Write, Read, Respond web?

Pondering 'Respond' being part

Craig Hockenberry, key brain behind Twitterrific, has responded to the Twitter API going splot. In it, he tempers the reaction of "Fine, we'll make Twitterific over Mastodon then!" with the current growth of the Indieweb and own-your-own-content. Back in 2003 (?!?) there was a post discussing the Read/Write Web; which in retrospect was a silver-goggled view of the future. Corporate walled gardens and surveillance capitalism put the kibosh on that.

Craig's post pinged my thoughts of adding Respond to the read write web. Reasoning:

  1. Write should be first; can't read what doesn't exist and highlights that we need to write content for people to read
  2. Read is second, which implies not just searchability and readability, but also discoverability and syndication
  3. Respond is new. It's not just write; it's a reaction to what's already written that you read. It grows on existing content rather than creates something on a blank slate. AND it adds complexity; as you need to be able to write a response that links to the original read in a way that both know about and can continue to react to.

With the Indieweb, people need to own their own content. Having your own domain is good. Wordpress isn't bad either, really, as it's free to make your own open space and you can import/ export as required.

Reading, I'm old so I fall back to RSS. It's simple, really, and lots of things already support this. New WebSub standards are also worth looking into.

Respond is tricky. With the Webmention standard; a response can be making a new post on your site and using tags and known URL formats to 'ping' the original site to say there's a response they can pull /link to. But there are a lot of older blogs that have their own comment forms we'd need to link to; or using Discuss or similar.

This feels like a nut that should be crackable, and should be cracked. There should be options for syndication and options for responses; but a tool should handle all that for you with smarts and you just write what you want, read who you want to, and interact with them without having to think about the How.