I’m not the sort of person who voluntarily stands for the flag, or for the official national anthem with lyrics by Francis Scott Key. I certainly don’t kneel before the cross; I have never accepted that one must be any sort of Christian to be an American. Nor have I ever truly pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. I merely milli-vannili’d the words to the pledge at school.

Some will say this makes me unpatriotic at best. Let them. I was never their idea of an American, let alone their idea of a patriot. But before we continue, Occasional Reader, indulge me as I share a national anthem that does move me in a way that “The Star-Spangled Banner” cannot.

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island,
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters;
This land was made for you and me.


As I was walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway;
I saw below me that golden valley;
This land was made for you and me.


I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding;
This land was made for you and me.


When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.


As I went walking I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.


In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?


Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

The following might mark me as old or out of touch: I refuse to accept that America is about blood and soil. I am saying that as somebody who could claim to be a “heritage American” by virtue of the fact that I have ancestors on my mother’s side (a branch of the Lovelaces in New York) who came to the country before the American Revolution. Some fought for independence, too. Some fought for the Union, and one lost an eye to a Confederate round.

Some of my ancestors, however, came to the United States after the Revolution, if not after the Civil War. They did not all come voluntarily, either. I have Black ancestors, the descendants of African men and women taken as prisoners of war in their homelands and sold into slavery by their captors. I have Jewish ancestors who fled pogroms. I have Irish and Polish ancestors who fled poverty and starvation. I have no idea whether my French ancestors freely chose to emigrate or not.

What does all of that mean? It’s complicated. I’m a descendent of oppressors and the oppressed. Some of my ancestors were enslaved. Others were slaveowners.

If nothing else, it leads me to scoff when anybody proposes a national identity for white people. The very notion of whiteness is one that demands that one sacrifice all ties to one’s national origins, culture, and language so that one might assimilate and become the ruling classes’ idea of an American.

Thus I find the notion of one’s claim to American identity depending on one’s ancestry—a claim pushed by the likes of Vice President J. D. Vance —utterly repugnant. You are not more of an American than anybody else because you can trace your ancestry in this country back to before the Revolution. If we’re to play that game, then the descendants of the First Nations have us all handily beaten. And if you yourself claim descent from the First Nations, and insist on having a greater claim to being an American, I will still disagree with you.

The very notion of one’s claim to Americanness being dependent on one’s ancestry seems to fly in the face of the ideals on which this country had been founded two hundred and fifty years ago. The men who attended the Second Continental Congress in 1776 made their intent plain:

In Congress, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

...all men are created equal... We don’t give that much thought, except perhaps to ask, what about women? or to note that many of the signatories were slaveholders—most notoriously Thomas Jefferson. We are not wrong to do so. The Founders were only men, after all. They might have held ideals, but they did not consistently live up to them. Regardless, what they accomplished set the stage for others to take up the cause of Liberty and demand further expansions of individual rights, if not individual sovereignty.

It might bear mentioning that until recently “Man” and “humanity” were all but synonymous. This being the case, this preamble on its own is a rhetorical ICBM launched across the Atlantic Ocean at London. Though aimed at King George III and his government, the fallout spread across Europe, and then the world.

Consider also the mention of the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. This is not God as understood by most Christians, let alone most traditional Catholics, right-wing cafeteria Catholics like Vance, or evangelical Christians. This is a direct reference to Deism, and to a God who set the universe in motion but does not interfere with Creation.

If the Deism of many of the Founders does not put paid to the notion of the United States as a country founded on Christianity, and you are the sort of Christian supremacist who insists on taking literally the parts of the Bible that you find agreeable, then I defy you to take another look at Romans 13, verses 1-7, and perhaps pray in private for understanding:

1. Let every soul be subject to higher powers: for there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God.
2. Therefore he that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist, purchase to themselves damnation.
3. For princes are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good: and thou shalt have praise from the same.
4. For he is God's minister to thee, for good. But if thou do that which is evil, fear: for he beareth not the sword in vain. For he is God's minister: an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil.
5. Wherefore be subject of necessity, not only for wrath, but also for conscience' sake.
6. For therefore also you pay tribute. For they are the ministers of God, serving unto this purpose.
7. Render therefore to all men their dues. Tribute, to whom tribute is due: custom, to whom custom: fear, to whom fear: honour, to whom honour.

