I caught the attention of Matthew, leading to an update to his mega post on the IndieWeb.

As ever, I’m always thrilled when someone responds to something I write on their blog. I am sure he is sick of writing about this, so I hope my small followup doesn’t lead him to feel the need to jump back in (unless he wants to!).

So, I wanted to answer his wondering:

Jason also has this to say, which I’d like to address.

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 know 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’m curious as to what Jason means by ‘we’ here. He might not live in that world, but I certainly do.

So do I! Almost everything I read on the internet I read using Feedbin. If something doens’t have a feed, I try to make it one. RSS has essentially been what I consider “the internet” since Google Reader. When I say “we don’t live in that world” what I mean is that the people who want to read my blog, to a reasonably approximation, do not live in that world. Just like it’s terribly difficult to get people to switch messaging apps, I can’t convince people to browse the web the way I want them to.

I am not publishing copies of my content to various platforms because I think Matt is wrong:

You owe these platforms nothing. You are not obligated to integrate with them. You are not obligated to provide them with “content”. You are not obligated to acknowledge their very existence.

I don’t owe platforms anything. Whatever obligation I have follows from the later part of my post– namely I want to make it easy to read my blog for the people who want or may want to read it.

Matthew notes:

The following sentiment is one I find admirable, however.

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.

This is why I provide feeds. This is why I try to improve my website’s typography and accessibility. That much I can do. But if making my writing more accessible to other people means manually posting links on commercial platforms, then be damned to them.

Here we’re in total agreement. But I’m pleased that my host, partially inspired by the IndieWeb, and certainly inspired by POSSE, makes it so that manually posting links on commercial platforms is not a thing I have to do at all. It also makes it so that I don’t have to do anything to read people’s replies to my posts from whatever platform they read them on when that’s supported! It’s great!

And I’m glad Robb made something like Echofeed so that this is possible without doing things yourself if you don’t host somewhere like Micro.blog.

I, of course, wish platforms cared about my stupid little blog being able to publish directly to them in a way that they don’t. But I care much more that if people who may want to read my blog use those services, they can still find their way here.

If I didn’t use Plausible analytics to occasionally troll the what domains are referring people to my blog, I’d have never known Matthew saw what I wrote. Maybe that’s ok, but I think it’s better that I can find the folks interacting with me, from wherever they choose to do so.