What do you want from the internet, anyway?
I want to follow people who are interesting to me, in a way that’s simple, expressive, and predictable.
I want this to work, furthermore, whether those people are sharing a random thought every day, a blog post every week, or an art project every two years.
And I want it to work, of course, across media, so I can follow writers, musicians, programmers, theorists, troublemakers …
Agreed, these points describe exactly what I want from the internet, yet is almost impossible to achieve. In the IndieWeb we’ve talked a bunch about following people rather than feeds, and wanting to be able to see that in one place rather than going to each service. For two years I checked Instagram, which I don’t use anymore, monthly just so I’d find out if/when one of my favorite artists released a specific image as a print because he doesn’t announce prints on his email list (magically I checked the day after he released it and it wasn’t sold out! Kismet. This is probably not something I should admit? 😅 I really wanted that print.).
So, I am excited to hear ideas for better ways to follow people. I’m not technical so I skipped over those details, but the sample images of ad and comic pages as a virtual poster board / nonlinear feed (with each person only getting one display block) caught my attention.
That visual layout is appealing. As a visual person, I find a lot of the feeds I follow tend to blur together in my reader’s chronological feed, so I can’t remember whose article I’m reading or which feeds I like best and which have mostly duds so I can unsubscribe.
Per the example, boards could be kind of picture-less Insta Stories made with html so they’re accessible (I assume screen readers can’t read the text in a Story?) – or text-only like a microblog post, with html markup (so, better than a tweet).
Considerations for the proposed system
From an IndieWeb own-your-content standpoint, I’d want to post the canonical form of a board to my site and have it populate through to anyone’s collections. The board they designated for my material would be reusable, each update replacing the last on subscribers’ pages, but I’d retain a copy of the original content. Bloggers could designate a post kind as a “board” so only those pieces of content passed through, or could have a separate microblogging stream that fed out.
These updateable blocks do a little make me think of Now pages, which often seem to be set up then rarely updated — so treating boards as less of a calling card / homepage and more as ephemeral content like tweets or Stories could create a positive feedback loop of users both posting and visiting more often (although fostering FOMO is maybe dark pattern-y?).
For a presentation that allows each publisher one block, you’d need a way to indicate updated boards since your last visit. Could be moving newest cards to the top, or for fixed position blocks using some visual indicator like a thick border or star in the corner (plus markup to make that info accessible for screen readers).
Would people’s collections be viewable by others? Sets up social implications, but also could be a handy way to find new people to follow if it was easy to follow a board from someone else’s collection.
An IndieWeb variation?
Thinking how a nonlinear feed / follow page could be constructed in an IndieWeb fashion, I bet it would be possible to hack together displaying the h-cards of everyone you’re subscribed to on a page similar to the IndieWebRing directory as a way to show updates outside of a single stream vertical feed. In addition to their photo and name, the h-cards could also list links to their most recent update on either their website or multiple services/formats they use. New content could be marked up and displayed in a way that was easy to skim, or cards with most recent updates get moved to the top of the display. An excerpt or headline could be listed, or each service could indicate the number of unread new posts on each (e.g. 20 new tweets, 1 new blog post).
As a person-focused rather than chron-focused display, people who hadn’t posted in a while wouldn’t disappear into the abyss, and it wouldn’t necessarily reward people for being frequent posters.
