Laurent Eschenauer | Search for indieweb

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June 7, 2013

14:55

It is in days like these that I'm proud and happy to be a developer and early adopter of the #indieweb. I own my identity. I own my content. I own my social grah (WIP).

I just need to decide myself to switch my email provider and logout from Google/Facebook/etc for good. That's another work in progress.

If you are curious about the indieweb, checkout http://indiewebcamp.com and join #indiewebcamp on #freenode.

Tags: freenode, indieweb, indiewebcamp

May 31, 2013

21:07

for the last 5 years of me having eschnou.com, barely anyone ever commented on my items... and then.. the #indieweb happened :-)

Tags: indieweb

13:31

@raphdg.storytlr.net Ho, and welcome to the #indieweb :-)

Tags: indieweb

May 30, 2013

20:08

@storytlr.michielbdejong.com Welcome on the #indieweb!! Here is a first federated comment for you :-) Posted from my own domain, sent to you via pingback.

Tags: indieweb

May 28, 2013

10:08

@xtof_fr Pas un silo, c'est open-source et fédéré via la spec Ostatus, c'est du #fsw au lieux de l'#indieweb :-) #microcast

Tags: fsw, indieweb, microcast

May 22, 2013

17:20

What the hell happened to Federated Social Networks?

"Facebook quitters, is this guy your savior?"

Ho boy, was I proud of this title ^^^ and blog post by @scobleizer. It was on May 22nd 2010, exactly three years ago. Facebook was engulfed in a major privacy scandal, the Diaspora team was wrapping up an amazing kickstarter campaing and Google was having multiple "social web" sessions at I/O and I had just been interviewed by Robert on the topic of Federated Social Networks and presenting him our work on Onesocialweb.

It felt like a perfect storm for making Federated Social Networks happen. Yet.. three years later, this dream feels further away than ever. What went wrong? Where do we go from here?

What went wrong?

Although many things eventually played against the various projects, I think we can single out three key factors:

Loosing the leaders: A big chunk of the thought leaders got hired by major companies in a very short period of time. In fact, most of them went to Google.
Analysis paralysis: Although we shared the same goals, the Federated Social Web community got quickly paralysed by endless debates on how to get there. XML vs JSON vs RDF, email vs uri identifier,etc...
Building Cathedrals: We were too busy architecturing the perfect protocols and not paying enough attention to the developers (and the challenges of interoperability) and the end users.

I think this last point is crucial, and was nicely phrased by @tomcoates as the following (in CAPS indeed :-) : "THINGS THAT USERS DON'T UNDERSTAND THAT DON'T MAKE MONEY **DO NOT SUCCEED**. THEY GO BUST OR FALL AWAY AND GET REPLACED BY THINGS THAT DO MAKE MONEY AND THAT USERS GET!"

What next then?

Well, over the last months I fell in love with the #indieweb community. Which, could be summarized as: "stop talking, start coding". The idea is simple: get your own domain, host your site there, and slowly work towards federating with others.

Instead of focusing on protocols, it focuses back on YOU and your needs. You get immediate value out of it (you got a blog) and you make exciting progress with a community of likeminded folks. As an example; a couple weeks ago, we managed to federate 5 different implementations around a single comment thread. Yes, this stuff is real.

I also like the 'low-tech' approach of the indieweb. Instead of complex API, we rely on the web and some simple markup in html pages to share content in an interoperable way.

So, no big kickstarter campaign this time and no Cathedrals. We just need you to reclaim your identity, get your domain, host your blog, and join the federation. If interested, hop into #indieweb on #freenode and we'll gladly help out.

What do you think? Are federated social communications doomed? What do we need to make it happen? What do YOU need to join the movement?

Tags: indieweb

Comments

I've also fallen in love with #indieweb over the last few months, and have made a commitment to moving over to my own platform, which I'm on track to do by the end of the month.

There was some leadership drain, but there were a lot of stalwarts in the federated social web community. Honestly, though, I think Tom hit the nail on the head, and the movement was stymied by complexity (and the bureaucracy that you described). Brad Fitzpatrick's frustration at the last Federated Social Web Summit was also spot on.

Indieweb will succeed, I believe, because it's easy. You can get *something* up and running in an afternoon. There's lots of great software springing up (and I hope mine gets to be part of the mix). The next trick is, finding the business cases for building these features in, and keeping them in.

@werd.io Thanks! Great to see you want to move to your own platform. I'm looking forward to receive your first pingback and indieweb comments :-) Stop by on irc when you get a chance.

I'm lurking on the channel a lot!

