In reply to Dear IndieWeb, it may be time to start considering the user, not just the technical spec. by Eli
Fully in agreement with you Eli. To provide agency to potential IndieWeb adopters, it is needed to start from purposes and what things a person wants to achieve. Build a pathway from there, and provide the building blocks. Not start from the tech specs. Myself I am frequently lost in the IndieWeb woods, even if I have some tech knowledge, and am not easily thrown off by the need to hunt down clues in obscure fora for a fix to an issue. Too often too much knowledge is assumed on all things IndieWeb if you seem to have some knowledge about a tiny part of it.
@ton I agree with you and @eli, if you two struggle to figure it out, what chance have I got? There needs to be a turn key solution for Indieweb implementation in order to gain wide range adoption.
@bradenslen I also find that info on the purpose of certain steps / building blocks is missing. If you have no idea why you’re doing something, and what it is you’re trying to achieve, you don’t have a way to see if ‘install this’ is the right thing or when it’s done. Also mostly lots of assumptions are hidden in existing documentation (like finding out in step 12 that step 1 assumed you were running a specific OS or something). Ideally there’d be a flow from ‘your purpose’ – ‘tasks you want to solve’ – ‘options to help you do that’ – ‘assumptions made per option’ – ‘instructions per option’ – ‘documentation of what is where in chunks of code so you can tinker if you want’. Most documentation, any type really, does the last 2 only, badly.
@ton I’m not sure mass adoption can be achived by fitting this stuff to someone elses platform. A platform that you don’t control. We need to advance from a hobbiest level, where people like to tinker, to something that just works.
I agree on documentation, this is a problem throughout modern software, not just Indieweb.