A simple subscribeable h-card website service that collated a person’s updates from social media and other sites could be useful for people who want to participate in the IndieWeb in the sense of having a domain to represent themselves, but still mostly post their content on social media to avoid admin tax. This could be an IndieWeb stand-in for services like LinkinBio that are just a collection of links to their content elsewhere on the web, something people could set up once and not fuss with again. When the author posted on any of their platforms, if that somehow backfed or syndicated a link on their website, the update could then be syndicated out to all subscribers / followers. (I don’t know enough about protocols to know if that’s possible/ how you’d go about achieving that 🤷♀️)
Playing with the visual approach
I do like the idea of cards for people / feeds and might try that presentation out on my blogroll 🤔
The visual layout could also work for an alternative feed presentation: kind of a Pinterest board suite of content from all the folks you follow, blocks of tweets mixed with YouTube videos and photos from Instagram and blog excerpts. Some company must offer this? Or not, since walled gardens don’t play friendly 😠
6 replies on “Following people outside of a feed”
This Article was mentioned on robinsloan.com
Robin Sloan has proposed a protocol, Spring ’83, that serves publisher’s content like a magazine stand. You see a board of cards, where cards get replaced whenever its publisher releases a new one. He aims to ditch the timeline experience it seems, partly considering form and content as pieces of the same expression, as well as a way to maintain space for voices that do not express themselves every other minute but way more infrequently.
A Beijing news stand with spread out mags competing for your attention. Image by Peter Ashlock, license CC BY
Others in my feedreader have commented on it in the past days and it gets me thinking. Not in any structured way yet. No idea yet therefore what I think about this in a form I can narrate, but some associations come to mind.
I do like the notion of small cards. Makes me think of Hugh’s Gaping Void back-of-a-business-card drawings, and of tiny zines made as a folded single sheet chapbook. The set limit creates friction for creativity to feed on. Yet, the built in size limit, when putting more of them together on a ‘board’ may well mean the same drawbacks as in Twitter, aiming for the highest attention grabbing value. Magazines in a kiosk do the same thing after all, using the cover to try and lure you into reading them. Look at that image above. Does that make a board of cards just a collection of adverts for your attention? Reading Maya’s annotations, there too the scarcity mindset a board of such cards might introduce is raised. Are there other ways to thread such cards?
The focus on p2p distribution, and on making it easy to put out there, chimes with me in terms of networked agency and in terms of low thresholds for such agency.
The notion where softer voices have the same claim to space as louder ones (i.e. more frequently posting ones) I appreciate a lot. Kicks Condor in his Fraidycat feedreader provides neat sparklines indicating frequency of posting, and allocates every single author the same space by displaying their last few postings regardless of timelines. That points back as well to my use of social distance (not the pandemic kind!) as a method to order presentation of feeds I follow, in a person focused way, and less a timeline. I follow people’s expressions, not blogs as publications. It also makes me cringe at the use of the word publisher in Robin Sloan’s explanation.
À propos following people, Maya also mentions how she likes to see friction between different strands of her online expression (e.g. blogposts, and Mastodon messages). Such different strands have different qualities to them, and having them in one place, like an IndieWeb enabled site may put them too closely or too obviously together. The notion of friction is important I think when getting to know someone online in more detail by following more of their online traces. I follow people, and for a good number I follow multiple traces (photos, posts, tweets e.g.). Combining those traces needs friction I feel, getting to know someone better from their expressions needs a certain effort. That’s about me having something at stake in building interaction. Blogs are distributed conversations to me and you need to invest your presence in such conversations. Connecting with others should be extremely easy in terms of being able to connect, but certainly not effortless in terms of time spent on the actual connecting. Way back when (2006), Lilia and I had conversations about this, and it’s still relevant now. My site purposefully introduces friction to readers: casual visitors see only a fraction of the postings, some content is only shared through RSS and not findable in the site, some content is both not listed nor shared through feeds etc. All the fragments are still in the same place, mine, though, and not farmed out to various silos to create the same effect of deliberate fragmentation. It means I’ve greatly reduced the friction for me as author using IndieWeb, not eroded the needed friction for readers. Someone who puts in the effort will be able to gather all my traces in their reader.
Tracy Durnell has some remarks, and compares Spring ’83 to IndieWeb efforts and discusses the visual aspects. Her suggestion showing a blogroll as cards, not as a list, is a good one I think, perhaps showing the last three postings the Fraidycat way? I’ve seen others do it as a river of news, but that once more provides additional amplification to the loudest authors.
Louis Potok takes a first look under the hood.
