Discovering the indieweb with calm tech
alexsci.com
alexsci.com
- On building kind, sustainable software: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/kind-software/
- Example projects (toys instead of blogs): https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/projects-and-apps-i-built-f...
- Wishlist: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/things-to-support-my-own-we...
- List of places to find indie content (something I used for my weekly newsletter): https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/places-to-find-indie-web-co...
Nowadays my current approach is:
1) meeting folks via Say Hi (unoffice hours)
2) keeping a separate RSS feed in NetNewsWire called People - this feed contains only the people I've met online or in person
EDIT: I almost forgot, but my partner wrote a cool intro to Indieweb for less techie folks: https://newpublic.substack.com/p/the-handmade-internet-is-ma...
It includes interviews with some of the people you might know from here :)
Related to Prezi, but not my earlier comment: I'm actually messing with a little toy project: a Playdate (http://play.date) remote to control presentations/media/Claude Code
It would be (useless, but) fun to be able to control the animation transitions (like those in Prezi) using the crank!
Please send along any feature requests, I know there are rough edges and more eyes will help find them. I'm also trying to decide if the RSS feature should be pushed upstream to StreetPass, or if the extensions are best staying separate. Thanks all :)
After browsing for a few minutes I found that it really needs to have some kind of filter mechanism. For example, on old.reddit.com each post has its individual feed, while on blogspot you have both RSS and Atom feed.
The "calm tech" concept works really well with the fediverse identities because it's such a niche concept that at the end of a day of browsing you'll get a handful of entries, but for something as ubiquitous as RSS you get a ton of useless feeds that are just. But I really, really like the basic idea, I'll see if I can apply it to the things I'm building. :)
The article totally buries the lead, so for anyone who misses it: this is a browser extension which simply keeps track of a list of the RSS feeds of websites you've browsed, so that later you can subscribe to them if you want to. It was forked from an extension which does the same for Mastodon.
It solves a very simple problem, which is that when I'm browsing a website I'm usually not thinking about subscribing to it, but later on when I'm reading my feeds, I wish I could add some more.
Blog Quest does what Mozilla was supposed to do with their hundreds of millions of dollars. From the moment that they declared their mission was to promote the open Web and negotiated an annual nine figure check out of Google. This is where the money should have gone: easy UX for people to subscribe to websites through an open standard, laying the groundwork for a free social graph on top of it one day. If they had done it at the right time they might have changed the course of history (again?).
Sadly they didn't. For 15 years they gradually buried RSS and then one day some random dude just throws a browser extension out there better than anything they ever did in the space. Extension of the year. Massive kudos to this guy.
Deduplicating RSS and Atom makes a lot of sense too.
Thanks for trying it out!
"Eugene" [1] boosted the post, which is how it gained attention i believe. That's what i meant with "source" ;-)
Tools like StreetPass and Blog Quest work because they reverse the core failure mode of modern social platforms: they stop demanding attention and start respecting it. Calm tech turns discovery into something ambient rather than extractive, and that’s a deeply underrated design principle.
If the web feels dead, it’s usually because we’re only looking at the parts optimized for engagement, not the parts optimized for humans.