If Christianity demands obedience of its adherents, not merely to religious authorities within the church, but toward secular authorities, then how can a nation founded in revolutionary defiance be a Christian national in the sense that it was founded on the Christian religion? The US might still be mostly Christian in terms of demography. But the historical fact lends itself more toward the United States as a Satanic nation than a Christian one.

It bears mentioning that Romans 13 was no doubt convenient to the aims of Constantine, who made the church a whore of the state to consolidate his power over the Roman Empire; one could almost suspect that the text attibuted to St. Paul might instead of been written by committee. After all, the Bible had been compiled by a succession of committees and synods beginning with the Council of Nicea, which began codifying early Christianity into a coherent belief system that served the state instead of threatening it with the the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed.

How can a religion that demands obedience to authority be compatible with a Declaration of Independence that explicitly says, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. That doesn’t make sense to me. Nor does it make sense that anybody claiming to be an American or a patriot would accept that some people are or should be less American because they don‘t have five generations of ancestors buried in a churchyard in Kentucky, as J. D. Vance defines heritage:

As a United States senator, I get to represent millions of people in the great state of Ohio with similar stories, and it is the great honor of my life.

Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.

Now. Now that's not just an idea, my friends. That's not just a set of principle. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.

Fuck this utter clown and the false dichotomy he rode in on. Vance has ancestors who fought in the Civil War? Fine. But as I noted earlier, so did I, and I reserve the right to disagree with Vance. For somebody who graduated from Yale Law and should presumably have been given cursory exposure to the philosophy of the Enlightenment, particularly that of David Hume, he seems to have a habit of trying to derive ought from an is he cannot even prove.

I refuse to accept that they were fighting merely for blood and soil, even if that had been a common slogan. Both sides were fighting for ideals, and what is an ideal but an abstraction of which people are determined to make a concrete reality? What about the millions of American men who fought in Europe and the Pacific Ocean during World War II? Were they fighting merely for their homeland, or were they fighting for ideals as well?

For my part, I am fighting right now. I chose to take up a pen instead of a sword. I do not want to kill, but to persuade those who are willing to listen, and to demonstrate to those who will not that they face opposition. I don’t do this for my homeland. The closest I have to a homeland is New York City, but I never lived there. Because of my parents’ poverty, I grew up in a succession of rentals around the city, moving at least a dozen times before I was thirteen years old.

As for the town in which I spent the latter half of my childhood and then my adolescence? I left it behind thirty years ago, and that ungrateful country shall not even have my bones. It is not for the town in which I grew up that I insist on putting forth my idea of America. It is not even for New York City. It is for the very abstractions J. D. Vance denigrated in his 2024 acceptance speech before the Republican National Committee.

• I believe in the natural and inalienable rights of all human beings to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
• I believe in the inherent sovereignty of individuals, and that even unconsciously we choose to associate and to yield part of our sovereignty by delegating it to a government that serves us so that we might prosper in peace, to engage in mutual aid for mutual benefit.
• I believe in equal justice under law.
• I believe in the separation of church and state.
• I believe that none of us are or should be the means to anybody else’s ends.
• I believe in freedom of speech.
• I believe in freedom of religion.
• I believe in freedom from want.
• I believe in freedom from fear.

Vance might call these abstractions, but without them, what even is America if not the force for tyranny that its most vicious critics claim it is? Why did USMC Major General Smedley Butler expose the Business Plot of 1933 (a Republican plot) and then write War is a Racket in 1935? Did he not believe in America, that America was founded in greatness and could be made greater still through the concerted efforts of her citizenry?

I wrote at the beginning that I do not stand for the flag nor pledge allegiance to it. Likewise, I do not kneel to the cross. I am not a Christian, but I am an American, and my allegiance is not to the flag, or even the Republic for which it stands, but the Constitution of the United States -- from which the government of the United States draws its just powers when it homors the Constitution.