I wanted to come back and say: I think the federated social web software that was produced, and is being produced, is amazing. Honestly showing us the future, way ahead of time. And my comments above about complexity should not detract from that; the point is that the platforms people are writing abstract that complexity away from end-users, which is great.

Similar questions have been asked regarding Identi.ca's upcoming migration from StatusNet to pump.io. Evan Prodromou has always wanted to give people software for making their own federated networks, but what they wanted was an open alternative to Twitter -- in other words, a central gathering place. And that makes sense, because in federated networks the biggest problem is discovery. Consider the hoops you must jump through to make sure all your contacts know when you change your e-mail address or IM handles.

Also, not everyone has the skills and disposition to rent a VPS and set up the complex software infrastructure required to run something like pump.io, especially as it has nothing to do with the usual LAMP stack. At least Diaspora is built on RoR, which is provided even on shared hosting accounts.

Ultimately, having a balance serves people best, like with WordPress the software and WordPress the service. But that's not what the federated networks crowd wants...

May 20, 2013

23:11

@julien51 Oui, je revinedrai vers toi quand on aura du PuSH + mf2 dans #indieweb :-)

Tags: indieweb

May 16, 2013

22:56

@steveklabnik It is too bad your blog did not send a pingback to mine btw... fancy adding some #indieweb support ?

Tags: indieweb

13:08

What's next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

A company that was the cheerleader of the open web is rapidly turning its back on every single open standard they once championned. Their latest move, announced yesterday at Google I/O, appears to be closing XMPP server-to-server federation.

It is only a natural next step in a process started a while ago. Here is a quick, and probably not exhaustive recap:

Google+ has no open RSS output, hence no PuSH support, no write API, in fact it has absolutely nothing open
Google Reader is scrapped, along with RSS support within Chrome
WebDav CalDav for Google Calendar is dropped in favor of their proprietary API
XMPP is dropped, while 3 years ago it was at the core of their Wave efforts

If they continue with this trend, then why not drop support for SMTP (and thus email federation)? When @aaronparecki.com posted the following picture a few months ago, I smiled. Today I wonder if this could actually ever happen.

This is what email would have looked like if it were invented in the Web 2.0 era. By aaronparecki.com

The good news is, we do not need Google to build the open web for us. We are developers, and hacking the future is what we do best. So, time to wake up and start building alternatives. For those interested, the following movements are worth a look:

Indiewebcamp: reclaim your social identity and content
Unhosted: serverless web services
Freeyourspeech: distributed communications

And beyond these movements, a lot of really cool open source projects which can become real alternatives to some of the Google monopolies.

Don't hesitate to comment, share your thoughts, or a link to an open project you are working on.

Update (May 19th 2013):

1) Two additional movements worth having a look at:

W3C Federated Social Web community group: developing Best Practices for the Open Social Web
Autonomo.us: Working towards free network services

2) It seems RSS in Chrome is back and that was a mistake. In addition, some users argued that CalDav support is not dropped but replaced by an "OAuth enabled" version and that it should not be a cause of concerns for third party developers. Not sure about that last one.

Tags: freedom, google, indieweb

Comments

The question we have to ask ourselves is "Why?". Answers assuming bad intentions are missing the point.

There's a deep reason why email is the only successful decentralized network. And also the worst regarding tho spam, ease of use and problems.

My point is not that they *do not* but actually are changing course, and reverting support of things they once championed. That is the scary bit.

i think it's all about GOG vs MSFT:
a) MS do not allow GTalk = Skype
b) but MS wants xmpp to talk from Outlook to GTalk to promote Office 365

Changing and admitting failure is part of Google culture and, for me, the biggest reason of their success.

We can say that they honestly tried. They tried really hard.

But it is simply not working. They are limiting themselves, they can't evolve the way they want.

I'm not saying that it is "good", I'm just saying that it is understandable and very predictable. I remember saying in one of my conference where someone told me that "XMPP was successful at taking over MSN" : "It's not XMPP, it's Google. The day Google drops XMPP, we will discover that only a tiny minority cares about XMPP."

I wish I was wrong…

(preparing a long blogpost on the subject ;-) )

"The good news is, we do not need Google to build the open web for us. "

If that's true, than I don't understand all the whining and crying is all about. Yeah it sucks when a service is closed down but that happens everyday. Why is it such a big deal when Google happens to do it - since *we* don't need them anyway.

@zaidira I think the bitterness comes from the perceived movement in google's culture. A move from their hacker origins to a corporate culture where the masses dominate. Time to move on I guess, but the effort required to replicate google's quality products is a little daunting.

Seriously, they didn't try very hard.

