2020-04-05

[[Blogchains and hyperconversations]]

On [[writing a book]]

Nadia Eghbal, someone who obviously loves writing, writes about writing a book. It sounds less… enjoyable than you might think.

What I hated most about this past year was feeling unable to seriously think about anything besides this one thing. Everything I read or talked about was in service to the thing. There was nothing but the thing.

Afterwards, I expected to feel a satisfying sense of completion, but mostly I just felt relieved. I didn't think of it as having finished a manuscript so much as having expelled a virus from my body.

16:59

Some nice quotes on what the [[IndieWeb]] is about, from Desmond's article Your Website Is Your Castle.

At the heart of the IndieWeb is an attempt to unify the ideas behind personal websites, blogs and social networks, but in a manner consistent with how the world wide web operates.

Your website acts much like your wall on Facebook or your timeline on Twitter - it's your personal soapbox, your castle on the web.

[…]one recreates, in a decentralized manner, the kinds of online interactions one has come to expect from private social networks.

IndieWeb authorship

I fixed a small issue in my theme that I'd noticed, where other people's sites weren't picking up my author details. The problem? My author info wasn't included in the entries. I had a site-wide h-card but I hadn't got it in the entries themselves.

The process for figuring out who has written a post is referred to as authorship, and the IndieWeb wiki page on it is very helpful. Also thanks to Sven for the help.

Read: Your Website Is Your Passport - Desmond Rivet

– Your Website Is Your Passport - Desmond Rivet

I found this a very helpful discussion of [[IndieAuth]] from Desmond, touching on web sign-in, RelMeAuth, OAuth and OIDC along the way. It's one of those things that I know exists, and just works for me (e.g. everytime I use a Micropub client), but it's nice to get a bit of a handle on how it works.

In a nutshell the purpose is this:

your domain should function as a kind of universal online passport, allowing you to sign in to various services and applications simply by entering your personal URL

Desmond does a great job of explaining the nitty-gritty of how it works, too. The two bits I bolded below jumped out at me - a decentralised authentication mechanism leveraging DNS as a user registration system. It's very elegant.

The process of using your domain to log in to sites and services is called web sign-in and is implemented via a protocol called IndieAuth, an extension of OAuth used for decentralized authentication.

It's entire reason for being is to answer the simple question: does the person behind the browser have control over the URL that they are claiming as their own?

If your goal is to make a social network out of the world wide web, there is a certain elegance to the idea of leveraging DNS as a user registration system.