Some of a more conservative persuasion might claim that I am ungrateful. They are welcome to do so. I recognize no obligation to perform a gratitude that stifles dissent. As an American, it is my right as both a citizen and a human being to speak up when I see my country falling short of the ideals on which it was founded, or outright betraying them. It is for that reason that I am writing this tonight, Occasional Reader, on the night of the Fourth of July, two hundred and fifty years after the ratification of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.

I never had any sympathy for “Make America Great Again” because I grew up believing that my country was great from the start, is still great, but could be greater still. However, it can only become greater, or be made a more perfect Union, if we hew ever closer to the ideals of universal liberty and equality that inspired the American Revolution in the first place. America must be a nation of ideas, first and foremost, because otherwise it can never become one out of many. When we divide ourselves each against the other by tribe, or nation, or faith, we betray every one of our ancestors who chose America by coming here.

Nor can we keep looking back at our past. To paraphrase Michael Moorcock’s The Revenge of the Rose, a nation that focuses too much on its past soon has nothing but its past to offer! That is not an America for which I would take up either pen or sword. I mentioned Moorcock because I have come to think that America is—like Tanelorn or Leo Tolstoy’s Kingdom of God—both a place and an idea one carries within the mind and heart. One need not come to America; by working in concert with others one could build America where one stands. It won’t be easy. It is inherently fragile because it stands in defiance of entropy and humanity’s tendency toward blind obedience to authority. It is, nonetheless, worth struggling to create and to maintain. As Camus wrote, One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

At least, that is how I feel. Nor is this wholly abstract philosophy for me. It is not merely a matter of principle. This is personal, and thus political. My wife, Madam Catastrophy, is herself an immigrant. She came to the US from Australia in 2004 to marry me, when I had been willing to emigrate for her sake. Am I truly to accept that she is less of an American because she chose to become a citizen and had to work to earn her citizenship instead of possessing it by birthright?

Too many of my fellow Americans seem to think so. Well, they are no friends of mine. Regardless, they have no less a right to their opinion than I have to mine. They have an equal right to speak their mind, as well; the fact that I disagree with them does not prove that their opinions are objectively wrong.

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Previous Posts on the Subject

I had read “IndieWeb’s 3 Body Problem” by @stranger back in May. I had refrained from writing a response because I had wanted to think it through and not just go off ranting on a wild hair. I never got around to it.

However, Simone Silvestroni reminded me of that post—most likely without intending to do so—when he wrote “Smaller”. Likewise—and possibly without realizing it—he touched upon several flaws in the Fediverse that I had observed back in 2019 because Fediverse software imitates corporate social media.

Let’s talk about what @stranger has to say first:

IndieWeb is a social club for developers, and apparently, not for me.

IndieWeb, a standard for the smart ones. Its member exclusivity works really well, as it prevents people like me from joining. It’s a coding test for the privileged. If you can solve it, like the Three Body Problem, you’re one of the cool kids—just like the Oxford Five. You’re deemed worthy to fight against the Big Tech, for us. It’s up to you, yes, you, to decide how the future of the web can be shaped. It must feel good to be an elite.

It was designed to exclude the likes of me, right from the very beginning when it was established. Who would consult an internet peasant, like myself about what they think humanity will become in the long term, in the next four centuries from now on?

IndieWeb’s setting up high walls to push people back. If it’s "open," how could it be so hard? When some full-stack developers struggle to have WebMention implemented on their blogs, I learn the answer. It’s not child play for the unenlightened. I didn’t even have the slightest clue or grasp what Microformats and WebMention mean and what they do. Tried, confused, frustrated, and defeated. I gave up.

As @stranger themselves observed, they were having a lousy day when they wrote this. Anybody visiting their site can see that they don’t give themselves nearly enough credit. I would suggest that anybody congratulating themselves because they've successfully followed the IndieWeb Camp’s suggestions and implemented their formats and protocols isn’t as smart as they think they are, and I will explain why in due course.