The XMPP community did, bending over backwards to accommodate them. A vast amount of serious effort has gone into reworking S2S authentication, for example, specifically to address Google's requests to make supporting Google Apps domains securely simpler for them.

Jingle was initially designed by Google, but yet they never implemented the latest standards as they were developed - and yet this was their area of greatest interaction.

I've even heard that some of PEP - another set of XMPP extensions they never bothered to implement - was guided by Google so they could deploy it.

Google have been known to use open standards, but they're rubbish at contributing to them.

The day Google drops XMPP, we will discover that only a tiny minority cares about XMPP.

MSN was actually XMPP without federation
Facebook uses XMPP for messaging

That picture looks a lot like Facebook email today

Don't forget http://autonomo.us/

Mike, only a tiny minority care about SMTP, too.

But federation and interop are important, just as Larry Page said, and users will be feeling that loss - and are already.

Google has always said the competition is just a click away. Time to click away, no? I think Google should not set the standards for *my* web activities, anyway. I hope others remain and evolve.

I'm curious if anyone is interested in proof of concept of federated twitter like open source project I've created some time ago: http://dotmesh.org

God, I hate Google. We should stop using them. They're terrible and evil, and are slowly ruining the Internet. Anyway, I'm off to Google News to see what's happening.

Don't forget identi.ca and joindiaspora.com

Google has never cared about the "open web"... it cares about Google being able to access all information out there. It doesn't give a damn-- and never has-- about other people being able to access information.

It's sad that a generation of people have been deluded into thinking google is somehow a force for good. They are blatent patent trolls-- suing Apple (via Motorola) for standards essential patents, which started the whole patent war (Apple sued them in defense)... which is pretty ironic given that android is a ripoff of Apple's IP... all the while Google's publically running an anti-IP campaign (Because as an IP theif they want to get away with it.)

Yet people ignore the fact that Google is the patent troll that started the whole thing and delude themselves into thinking that Google is "right" ... becuase they want to own an android phone without guilt.

At this point, I have no sympathy for people who are so deluded that they think google is anything but evil. They have been evil (and uninnovative) for a long time.

This is not surprising given they make their money by violating people's privacy.

But the deluded fools think "oh this service from google is free, they must be benevolent!"

I look at this as a golden opportunity to re-make the services they are dropping, and then sell them back to them for a nice few million bucks in a year or two. Cheers Larry!

There's not a whole lot of transparency from Goog as to why they make these decisions, so I can only imagine that as they've evolved into a purely commercial company supporting and championing interoperability has become a cost center that runs against some walled-garden vision. Who knows, but I think its sad. If anyone is interested, I'm developing an open-source+hosted API/transport pipelining system, reach out if you want to jump into the code its not released quite yet but happy to open the repo to collaborators... https://bip.io

Hey,
For email I really enjoy using fastmail.fm
Only $30 a year for having your own domain's email, else free.
Hope that's a useful tip for people.

Ian

Thanks for the post! Google is certainly making many strange decisions lately, I think looking elsewhere for the services we get from it is essential before it is too late.

I am working on a system to easily self-host all the services you might need from your own home on a Raspberry Pi. All this with a simple graphical interface, making server management available for the masses. Check it out at https://ark-os.org :)

Yeah, ßingen and Ian, *lots* of alternatives out there. (I have a website and use domain-managed mail. Doesn't cost as much as you might think.) For those of us who wear tinfoil hats and don't care about the laughter behind us, read Brad Thor's "Black List". (Just because yer paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.)

Ploum said: "There's a deep reason why email is the only successful decentralized network."

Are you nuts? Lots of our most successful networks have always been decentralized! You can't seriously be suggesting that systems like Usenet, IRC, Bittorrent, XMPP, or the internet itself (!!) aren't successful.

I am working on a Feed reader which works with the open (and open source) API provided by TinyTinyRSS http://jabs.nu/feedthemonkey and on a Twitter-like client for the Open Social Tent Protocol (https://tent.io) http://jabs.nu/bungloo

""Changing and admitting failure is part of Google culture and, for me, the biggest reason of their success. We can say that they honestly tried. They tried really hard. But it is simply not working. They are limiting themselves, they can't evolve the way they want.""

I think the problem is not that Google is abandoning these protocols. (Lots of companies never bothered to use them in the first place, and we're not complaining about those guys.) The problem is they're talking out of both sides of their mouth.

From one side: open is great, Google is open, Google is better than our competitors *because* we're more open. From the other side: we're abandoning a bunch of the most popular open protocols because they're just not working for us (you claim).

