Obviously I've been thinking about blog and the IndieWeb a lot these days. We are not very far from the two year anniversary of Cohost shutting down; maybe I'm thinking about how to build some of that social experience up again brick by brick, using the web as a substrate rather than a silo (or a federation of silos, which is the approach some others have been taking).

For me personally, the core design that made Cohost so valuable was a particular mix of features that enabled:

• Full-spectrum posting; Cohost felt suited to and supported well everything from <140 character microblogs to long essays to media posting. In particular, it was extremely good at what I'd call "mesoblogging," posts in the 500-800 word range which are a poor fit both for traditional essayistic blogging and microblogging platforms. This is really what I miss the most.
  • Posts on Cohost could have titles, but did not have to; the posting interface essentially scaled gracefully in complexity from "typing some words into a box and hitting send" to "fully formatted writing with subheads, tags, metadata, etc" and nothing got lost in the shuffle.
  • A static-website blog like this one is perfectly good for essay posting, but the simplicity win of this kind of setup does mean that you miss on the conveniences of a CMS interface that takes away, for example, the work adding date of publication information to a post.
• Replies and comments as distinct first-class entities. I think they occupy vastly different niches, and I think the ability to choose between responding with or without rebroadcasting
  • Funnily enough, webmentions as I just added them runs counter to Cohost's original design—the site very deliberately did not create backlinks on replies; you could see who had replied to you but their replies were not findable from your post. This meant that if someone was being dogpiled in replies (something that the site's OP-then-reply design already discourages relative to Twitter's quoter-then-OP model) there was no centralized place where people could go to find the dogpile and join in. I think right now at least, the risks that Cohost was designed to mitigate aren't really there with indie web, so the backlinks are valuable...
  • But commments as their own distinct entity still have value, because sometimes you want to remark on something without rebroadcasting it!

I am thinking a lot about how to achieve similar things using those open web tools within the constraints of a static-website (or "JAMstack") setup. I don't really want to go back to any kind of service that has a CMS; using Eleventy is just too nice in terms of the control that it gives me over templates and the long-term portability and safety of the material, which does not in any way live in an opaque database but rather in the filesystem on my computer (backed up in several places) where it belongs.

I like the concept of Micropub but I also like the static website workflow, and it occurs to me that it'd be pretty easy to build an adapter of sorts as just a server that ingests Micropub POST data and spits out git commits (which are, de facto, the standard for "publishing" posts on a Jekyll or Eleventy website). You could run this on an actual server or just as a local-machine daemon that adapts desktop micropub clients to a static website project. I know such a thing exists for Jekyll already, though a particular difficulty with these tools is that (as far as I can tell) micropub clients expect to spit out HTML, and what I'd want to eventually land in the git repo is in fact well-formatted markdown. I don't think that's intractable, though, and tools like Pandoc exist which can "un-render" Markdown.

It is possible however that I'm overthinking this terribly and the solution I really want is a shell script that 1. opens an ephemeral vim session, like the one you get to write a commit message 2. turns whatever I type into that session into an untitled post dated to now and asks if I want to immediately post it or save as a draft.

On the other half of what I'm thinking about: webmentions only provide the "reply" half of the reply/comment duality, and with comments I feel a bit more stuck. I would love it if something like Comentario existed, but set up to use IndieAuth as its only authentication method.

Authentication systems are the annoying hurdle of operating a blog with a comment system. Obviously having distinct "user accounts" adds complexity, but having to have a distinct account on the blog of every person you read and comment on is itself impractical. Traditional email/password login, besides not being terribly secure, requires a server somewhere that can send email—and sending email is itself an incredibly annoying task, because the email system is so choked with spam that we've kind of landed on an internet where we only let a single-digit number of major providers really send email.

Comentario itself supports Oauth with a few different services, but I think that's not good enough. IndieAuth is; it's a stable long-term solution. There's no need for the consumers of authentication to know or care about which providers of authentication are available, which means that you are not essentially maintaining your authentication system's usefulness against the ongoing churn of the internet. Using URLs as identities has some inherent anti-spam properties; domain names are simply a more limited commodity than email accounts, and they have a public verification mechanism baked in. Such a comment system wouldn't even need an admin password or any kind of secrets at all—you could log on to the admin panel by simply logging in with the domain name of the website itself. I believe other people have built similar setups as one-offs, but this is something that really is begging for a turnkey solution that occupies the same "slap this webcomponent on your template" niche as Comentario or Disqus.

Ultimately I am enjoying this exercise in trying to reconstract a good version of the social media web as essentially a hot-rodded, self-built project, even if I eventually hit a wall with how close I can approximate that experience.

As per my last post, I am now in full control of this blog's faculties. A big motivation here was to start working towards incorporating various IndieWeb features, generally at my own pace and with my own considerations for how I want things to work.

The first step in that direction is having some support for webmentions, which really means "doing several distinct things that, together, constitute participation in an ecosystem that we call webmentions as a gestalt entity." Webmentions really are just a way of notifying a website that you linked to it—if you're old enough to know what a "pingback" is, webmentions are basically pingbacks but hopefully perhaps without the problems that plagued that system.^[1]

Theoretically, you can just add a little metadata to your website page templates that points to an API endpoint that can receive webmentions (which is provided as a service by Webmention.io). You can then just treat webmentions as notifications you can see on that service.

But in practice, you want some way to display webmentions on your website, so that you can "close the loop" as it were. It's easy to treat webmentions just as private notifications, but it's nicer to be able to show them off! I need the social proof that people like and approve of the things I write!

I decided to set this up in a fairly "relaxed" way. This blog is a static website built with Eleventy; I have it set up so that it's automatically built on a server, rather than building it on my machine and uploading it somewhere to be hosted. When that build step happens, it fetches webmention data from Webmention.io and incorporates it into the static pages. This will happen whenever I update the blog by hand, but I also have a cron job^[2] running to auto-rebuild the blog every six hours, which means that new webmentions should eventually appear without human intervention. This is in a sense a very dumb way to do things but in another, higher sense it's a very smart way to do things; I'd call this the "slow social" if I was able to purchase the domain name slow.social, which sadly I am not. "Sometime in the next six hours" is, I think, a very reasonable timeframe for comments to appear on the blog.^[3]

For my own implementation I heavily referenced Reilly Spitzfaden's post on the subject, A Quick Guide to Everything I Know about Webmentions. Reilly used Eleventy to build her website, so a lot of the code she shares I was able to directly adapt. Natalie (nex3) also had a useful conceptual writeup on her own blog, which is really a more focused follow-up to her longer essay A Sociable Web. What I have working so far is very simple but the nice thing about all this piecemeal "microformat" stuff is how incremental you can be with it... I do not think the whole "indieweb" concept functions if the demand is that you have to monolithically implement every aspect of the system all at once or it falls apart!

As for sending webmentions, well, uh. After this blog post finishes building I am just going to use curl to send the relevant ones. There's an existing package of command-line tools for sending webmentions but alas they are written in Python and I am spiritually opposed to ever typing pip install into a terminal.

Anyway, ultimately: you are now on the hook to webmention me, ideally this post specifically, so I don't look like a fool. Thanks in advance!