This Article was mentioned on zblesk.net
I’ve been thinking about Robin Sloan‘s Spring ’83 Experiment on and off for a bit.
I too almost immediately thought of Fraidyc.at and its nudge at shifting the importance of content based on time and recency. I’d love to have a social reader with additional affordances for both this time shifting and Ton’s idea of reading based on social distance.
I’m struck by the seemingly related idea of Peter Hagen’s LindyLearn platform and annotations which focuses on taking some of the longer term interesting ideas as the basis for browsing and chewing on. Though even here, one needs some of the odd, the cutting edge, and the avant garde in their balanced internet diet. Would Spring ’83 provide some of this?
I’m also struck by some similarities this has with the idea of Derek Siver’s /now page movement. I see some updating regularly while others have let it slip by the wayside. Still the “board” of users exists, though one must click through a sea of mostly smiling and welcoming faces to get to it the individual pieces of content. (The smiling faces are more inviting and personal than the cacophony of yelling and chaos I see in models for Spring ’83.) This reminds me of Stanley Meyers’ frequent assertion that he attempted to design a certain “sense of quiet” into the early television show Dragnet to balance the seeming loudness of the everyday as well as the noise of other contemporaneous television programming.
The form reminds me a bit of the signature pages of one’s high school year book. But here, instead of the goal being timeless scribbles, one has the opportunity to change the message over time. Does the potential commercialization of the form (you know it will happen in a VC world crazed with surveillance capitalism) follow the same trajectory of the old college paper facebook? Next up, Yearbook.com!
Beyond the thing as a standard, I wondered what the actual form of Spring ’83 adds to a broader conversation? What does it add to the diversity of voices that we don’t already see in other spaces. How might it be abused? Would people come back to it regularly? What might be its emergent properties? This last is hard to know without experimenting at larger scales.
It definitely seems quirky and fun in and old school web sort of way, but it also stresses me out looking at the zany busyness of some of the examples of magazine stands. The general form reminds me of the bargain bins at book stores which have the promise of finding valuable hidden gems and at an excellent price, but often the ideas and quality of what I find usually isn’t worth the discounted price and the return on investment is rarely worth the effort. How might this get beyond these forms?
It also brings up the idea of what other online forms we may have had with this same sort of raw experimentation? How might the internet have looked if there had been a bigger rise of the wiki before that of the blog? What would the world be like if Webmention had existed before social media rose to prominence? Did we somehow miss some interesting digital animals because the web rose so quickly to prominence without more early experimentation before its “Cambrian explosion”?
I’ve been thinking about distilled note taking forms recently and what a network of atomic ideas on index cards look like and what emerges from them. What if the standard were digital index cards that linked and cross linked to each other, particularly in a world without adherence to time based orders and streams? What does a new story look like if I can pull out a card either at random or based on a single topic and only see it or perhaps some short linked chain of ideas (mine or others) which come along with it? Does the choice of a random “Markov monkey” change my thinking or perspective? What comes out of this jar of Pandora? Is it just a new form of cadavre exquis?
This standard has been out for a bit and presumably folks are experimenting with it. What do the early results look like? How are they using it? Do they like it? Does it need more scale? What do small changes make to the overall form?
For more on these related ideas and the experiment, see some of these threads of conversation I’m aware of:
https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/specifying-spring-83/ (with annotations)
https://tracydurnell.com/2022/06/10/following-people-outside-feed/
tinysubversions.com/spring-83/rrffcc-dfk-1.txt
https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/spring-it-on
https://www.louispotok.com/spring83
https://maya.land/responses/2022/06/12/robin-sloan-spring-83-initial-musing.html
https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/06/spring-83/
https://hypothes.is/search?q=%22spring+83%22
Know of others? I’m happy to aggregate them here.
Featured image: Collection of 1990s 88×31 buttons by https://anlucas.neocities.org/88x31Buttons.html
A simple subscribeable h-card website service
DIMV