I think it would be drastically different if they had said, hypothetically, "CalDav isn't flexible enough for the needs of Google Calendars, so we're proposing a new open standard, SuperCalSync, and inviting everybody to try it out with us". That would show that the existing protocol sucks (well, it kind of does!), but that they think openness can work. But they're not doing that.

I would *love* for Google to put out a press release that said: "We tried open source and open protocols. Nobody cares, and it holds us back. We're going to do everything behind closed doors from now on. Deal with it." Then at least they'd be honest.

Great analysis. this article is good. thanks for posting this article..!

We need personal clouds http://personal-clouds.org/ to restore control to us and give us a say in the features we like to use.

Open is awesome as long as it works in my favor

It's amusing to me that Google's apologists defend the company for almost any action, even when they would be howling if a similar action was taken by Microsoft of Apple. For some reason, there's a portion of the tech crowd that's bought the insane notion that Google has everybody's best interests at heart, so we can trust them. I appreciate and use some of Google's products, but I trust the company less and less — because their actual track record is nowhere near the record of altruism that Larry Page and his supporters would have you believe. (Just to be clear, Google isn't supposed to be altruistic. I'm just sick of the hypocrisy and the dishonesty about it.)

So, when someone defends Google's actions, it may be assumed he also believes Google to have everyone's interests in mind.

I didn't see that assertion in these comments.

Fortunately, I haven't yet seen the "Google is just an advertising company" gem. There's still time, people!

Great idea. They can drop SMTP and go with X.400 instead!!!!

Here, Daniel: "Google is just an advertising company." (Hope I got that in, in time.) The Gorg isn't operating pro-bono. Employees gotta pay the rent and put bread on the table, so to speak. Guess where the bucks come from.

To believe the core of Google's business is anything but advertising simply means one is not paying attention.

"We at Google believe in freedom of speech, and that anyone who says otherwise should be locked up indefinitely"

You should see the three year ling thread of comments begging them to add caldav (and carddav) support to android. http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=7639

This is something that has been in iOS for a long time. This underscored, for me, that Google's business model is not very conducive to open protocols in the long run.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Thats why we should avoid android to and use alternatives like jolla sailfish on our smartphones.

"We at Google believe in freedom of speech, and that anyone who says otherwise should be locked up indefinitely"

"We at Google believe in freedom of speech, when you let us speak on your behalf"

Accuracy check: The Chrome RSS extension was taken down by mistake and was subsequently restored weeks ago. The status of RSS support in Chrome hasn't changed.

The W3C Federated Social Web Community Group is missing in the list of "movements":
http://www.w3.org/community/fedsocweb/

It is the fifth largest W3C Community Group and currently is concentrating on developing a Best Practices document for the Open Social Web.

Thanks for the summary. Change developpers to developers.

I wish Mozilla adopts XMPP for their FireFox OS chat and messaging. Mozilla are the only real champions of user privacy and the open web.

'Mozilla are the only real champions of user privacy and the open web'

Yep. And we should all thank whoever is funding them!

Another great projects for an open web are Friendica (http://friendica.com/) and Zot protocol (https://github.com/friendica/red/wiki/zot).

This reminds me that we can't rely on corporations to move forward the open web.

We have to make sure we, as individuals are pushing too!

Don't forget about Google's switch to Blink rendering engine. It's less about being better and more about pissing in Apple's soup.
And their half-assed "open source" approach to Android. Only giant corporations get access to the newest versions of Android.

May 11, 2013

22:33

@aaronparecki.com Really cool stuff with the #indiecards :-) Can you detail your process going from the url to a card being displayed? Do you leverage oembed?

Tags: indiecards, indieweb

Comments

@eschnou.com Right now it's just auto-detecting a few known URL patterns and using that site's embed code. I just updated the post with more information and some sample code! http://aaronparecki.com/articles/2013/05/09/1/experimenting-with-auto-embedding-content #indiecards #indieweb

@aaronparecki.com Awesome! Thanks for sharing! And as you can see, I fixed my author parsing issues :-)

April 24, 2013

21:30

We are on #hackernews front page! Woot :-) "The First Federated #Indieweb Comment Thread" - Keep on upvoting :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/

Tags: hackernews, Indieweb

09:43

Shared the link The First Federated #Indieweb Comment Thread

Great summary by Tantek on our #indieweb achievements of the last days. Implementing federation with pingback and microformats is dead easy, when are you joining the conversation ?

