points are largely dead and a struggle right now. But I don’t agree this makes it not my problem.

I’ve written about this before, but POSSE is a profoundly egalitarian idea. I am never going to get all of the people I’m connected to online to go back to using RSS. And I’m not going to get them to bookmark my webpage and visit it multiple times a day. They have places they consistently read feeds. I’m having a lot more fun writing on my blog because people do reply to my posts, or comment in various ways, wherever they are.

I like to make it easy for people who opt in to read what I write. I think it is important, or at least valuable, to put in some work to make it so that people who read have to do less work. POSSE, and the tech that supports it, is what makes this possible.