Now let’s get Simone’s take.

Second, I completely lost interest in the Indieweb. I respect the project, and still prefer it to the current corporate web dystopia. However, my initial skepticism was right. Matthew Cambion put it in words for me recently: we solved the interconnections between people on the internet years ago. RSS has this specific purpose, email serves the rest. All that time spent making this website compatible with webmentions should have been used communicating directly with people. The tools were already there.

I suspect that he’s referring to something I had posted on Mastodon, but I had also talked about RSS and Atom being enough in “RE: Does a Blog Need to Integrate?”. However, that was in reference to people suggesting that personal websites should interoperate with the Fediverse—AKA quasi-decentralized parasocial media—by implementing the ActivityPub protocol.

Never mind that many personal websites, mine included, can’t actually do this because they’re static websites with no server-side code. Many, mine also included, don’t use JavaScript, either.

Likewise, these same personal, independent websites can’t fully integrate with the IndieWeb for the same reasons. Why is this the case? My opinion is that the IndieWeb is not about websites at all.

More on this, as well, but first I’d like to acknowledge Lily Mara’s take:

I believe that we should have better on-ramps to letting people control their own digital presence. It’s super easy to make a Twitter/Facebook/TikTok account because somebody gets a little bit richer every time a new account is created. There will never be this same kind of financial incentive for the IndieWeb, because if there were it wouldn’t be “indie” anymore. As a movement, we should think about making things that are actually easy for people to do, rather than superficially easy. There’s a massive amount of IndieWeb publishing tools that are targeted at developers (we can kinda roll with the punches when a tool isn’t all-the-way-there), but not quite so much for less-savvy users. Tools like omg.lol attempt to strike something of a balance, and I’m interested to see where that site goes (some people certainly love it). There are a lot of great personal websites and blogs out there today, separate from the fray of the addiction web. A lot of those are run by people who already work in technology to some extent, and it shapes the culture of the movement.

I agree with Lily here. It is still harder than it needs to be to have your own internet presence for a panoply of reasons that really ought to be discussed elsewhere, and perhaps by somebody who isn’t a long-haired metalhead who codes for a living and suffers from delusions of erudition and literary talent.

For example, it is harder than it ought to be to run a website if you don’t speak UNIX. For Crom’s sake, you still need to understand files and directories if you want to build a website, and in the US we have public schools assuming that kids are computer-literate if they can cope with Google Docs or Office 365. No wonder these kids end up on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.

And I’m saying this as somebody who could—if I were enough of an asshole—indulge in the sort of technoelitist dick-waving Lily Mara is talking about. If I wanted to, I could do a full IndieWeb implementation of my own, with microformats, webmentions, all kinds of different post formats, RSVPs, the whole nine yards. I could do it with C# and .NET Core and Azure since I use that tech at my day job. I could brush up on PHP and do it with the data stored in SQLite, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL. Hell, I could probably do it with Django if I wanted a better excuse to learn Python than my day job has offered thus far. Or, I could go back to running WordPress, dealing with its Gutenberg interface—which was apparently built with React, which explains so fucking much—and use plugins and themes to implement both IndieWeb and ActivityPub support.

You’d think that since I’m the sort who could get a monumental hard-on from building this website with a makefile and some shell scripts that use sed, awk, m4, and a bunch of other command-line utilities that the IndieWeb would be right up my alley. Well, you’re gonna love this: I've come to think that the IndieWeb’s very existence was a mistake.

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WTF is the IndieWeb Anyway?

First, let’s deal with what the IndieWeb isn’t. It isn’t personal websites on NeoCities, though you can incorporate some IndieWeb stuff there if you want. It isn’t a developer blog you build with Hugo, Astro, or whatever new SSG is trending on Hacker News so you can build clout and get a job at some startup that will most likely go out with a whimper and leave you holding the bag.

Being part of the IndieWeb is about building a personal web application, not a personal website. It means having on your own website, all of the functionality one might expect from a corporate social network like Facebook. Apparently all of this functionality is necessary in order to integrate with corporate social media platforms using the POSSE approach: publish on your own website, and syndicate elsewhere.

