Including readers in the IndieWeb
The IndieWeb in general is publishing oriented; however, the pool of people willing to publish anything is very small as a subset of the online audience. If the IndieWeb is meant to be for all, we ought to consider how our indie websites can serve people who primarily read content rather than write it — at the same time we lower the barriers to entry of posting replies and interacting with our sites. And I mean both technical and social barriers.
I think Tracey makes some great points here and I’m particularly interested in how to get feedback from readers. I invited a friend of mine to a recent IndieWeb event and they asked the question “what if I’m not interested in posting anything?”.
Part of what drew me into posting to my own site was a frustration with the experience on traditional social media sites. I want my site to be a better reading experience than an ad-centered, engagement platform. But I also don’t get much feedback from my tiny base of readers. It seems even harder elicit that kind of feedback on a community level. Think about what “reader” representation at IndieWeb events could impact community focus! Maybe we could get more momentum around Microub and building the reading experiences people want.
Like Jacky mentions, I think building more collective tools needs to be part of the solution. But that’s a significant responsibility to shoulder and harder still to do it well enough to be user friendly. I love the idea of the Open Heart Protocol and it’s anonymous simplicity. Since I already show webmentions on my site, I would love to figure out a way to seamlessly combine those two data points into one UI.
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