In reply to Challenges of fragmented writing by Lilia Efimova
I recognise what you say. The multilingualism, the ‘going where the intended readership is’ vs shouting into the void on my blog, the friction due to fragmentation.
I think over the past 2-3 years I’ve made a few steps that have helped me reduce that friction and fragmentation.
The first element is that my site has become much more of a central point. I use it to post to Twitter and Mastodon, and responses there get fetched and added to my blogposts. It doesn’t work for Facebook, they’ve locked up their silo, then again I no longer have an account there either. Cross-posting from my blog to such services allows me to reach out to those who ‘live’ there, while still have my own unified view of the things I posted and the responses it got. I can both share my posts on Twitter, as well as have a category I use to send messages to Twitter, that otherwise don’t show up on my website, except to me.
I’ve created a way to post in multiple languages here in my blog that doesn’t amount to having walled off sections. It’s just all there in the same place, but who wants can separate out selected streams to follow. The main RSS feed simply holds everything but I added things like machine translation links to non-English blogposts in my feed.
I haven’t yet come upon an idea to easily and reliably create different levels of access for certain types of posts, or certain types of information within posts, which like you I would enjoy to have here. I do post things that never appear on the front page (meaning, like you blogged a long time ago, you have to make an effort to discover more), and I also post things that only show up in RSS, and remain unlisted in the site itself. As RSS readers are a self-selected separate readership, I can treat that as ‘posting to my blogger network’, while it isn’t public on my site.
The second key element is that I rearranged my PKM system in such a way that all of my offline writing is now in a single place (basically text files for which I use Obsidian as viewer).
Everything that catches my eye flows into it, as well as my own processing, connecting, and writing takes place there.
The step that I’m building now is that what I write there can automagically flow to the channels where I share such things (eg my book reading, and soon postings themselves). My site again is/will be the conduit for it, as it can also post to other channels. I also run 2 other websites for clients straight from my notes (when I update my own local notes on EU data regulations, the client site updates).
Obviously there is still a lot to wish for too, mostly in the area of granular access and disclosure.
..on getting back to writing, I struggle with cross-platform issues. […] At the moment I have no idea how to put it all in a system that works
Lilia Efimova
Thank you for writing this, Ton. Although I hardly comment on your blog I am here quite a lot a see your long-term systematic investment into creating a knowledge ecosystem that flows between personal processes, documenting, and social interaction. From where I am now that looks like a mountain range that I need to cross if I want to get somewhere. I know quite well where some of the problems are, but I have no idea how to gather resources to work on them. In a sense, I am where many non-bloggers were when we were early adopters – in need of pragmatic advice and help instead of exploring possibilities and DIY solutions.
So, back to you blog ecosystem. Do you have something written on low-hanging fruits, plugins or small changes that bring noticeable differences to start with? Do you have a list of WP addons/plugins you use? Do you know someone who can help with either a pragmatic plan on the sequence of WP changes to start with or rehauling WP for my requirements?
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.