The (Plain Old) Web ⁂ starbreaker.org

I've noticed a fair bit of chatter about syndicating to other platforms material that you've published on your own website from the likes of Molly White, Dave Winer, Manuel Moreale, and even n3verm0re.

Molly White is singing the praises of what the IndieWeb people call POSSE.
Dave Winer gave up on POSSE in 2017 because catering to platforms that didn't support links was making him a worse writer.
n3verm0re finds that for him, syndicating to other platforms is stressful and makes him feel like a kid desperate for attention and acceptance.
Manuel Moreale seems to think that social media is fundamentally a mistake and that the Web is inherently social, that personal websites, RSS feeds, and email are all we need for a social internet.

My own opinions concerning POSSE and social media tend to be negative. I've little regard for most of the IndieWeb's initiatives. Nor am I interested in syndicating to proprietary platforms like BlueSky or Threads, let alone Twitter (which has become a Nazi bar under Elon Musk's ownership). I am also souring again on federated social platforms like Mastodon, because they imitate and recreate the worst aspects of corporate social platforms.

a tangent on Mastodon and spicy takes

In the case of Mastodon, it didn't help that I had run afoul of my current server's policies regarding "violent speech" by suggesting that instead of eating the rich, we should leave that to carrion birds and perhaps make the birds' lives a little easier by hanging billionaires — after, of course, they've had a fair and public trial by jury. Even the rich deserve due process, after all. The management didn't appreciate tha sentiment, of course, and I don't really blame them since my suggestion that the state exercise its monopoly on "legitimate" uses of violence for more pro-social purposes than it typically does could still cause them legal trouble.

The problem might have been that I hadn't been sufficiently explicit in my post about the need for a trial before the hanging. I had figured that the necessity of a trial could be left implied, since lynchings almost never happen to the richest among us, but to much more vulnerable and marginalized people — like black men who nowadays are instead summarily executed by local police for misdemeanors like "driving while black".

The penalty that social.lol's management imposed wasn't even that harsh. Anything I post to the public feed is instead posted "unlisted", which means it's still publicly visible if you can find it; it won't get pushed into other people's feeds.

They dealt fairly with me. That doesn't mean I'm obligated to be happy about it.

I can, however, post as I please right here on my own website. Unlike Mastodon, my website's support for HTML is limited only by my knowledge. I can style my posts as I please. I'm not subject to a maximum length of 500 characters. And my website's host, Nearly Free Speech, isn't likely to crack down unless I post something far more egregious than I generally do, like something the FBI or the Secret Service would recognize as a credible threat.

That's not going to happen because terrorism isn't my style. A single angry man with a sledgehammer is not a revolutionary. Besides, if the Feds didn't kill me during the attempt, my wife would afterward.

Even if it was my style, I think I'd know better than to announce my plans on my website. The time to explain yourself is 35 minutes after you've successfully carried out your mission.

a panel from Watchmen by Alan Moore — Adrian Veidt in Watchmen knows the importance of good OPSEC.
(credits: Text by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons)

I've seen people like Westley Winks make reasonable arguments on forums that making an effort to syndicate, even on proprietary platforms, is an act of service. I am not wholly unsympathetic to this viewpoint. It's one reason I provide a RSS feed. It's one reason I am thinking of starting a newsletter using Buttondown (since I can't be bothered to self-host Ghost and Substack is still and will always be a Nazi bar).

However, altruism is not one of my few virtues. I do not run my website as a public service, or for anybody's sake but my own. After all, literature ain't Burger King, so if I want something written my way I've got to write it myself. If I want other people to read it, I've got to publish it at my own expense. Therefore, I'm of the opinion that since I provide feeds I've done my part.

a tangent on newsletters

It's fortunate that I've long since given up the notion of being able to quit my day job and write for a living. However, as my musings on charging for newsletter subscriptions might suggest, I've little inclination toward "acts of service". Manually syndicating things I've written to platfoms like Threads, Facebook, BlueSky, Instagram, etc. at my own temporal, if not financial, expense does not appeal. And even if these defective platforms supported RSS and published the raw HTML of each entry as is, I might still not be willing to contribute; I am generally against the commercial use of personal websites by corporate platforms.

However, if I say nice things about a band and said band wants to share a link on their social media accounts, I'm willing to let them do that. If I get into a band, particularly one that doesn't get a lot of radio airplay or mainstream promotion, I want to see them succeed. I certainly don't want my musical diet to be 100% radio-friendly dad rock.

