After xoxo

There was a particularly strong thread that ran through most of my conversations at XOXO this year. It was braided from questions (pleas?) like the following:

• what’s wrong with the internet now
• can we make it not poisonous again
• could we even make it fun again
• what about all those sites we used to make for ouselves
• how can we find the people and communities doing that now

Before the talks, this wasn’t much of a surprise. I was there in large part to talk about these things! Nik and I had purposely busted ass to get Octothorpes ready to share because XOXO seemed like the biggest gathering we could find of people who would get it. (Briefly, Octothorpes are hashtags and backlinks you can use on independent sites. You can read a lot more starting from the guide we made for XOXO.) I had just written essays called We really like personal sites but the internet has been turning into poisonous garbage at an alarming rate and We got used to talking to the internet itself instead of people on the internet as a way of explaining why we were making Octothorpes. So this was on my mind.

We hoped to find a few people who were asking similar questions. I was not expecting that nearly everyone I talked to was likely to bring these questions up first. And when they seemed to form a powerful, unifying chain of critique and inquiry and hope through the main talks… I think I actually pumped my fist in the air a few times.

Tracing the thread

Some points on the line, in chronological order:

note: most of these quotes are from memory. Once the recordings of the talks are posted I’ll link to them and correct anything here. Feel free to correct me if you have notes.

Darius Kazemi says “Indie is just an economic descriptor” in his funny, insightful talk about the highs and lows of trying to make it building independent projects and communities on the internet, in part as a followup to his 2014 talk “How I Won The Lottery” This was to say that it’s a way of existing in the market, rather than a coherent aesthetic or a value system, and it can be liberating or fuck you up in equal measures.

Someone? says something to the effect “We used to do weird things on the internet and then at some point it started doing weird things to us?” Interestingly, when I tried to clarify who said this on the XOXO slack, it was clear that this could be considered one of the main themes of the festival. Someone else asked Andy Baio, one of the organizers, if this was on purpose. He responded that, while he had themes in mind when inviting speakers, they were ultimately in control of their own talks. He didn’t even see the talks before they presented live, so this solid theme we felt mostly came together organically.

Definitely Molly White asked the room to remember the time they felt embodied excitement, like in the pit of their stomach, about making something on the internet. Her example was building her user profile page (called a lookup) on Neopets. She challenged us to find that feeling again with what we do now. The crowd was stoked.

Erin Kissane, with great generosity and attention, told her story of gathering countless friends and strangers via the internet to process early COVID data. How it became the foundation for whatever public understanding we had of the pandemic, and what that community of purpose meant to her. This structured her nuanced critique of the current state of the internet. She implored us not to take a “dark forest” approach in leaving the sites of the current online toxicity. Both so these networks of care and shared concern could still form in public, and so that there was somewhere for those who come next to go. Instead, she gave us the rallying cry Fix the fucking networks. It’s a line that I know many people in the last week or so have written down in their own accounts and web logs.

Ed Yong’s moving, personal talk brought it home about both what one could do with the internet and what it could do to you. It was so open-hearted and immediate and personal that I don’t really feel like I can or should try to summarize it here, only to say that when I do post the video you should definitely watch it all. In it, he said something along the lines that we’ll look back on the era where we put our random thoughts online for milions of strangers to read like we look back on when we built houses with asbestos. This was greeted with ripples of laughter and then applause, filtered through I believe both relief and regret.

Our through-line so far, paraphrased:

• Indie just means out there on your own. And that can be pretty hard.
• We used to do weird things on the internet, and now it does weird things to us.
• Try to remember when making things on the internet felt creative and exciting.
• We need to fix the fucking networks if we want to hang on to that feeling, and be safe out there on our own, while still being able to find each other.
• Massive social media feeds are acute and chronic health hazards.

So, the way people talked about “being on the internet” at the last XOXO, in 2019, felt, uhh, different than this. This felt like a “Frogs that jumped out of the pot¹” conference. A “How do we deal with the fact that society and most of our livlihoods have oriented themselves to this boiling pot of water that towers over our every waking moment while all we want to do is hop around and catch flies?”

Next – the IndieWeb becomes or remains discourse

While mulling this all over in the last week, I came across some posts, on independent blogs, that seemed to be part of this zeitgeist for the open internet. They were both for small and personal websites and critical of some of the largest current projects working towards independent and non-commercial internet spaces, the IndieWeb and Fediverse movements.