This made sense back in 2011. And the DIY ethos that has driven IndieWeb is admirable. However, I think stuff like microformats and webmentions are over-engineered and over-complicated, and I’m not sure that anybody thought any of this through with sufficient rigor.

First, there’s IndieAuth. It’s like OAuth, but for IndieWeb sites. It’s not a terrible idea, and not even that hard to set up. Damned good thing, too, since indiewebify.me treats it as the second step after getting a domain name. You set it up by linking to a social media profile that links back to your website. Fair enough, but if you’re not on any sort of social media, not even Mastodon, then you’re going to have a hard time setting up IndieAuth. And I have no idea if you can use an alternate git forge like SourceHut or Codeberg instead of Github if you’re a developer who isn’t otherwise on social media.

Next, there’s microformats. Yes, let’s embed metadata about a webpage, a website, or its operator in HTML markup within every page’s <body>. Never mind that there is already a place for such metadata in a webpage: <head> and an element as well: <meta>, though the IndieWeb people call this "invisible metadata" and consider it an "anti-pattern". Suppose they’re right, and we should clutter <body> with metadata using microformats that viewers still won’t necessarily see unless they use "view source". Worse, we’re supposed to put them in HTML elements’ class attributes? Apparently because data- attributes hadn’t been standardized yet when the IndieWeb people came up with microformats? Whatever. At least you can parse microformats with hxselect, but why would you bother? It’s not like Google gives a rip about your microformats; they want JSON+LD, which is more invisible metadata.

Finally, there’s webmentions. Because pingback and trackback weren’t enough. To be fair, webmentions just use HTTP and x-www-urlencoded data instead of dicking around with XML remote procedure calls. Nevertheless, they can still be used for the same sort of spam you get using pingback and trackback. The only reason webmentions haven’t become the spam vector they could be is that spammers don’t give a damn about IndieWeb; it’s more profitable to keep pounding WordPress sites since there are so damned many of them.

Admittedly, it isn’t that hard to implement microformats, even in a static website. I currently do it, which like Simone Silvestroni I am reconsidering. Nor is it wholly impossible to implement webmentions on a static website.

The question with which I struggle in both cases is, Why in Crom’s name should I do this? Who benefits from my website providing carefully formatted metadata about my web pages, my website as a whole, or myself for convenient processing? Who benefits from my website automatically pinging your website to tell you that I had linked to something you had written and quoted it?

In the case of microformats, I think they provide greater value to Google and other commercial/corporate operators than they do to webmasters like me. As for webmentions: I would much rather get an email from a webmaster who has linked to something I've written and quoted it. It’s more personal and more human. And I would much rather send an email if I really want somebody to know that I've linked to their website and quoted them.

I’m not sure we ever needed IndieWeb to build a social web. We don’t need microformats for subscriptions like h-feed; RSS and Atom feeds are proven technologies still in widespread use. Likewise, people can communicate by email. All this technology predates IndieWeb.

If we put aside microformats and webmentions, I think the main draw of the IndieWeb project is the POSSE concept: publish on your own website and syndicate elsewhere. My understanding is that microformats were supposed to aid this, but I think this notion is arrant foolishness. The likes of Facebook, Twitter, and even the Fediverse don’t care about your website. They don’t care that you've implemented microformats to present your website’s data for convenient consumption by these silos. They don’t want to admit that there’s an internet outside their walled gardens.

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Integration is not your problem.

Webmasters need to stop taking the onus of interoperability upon their own shoulders. Does your website have a RSS or Atom feed? Do you provide a full-text feed as well as a headlines feed? Are you providing your full archive, even if only as headlines and summaries?

If so, then congratulations: you did your part. Go have a beer or hug a kitty or kiss somebody who wants to be kissed by you.

The onus of integration and interoperability properly belongs on the shoulders of platforms. If they seriously cared about syndication from websites and blogs, they would do a far better job of supporting RSS and Atom feeds. When you create an account on a social media platform—whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, or anything else—you should be able to provide your website’s RSS feed. The platform should grab your feed, parse it, and treat every entry as a post. You should not have to write a bot that will read your feed and post on your behalf via a platform’s API. The existence of a service like EchoFeed should not be necessary.