Then there's this new thing, this Social Web Foundation. Except it's not new. It's just a bunch of California techbros rebranding ActivityPub and the Fediverse because these concepts don't make sense to venture capitalists and other people who don't speak UNIX. I'd be content to ignore this as yet another attempt to commercialize/colonize/commodify/gentrify/enshittify the Web that won't pan out, except some of the central figures seem to be of the opinion that it's impossible to be social on the web without their work.

For example, Evan Prodromou's profile on the Social Web Foundation's team page claims that he made the first post on the social web in May 2008. I can understand why he (or his ghostwriter) is making that claim. He helped create GNU Social back then, and is one of the co-authors of the ActivityPub protocol, and he probably dropped his first GNU Social post around 2008. If we buy the notion of the Fediverse being the social web, then Prodromou's claim is valid.

Nevertheless, as Bix pointed out in Holy Hell, The Social Web Did Not Begin In 2008, this is arrant bullshit that elides over a decade of web history. There's no reason to buy the claim that the social web started in 2008. We had web forums in 1996; I knew this because I met my first serious girlfriend there. And before web forums, there was fucking USENET in the 1980s. Not to mention dialup BBSs, CompuServe, Prodigy, etc.

We had a social web in the mid-1990s. Fucking Geocities was the Social Web, damn you. However, we didn't call it the "social web". It was just the Web; it didn't even have "plain old" as a prefix.

It was good enough back then when I built my first websites on a long-defunct competitor to Geocities called The Globe in 1996. It's still good enough, otherwise people wouldn't keep deciding to make a little site on Neocities, figure out HTML and CSS, and maybe even get their own domains.

But I can't help but think that people like Evan Prodromou and Aral Balkan (who's building what looks like yet another web app framework called kitten) have an over-complicated view of what the Web is, can be, or should be. People like them think that personal websites shouldn't be static HTML served by Apache or Nginx. People like them think your website shouldn't only support RSS/Atom feeds, but ActivityPub. Never mind that you can't fully implement ActivityPub on a static website, but must instead run your website using a web application.

This should not be taken to say that you should not implement ActivityPub or other "social web" protocols if that's what you want to do. It's your website, and you have the right to do it your way, even if that means your website moans like a porn star taking twelve inches and pretending to love it whenever somebody clicks a link. (I was acquainted with somebody whose site did that, but discretion forbids my mentioning the operator by name.) And if you speak UNIX and are up to the challenge of maintaining a Fediverse node or a CMS like WordPress or ClassicPress, more power to you.

The converse is also true. Nothing but plain HTML is valid. A static website styled with seven lines of CSS is valid. Your website can even have a little JavaScript as a treat, or to provide extra functionality or interactivity that can't be implemented with HTML or CSS.

a tangent on appropriate technology

I could, and have before, run WordPress and build my site with a CMS, but I choose not to because that's overkill for me. I don't even use a static site generator like Jekyll, let alone something that needs Node.JS like Metalsmith, Eleventy, or Astro.

I build my website with UNIX tools, and I figure that if you can't fully implement something like ActivityPub on localhost with a shell script and makefile and publish it as part of a static website, it's not worth my time. Remember: if it doesn't work in Lynx on a 486 with a 56K dialup connection, it doesn't actually work.

The web doesn't have to be complicated, slow, or inaccessible. Techies make it that way, to make a living.

And while I talk about making things accessible to people who don't speak UNIX, it bears mentioning that back in the 1970s, AT&T had secretaries with UNIX accounts writing and typsetting memoranda with tools like ed and roff that even I am not hardcore enough to use regularly. Real computer literacy, by which I mean the ability to use a command line interface and do some basic shell scripting, shouldn't be beyond the reach of the average person. I mean, if a schmuck like me can do it, what's your excuse?

Nor do you need to be part of the "social web", or the "small web", the "smol web", the "personal web", the "IndieWeb", or any of that. You can just be on the Web, the plain old web of independently owned and operated personal, academic, and small business websites. You can ignore the "Social Web" people, and most of what you hear from California techbros; as the late, great George Carlin might have observed: it's bullshit and it's bad for you.

George Carlin: It's all bullshit, and it's bad for ya!

Dammit, I honestly didn't set out to write another manifesto here. You'd think I lived in Montana and grew dental floss for a living. While the "good old days" weren't that good, and the Web really wasn't accessible to people who didn't speak UNIX (and it still isn't), I honestly think that stuff like the Social Web Foundation isn't helping.