Tags: indieweb

April 23, 2013

09:54

Fédérer les conversations sur le web, comme alternative aux silos que sont Twitter et Facebook, c'est possible! Un exemple ici d'une conversation sur l'#indieweb. Et toi ? Quand vas-tu nous rejoindre ?

http://eschnou.com/entry/testing-indieweb-federation-with-waterpigscouk-aaronpareckicom-and--62-24908.html

Tags: indieweb

April 22, 2013

23:18

Having a federated conversation across the #indieweb

The commenters on this post have done so from their own site, in an #indieweb spirit, and notifying my site via pingbacks. This enable a true, federated, two-way conversation in the open web.

No silos, no paywall, no control by a single entity or government. Pure freedom, at least as pure as emailing or calling someone.

I love it :) When are you joining the conversation ?

Featured in this picture are @aaronparecki.com, @tantek.com and @christopheducamp.com

Tags: #indieweb

April 19, 2013

20:26

Testing #indieweb federation with @waterpigs.co.uk, @aaronparecki.com and @indiewebcamp.com !

Tags: indieweb

Comments

Laurent Eschenauer It worked! Now here's a reply! #indieweb

Laurent, are the REPLIES FROM THE #INDIEWEB displayed automatically, are you manually adding them, or automatically queued and you're just manually approving them?

@tantek.com It is automatic, when I receive a pingback I parse the source for mf2 content to find a hcard and hentry. No moderation, but I receive an email when someone comment/mention so I can react/delete if spammy.

Next for me is to also support webmentions, and enable a 'in-reply-to' flow.

Premier essai pour tenter de rejoindre une fédération #indieweb chez @eschnou #fra

Les réponses #indieweb chez @eschnou

And now we have unified local/indieweb comments, time ordered ! Let's have a real distributed conversation :-)

@aaronparecki.com This is a reply to your reply, making it a really distributed conversation :-)

Laurent Eschenauer great work getting #indieweb comments working :)

@waterpigs.co.uk Thanks for helping out. Could not have done it without your php-mf2 library!

Historically, I consider this to be the #indieweb equivalent of this.

Hey Laurent, how do you know where you have to "attach" the reply, or do you run this task by hand?

@notizblog.org Everything is automatic. The pingback request as a 'target' which I map to an existing post (after a bit of regexp magic). In the 'source' item there should also be a link pointing to the target with a 'in-reply-to' tag. More details here: http://indiewebcamp.com/comment

WordPress and IndieWeb-Comments

Nice! It seems there is a bug in my mf2 implementation and your storytlr is using the title instead of the post.

There is also a few bugs in my side (also in my own comments timestamp as you can see :-). A bit more work needed, but we are getting there :-) Welcome to the conversation!

BTW, is storytlr also sending pingpacks/webmentions in the comments section? If so, do you have a source url for any "comment" or do you support some kind of html fragments like superfeedr does http://blog.superfeedr.com/fragment-subscription/ ?

@notizblog.org Yes, I send pingback for any mention within a comment (hence the @ at the begining of this comment) and the pingback is from a URl + fragment to the comment. I'm missing proper mf for the comment but it is coming.

Le Premier Fil de Discussion Fédéré de Commentaires #Indieweb

Hopefully h-card entities should get expanded in the reply context for this note (crosses fingers)

Testing, testing, is this thing on? 21:46 on 2013-04-26

Ben Werdmuller Really excited by indieweb comments. Impressive idea, and a pointer to what's possible with microformats and webmentions. http://eschnou.com/entry/testing-indieweb-federation-with-waterpigscouk-aaronpareckicom-and--62-24908.html 3s

Foot very much in mouth, here ends my #indieweb comment testing for the night. 4s

Another #indieweb creator has commented on Laurent Eschenauer’s famous thread with a new implementation — congratulations benwerd!

March 27, 2013

23:10

Was great catching up with @alardw.com and chatting about the future of #storytlr. See you soon on the #indieweb, and congrats on receiving your first pingback :-)

Tags: indieweb, storytlr

March 26, 2013

22:31

And my first ever #indieweb pingback goes to @tantek.com, @aaronparecki.com and @waterpigs.co.uk ! Yes, I can now federate... well.. if I can manage to get it to interop :-)

Tags: indieweb

March 15, 2013

21:45

Shared the link Web Action Hero Toolbelt

This link was actually shared using the Web Action Hero Toolbelt of Barnaby Walters. Really cool stuff ! And now Storytlr is enabled too. It took me five minutes and two lines of code.

Tags: indieweb

January 6, 2013

22:17

Shared the link IndieWebCamp: Getting started

If you too want to get started and go Indieweb, this page provides you a few simple steps. Most important of course is to get your own domain name. Then, you could have a look at http://storytlr.org which supports most of the required features.

Tags: indieweb