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Fuck the Platforms

However, platforms don’t want you to syndicate from your own website. They don’t want you to have a website at all. They want you to spend all of your time on their platform, and not own your own.

But if you are going to insist on having your own website, they still want you to feed them "content". They just don’t want to make it easy for you or convenient. And they certainly don’t want to compensate you for the work you do to make your website suitable for commercial use. Is Google paying you to do SEO, or paying for the privilege of indexing your website so they can serve ads on search engine result pages? Do platforms like Twitter and Facebook pay you to set up Twitter Cards and Open Graph metadata so that they can provide link previews when they bother to show links to your website to other people in the first place? Does Reddit pay for the privilege of linking to your website so that it can show ads to its audience? Are any of these platforms paying you to deal with the abusive bozos they will inevitably send your way?

No. They do not. They expect to be able to make commercial use of anything anybody publishes on the internet, even if they do so under a Creative Commons license that says "no commercial use". Don’t even get me started on OpenAI and its competitors again.

Nor is the Fediverse any better, since Fediverse platforms are nothing but poor imitations of commercial social media platforms. Ideally, these platforms are run on a break-even basis, or a much more modest profit—just enough for the operator to not need a day job. But the Fediverse is not necessary. We had the technology to build a social internet long before the Fediverse was a bunch of GNU Social servers talking to each other using OStatus protocol, let alone a bunch of Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, Funkwhale, Pillowfort, Lemmy, and Crom knows how many other different platforms talking to each over using ActivityPub.

And we sure as Hell never needed Bluesky. ActivityPub might be a shitty standard that purely static websites cannot meaningfully implement, but at least it’s the W3C’s shitty standard. ATproto is just more incompatible, proprietary shit.

So, the Fediverse, Bluesky, and the rest can eat the corn out of our shit. We owe these platforms nothing but an upraised middle finger.

• 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.

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Fuck the IndieWeb, Too

I have come to think that the core proposition of the IndieWeb movement is an attempt to have one’s cake and eat it, too. They want you to own your work by pubishing on your own website, first. But they still want you to have the alleged benefits of social media and maintain contact with friends, acquaintances, and associates who still use social media and don’t have their own websites. And they want you to have bullshit from platforms such as “likes” and comments show up on your website, privacy implications be damned.

This benefits social media platforms more than it befits you as a person or as a webmaster. It doesn’t do the open web any good, either, if that sort of thing matters to you. It matters to me because I don’t think we should be making it easier for corporations to make commercial use of personal websites. All they offer as payment is ‘exposure’, and exposure isn’t going to pay your web hosting bills, let alone your rent or mortgage.

I have come, therefore, to think of the IndieWeb movement as an example of how resistence to capitalism becomes commodified. By attempting to accommodate and cooperate with corporate social platforms, IndieWeb became an over-engineered and over-complicated mess. It did so by dismissing fundamental internet technologies as "not invented here" (NIH).

And for what? So that you could write a blog post and then paste a link into Twitter and have bullshit from a platform’s reply guys show up on your website? Is that really worth all of the effort it can take to implement IndieWeb tech on a personal website?

I don’t think so. And I know I am oversimplifying what IndieWeb is about and what it does. All of the above is my opinion, informed by my understanding of the facts.

If you have your own opinions about this post, or about the IndieWeb, by all means express them on your own website. Or, you can just email me and tell me I’m a fucking dolt who ought to be sweeping floors and scrubbing toilets instead of working in tech. However, if you did the joke would be on you: if being a janitor paid as well as being a techie, I wouldn’t be in this trade. Unlike programmers and sysadmins, janitors are smart enough to have a union.

If having a static website that’s nothing but read-only HTML styled with CSS makes me an "internet peasant", then I’m OK with that. I don’t need to impress anybody with my technical prowess. Even if I needed to impress people in order to get a better job than what I've already got, overengineering my personal website isn’t gonna do it.