Roughly in order that I read them:

• Yelling at Clouds by Manuel Morale
• IndieWeb’s 3 Body Problem by Solo
• Smaller by Simone Silvestroni
• Has the IndieWeb become Irrelevant by Matthew Graybosch
• The Social Web by Manuel Morale

And responses from the IndieWeb community:

• Has the IndieWeb become discourse again? by Marty McGuire
• Ownership, connection, and control by Jason Becker

A lot of it is inside-baseball for a small community, and I don’t even think it registers on the internet drama scale. I agree with a many of the specific points from the critical side, enough that I’m already building something that I think aligns with many of them, but I also agree with much of the responses from the IndieWeb community, who are all, in all of my experience, friendly, welcoming, and open minded people. If this is stuff you already care about, I do encourage you to read all these posts. But, with the thread from XOXO running through my thoughts, here’s a summary of what I thought was most compelling from these posts.

• If you want to be an individual who writes stuff on a website who talks to other individuals about it, email, a webpage, and RSS do really well for that. You might not need more than that.
• We should critically assess the benefits of integration between “websites” and “platforms”
• The Fediverse largely reproduces patterns designed by corporate social media, just with a better ownership model. Let’s critically assess those patterns.
• However accessible non-commercial internet authorship tools are trying to be, a lot of people – perhaps most – still find the bar too high.
• No one can agree on what “IndieWeb” or “indie web” really means
• We’re even having a hard time agreeing what “the social web” means

Here’s what stuck out to me about the context in which these posts are being discussed:

• These posts are all in conversation, almost all of them from the last few weeks, on static, self-made websites, and most of the authors insist on email as the main channel of response.
• People are having substantive conversations about a topic that matters to them, and being pretty articulate, nuanced, and respectful about it even when they’re disagreeing.
• The posts have reached people outside of the author’s immediate community without the authors promoting them on any platforms

Reading this conversation felt like hearing from frogs that got out of the pot before it got warm. I think, in general, those are good people to listen to in whatever context you encounter them. But…

It is very easy to go, fuck yeah, out with the new, in with the old, let’s make the internet sane and quiet and small. But…

It’s very hard to balance that with Erin Kissane’s call to action. As she said in her talk, she and her army of volunteers should never have had to step in to do the work we expect our governments to do in a pandemic. But now we have the tools for citizens to self-organize en masse about issues they care about, so we should think very critically about dismantling them before the next pandemic. How do we balance these concerns?

The Active Web

Here I am participating in discourse, in relatively real-time. How did I get into it? I saw a post by Sarah Joy on Mastodon that linked to a post that linked to this. So a combination of the convenience of a social feed, and the small web’s call to browse.

The double edged sword of convenience is that it’s accessible, but it’s also exploitable. In America, a “convenience” store is conveniently located, but it’s also full of addictive substances. Nothing hates inconvenience more than addiction.

So maybe “passive” is a better watchword for what we’re trying to change about the internet. After all, Erin Kissane wasn’t talking about the importance of large networks of passive users consuming content. I think she was talking about the importance of maintaining a low bar for engagement, since the network she so valued was one of the most engaged collections of people on the internet ever. Also, I am not and have never been close to marketing, so I mean engagement as, like, you know, engaging with shit you care about. Not whatever else it ends up meaning.

Mastodon made it convenient for me to find this set of articles, but I had to actively engage with it to appreciate it.

Jason Becker says:

I am never going to get all of the people I’m connected to online to go back to using RSS. And I’m not going to get them to bookmark my webpage and visit it multiple times a day. They have places they consistently read feeds.

I don’t think that’s entirely true. I mean, no, not everyone. Maybe not every post is for everyone But I only read his post because I checked, for the third time, the website of a guy who checked Jason’s website. Maybe no one’s going to find and check your website without a reason, but I’m going to click through if I actually care about it, or if the link looks interesting. This is called browsing and I miss it.

I feel like all these conversations and calls to action I hear have this in common; they’re calling for an active and critical engagement with the internet – what we put on it, how we build it, and how we use it to connect with other people. For some people that means writing your own CMS from scratch and federating all your posts to multiple services. For others it might mean making a mutual aid Facebook group. Or maybe just starting a text thread with friends.

There’s a sort of “cat’s out of the bag, what comes next?” vibe to a lot of these conversations. I definitely don’t have the answer, but I’ve really appreciated the questions and challenges posed by all the sources I’ve posted here. This is what I’m hearing:

• We want to be able to connect, broadly
• We want a humane speed.
• We don’t just want moderation, we want a kind of internet that can be moderated. We might just want moderate internet.
• We have been convinced that you can’t scale if you ask people to do something to get to content, rather than just lining up to receive it.
• We have been convinced that stuff has to scale.

Erin Kissane is challenging us to do something that can empower mass numbers of people without having to harvest mass numbers of people. That’s definitely tricky.

But if this is where the conversation is at, I’m excited to see what comes next and will try hard to contribute meaningfully to it.

Thank you XOXO for making this conversation feel vital, spirited, and friendly.

ps OMG I almost forgot. One of the great things that came out of this zeitgeist already was Molly White putting out a call for personal blogs in the afterglow of the festival on the XOXO slack and getting this treasure trove back. That’s your present for getting this far. ❌🅾️❌🅾️