The IndieWeb, therefore, is mostly irrelevant to me aside from its monthly blogging carnival. I think that encouraging people to write and meet each other online is what the IndieWeb should be about, not catering to corporate parasocial media platforms or providing another venue for techies to engage in dick-measuring contests.

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@Supes@socnet.supes.com is apparently smart enough to run a Mastodon instance but not smart enough to understand why social media sucks.

I still cant work out why some people want to de-platform people they dont agree with. If the shoe was on the other foot and they were the ones being de-platformed we would never hear the end of it!! Time to grow up and either have a discussion with those we dont agree with and try to change their minds or just ignore them. De-platforming is childish bullying.

Here’s the deal. Social platforms where everybody contributes to the aggregated public feed by default (Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) are inherently toxic. Social platforms where anybody can follow anybody by default (same examples apply) are inherently toxic.

You might think de-platforming as “bullying” or “censorship” if you think that the public silos (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Medium, the Fediverse) are the only places to go, but as long as everybody else uses those platforms as well you’re just going to have to suck it up and deal because nobody wants to deal with your bullshit.

If you want a platform where you can speak freely, build it on the open web at your own expense. If you can’t support your platform with ads, there’s this magical thing called a “day job” that might help. And whatever you do, don’t use the name you use at your day job on the internet. If somebody really wants to dox you, they will, but why make it easier for them?

If you’re @FrankenchristSuperstar on Twitter but never mention that you’re also Joe Schmoe who works for Weyland-Yutani, it’s a lot harder for butthurt people to demand that Weyland-Yutani fire you for saying something that hurt their wittle feewings. (PS: right-wingers are even more prone to butthurt than left-wingers.)

Back in the day, everybody knew where Nazis and white supremacists and fascists tended to congregate online. Remember Stormfront? As long as the goose-steppers stuck to Stormfront and related sites, nobody really gave a shit what they did online because it was contained. Yes, it was also where hundreds of hate crimes were plotted, but neither local, state, nor Federal law enforcement appears to have tried to shut down Stormfront; maybe they understood that if they nuked that site, the human cockroaches infesting it would gather elsewhere, and perhaps learn better OPSEC in the process?

If you ran a forum and one of you guests was posting fashy or tankie propaganda, there was nothing wrong with kicking them off because they could go somewhere else. You either moderated your platform, or your platform became subject to informal containment policies as word spread that your platform was infested with neo-Nazis, white supremacists, or the sort of self-righteous leftists who grew up reading Harry Potter and can’t accept that an author they loved turned out to be an asshole.

Incidentally, the best way to deal with a once-beloved but narrow-minded novelist who says dumb shit on Twitter is one of the following:

1. Don’t use Twitter or acknowledge its continued existence.
2. Don’t follow the accounts of people who say dumb shit on Twitter.
3. Preemptively block people who make the news for saying dumb shit on Twitter.

I mean, if I were foolish enough to get back on Twitter, the first thing I’d do is block the President and J. K. Rowling. Then I’d make a point of muting hashtags and keywords that tend to attract self-righteous idealists and authoritarian shitfountains.

I didn’t have to worry about this sort of thing on the Web before 2010, and I don’t have to worry about this sort of thing in Geminispace. If I don’t like what somebody writes on their site, I just don’t go there or share links. Problem solved.

Likewise, if somebody doesn’t like what I say on this site, there’s a simple solution: forget that starbreaker.org exists. If it shows up in an aggregated feed, don’t click the links. It’s not like I have a mailing list that pushes my bullshit into your inbox. This is old-school pull tech. Strictly opt-in, not opt-out.

The problem with social media is that all of the downsides are opt-out:

• public posting by default
• being followed by random strangers
• receiving unsolicited private/direct messages
• receiving unsolicited public replies (sometimes you just want to broadcast)
• being visible to the open web
• being indexed by search engines
• being subject to gamification via likes/retweets or favorites/boosts

I’ve added likes/retweets to the list because of solderpunk, who mentioned and quoted this post in a post of his own.

I’m not just talking about Twitter, incidentally. The Fediverse honestly isn’t much better. When Eugen Rochko designed Mastodon and “lain” created Pleroma, they seem to have deliberately replicated all of the worst aspects of corporate social media and made many the same mistakes the GNU Social people made while adding new failures:

• Posting to public timelines by default.
• Anybody can follow you by default.
• Your profile contains a hidden RSS feed accessible from the public web.
• Search engines can index your public posts by default.
• People can see how popular you are by default.
• New accounts not only can but are encouraged to follow complete strangers, which rolls out the welcome mat for trolls and spammers.
• Anybody can reply to your public/unlisted posts or direct message you by default.

With these seven deadly sins of social network design, is it any wonder the Fediverse is a shithole? The Federated timeline isn’t a community; it’s a fucking cacophony. The Local timeline on popular servers isn’t much better.

The iron curtain between the Japanese Fediverse and the rest of the Fediverse is an inevitable consequence of Eugen Rochko not thinking things through. When people from a country that has no objection to content that the governments of most of the rest of the world regard as child pornography (lolicon and shotacon art) post such content on public timelines, the only sensible response is containment. Allowing such content to spread is all but suicidal when you’re running a Mastodon/Pleroma server as a hobby and don’t have the money or connections to fight off accusations of distributing kiddie porn.

Likewise the panic over Gab forking Mastodon. If public-posting-by-default didn’t exist, people had to make a conscious decision to post on the public timeline (with “are you sure” prompts to discourage them), and you simply couldn’t follow or otherwise engage with other people without their consent, then I don’t think Gab would have been the boogeyman it had been when they first announced their migration to Mastodon. Better still, if instance admins and moderators could disable public and unlisted posts for people who post obnoxious shit where everybody can see it, the Fediverse might be a safer and more welcoming place that still allowed freedom of speech.

Even Google+ made these mistakes, though they did a better job of providing tools for letting people segment their audiences at first. On Google+, you didn’t have “friends” or “followers”. You had “circles”, as in social circles. By default you had circles for “friends” and “family”, and could create others as needed. You could post to public, all of your circles, or just one or more particular circles. You could even place individuals in multiple circles.

Of course, because posting to circles on Google+ was basically posting private, and Google+ only provided stats on public activity with great reluctance, we’ll never know whether Google+ really was the “ghost town” marketing types thought it was because the people who gravitated to that social network were happy doing their own thing.

Yeah, I still kinda miss Google+. For a few years (2011 to 2014) is was a brilliant forum for geeks, musicians, writers, artists, techies, etc. But that wasn’t good enough, and Google decided that G+ needed to be a better Facebook than Facebook instead of playing to its interest-based strengths.

I think you can guess at how well that went.

I think I’m seeing the same thing happen with the Fediverse. Mastodon and Pleroma are both trying to be better Twitters than Twitter. Eugen Rochko and “lain” seem to be repeating the same mistakes Jack Dorsey made. Or, to be fair, one could argue that the W3C team responsible for the ActivityPub protocol are repeating the mistakes Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Vic Gundotra (not to mention Tom Anderson) made.

What’s the fix? I can’t answer that. I can suggest that maybe everybody should have a safe space, even the people I don’t like (or outright loathe). I think a safe social space is one that has the following attributes:

• Nobody should be able to engage with you or anything you’ve posted without your consent.
• If somebody finds you or something you’ve posted objectionable, that’s their problem and they should solve it themselves by ceasing to engage with you.
• Public posting should not even exist. If you want to broadcast to the general public, build a web/gemini site.

Is this impossible to implement? Probably, but that’s hardly my problem because it wasn’t my idea to reduce human social interactions to something that could fit into a relational database so it could be manipulated with fucking SQL statements.

Oh, wait. We’ve had this tech for decades. It’s called email and invite-only listservs/forums.

Now, is smol internet less accessible to people who aren’t good with tech? Yes. Can it be made more accessible? Probably. But nobody’s paying me to solve that particular problem for others, so fuck it. 🤷

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