 Welcome to another session of Domains21. In fact, this is the final session of the Domains21 track. And Chris, you are the only, so this is unique, you are the only live broadcast session. So take that as a special compliment from the reclaim team. Welcome. This is Chris Aldrich. I should actually introduce you. This is Chris Aldrich. I know him through the indie web community. He has talked broadly about what it means to reclaim some of your web presence. He's been a big supporter and advocate of Domain of One's Own, which I really appreciate. But more than that, a big advocate and supporter of the idea of owning your online presence and kind of reclaiming some of that space. So Chris, welcome to Domains21. I will remove myself so you can do the good work. And thank you for joining us today. Thanks, Jim. I appreciate it. Nofes Da to those in the East. And good morning to those of you in the West where I'm at in Los Angeles. I'll start with a short caveat. I'm live, so I've got that pressure. But my session was originally in an hour-long workshop. I'm going to compress it down in about 20 minutes. So hopefully things will go well. After this, sometime in the next few weeks, we'll schedule a Domain of One's Own meetup. Hopefully we'll do one both in Europe and the Americas to help walk people through and set up the technology I'm going to demonstrate and give you some hands-on experience. Smooth out the bumps in the road and go from there. But you'll notice here on my slide, unlike most presenters, I have no Twitter handle. Because of domains, I'm now far less invested in Twitter than I used to be. So all of my content now originates from my domain. And hopefully we'll show you in a moment how you can start doing that for yourself. So when I told some friends about the title of this talk, their immediate reaction was, who would want their own Twitter? It's dreadful. It's horrible. So except my apologies that the title is definitely clickbait because who would want a replica of Twitter for themselves? Yet I noticed the vast majority of both the OER and Domain's communities are on Twitter. When I looked at the badges, those awesome badges for the conference, I actually saw, I think, more Twitter handles than I saw domain names. And it made me a little sad. Twitter opens us up to a variety of harms and ills. But the social glue of our communities kind of entices our colleagues, our students, our friends, and families to also have a presence there. So the question is, why are we setting such a bad example to our dear ones when we're regularly talking about a healthier and happier alternative? Why don't we make a domain that's even better than it is already? I would suggest there is more infrastructure available to do this than we think there is. Today, I'm going to hopefully expose everyone to a little bit more of that so we can help each other break free. Together, I think we could provide our colleagues, friends, students, families with better models of how to represent themselves and interact online. And this will hopefully let us have a bit more freedom and agency. Is this solution perfect? Not yet. Far from it. I would argue that it's measurably better and it can help us bridge the divide. But there's going to be a lot more work to go into it. Hopefully we can do that. So with our domain names, our websites, let's take the next step forward. But as we do so, let's try move slowly and fix things as we move along. So from a domain's perspective, what is it that Twitter is offering us that's keeping us bound to it? Here's a few screenshots. I'll show you what some highlights of the Twitter interface. It's obviously got the ability to quickly and easily post short status updates and photos. They also provide a simple one click UI button so that you can create likes, replies and reposts to give interaction and feedback with others. I always like to say Twitter is 2% posting interface and 98% reader while products like WordPress are the exact opposite. Today, hopefully I'll show some of us how to turn those tables a little bit. Here's another post portion highlighted of a Twitter stream. It may appear small in this screen capture, but obviously we'll scroll on down for days and days. The neologism doom-scrolling might give you a little bit of an idea just how far the scrolling interface will go. And the final piece I wanna highlight are the interactive and perhaps too often addictive notifications that add mentions and replies you get from Twitter. So even if we consider the wide and varied offerings of RSS-based feed readers, we're still missing some crucial pieces which either don't exist at all or which just don't dovetail with our domains right now. Many of us from the old school blogosphere will read each other's posts on their respective domains and then reply directly on the page in the comment boxes there. But if we do this, where's that ownership piece that we were promised by the domains model that we're all practicing? Shouldn't we be able to own our replies as well if we wanted to? I think we can do better. So as we go here, I wanna recognize that most of the technology I'm about to demonstrate comes out of the IndieWeb community's work over the past decade with a very similar ethical viewpoint and standard of care that closely aligns with the domains movement. The IndieWeb is a group of people, primarily people, including designers, UX, UI people, people, web developers, and even ethicists. They've gone a long way towards creating some standardized building blocks to allow domains to begin doing much more than they have in the past. And I think there's a fair amount of overlap in the people between these two communities. So what I'm about to describe and show will be very word press-centric, but it doesn't have to be. And that bears repeating or maybe I'll rephrase it. You can have almost any website built on any platform using a variety of programming languages and still get most, if not all of the benefits of what I'll describe here. So perhaps a concrete example of what this all looks like will be helpful. And what I'm gonna show here is all working for me on my own domain. All this infrastructure works live in real time. It's really spectacular. And I know a little bit of code, but only enough to be tremendously dangerous. And I think most of this technology has come down to a place where if you have a word press site and you can write a post and publish it, you can do most of what you'll see here. So first let's start with one of the several social readers in the indie web space. Yarns is a content server that lives on your word press site. It collects the sites of people you wanna follow and temporarily stores their content for you to read. If you're using something besides word press or looking for other options, there's a variety of these other servers that you can use for a variety of websites. You can download Yarns, activate it from the word press repository. Here's what one of the settings pages looks like. It'll allow you to choose how long you want to keep posts in your reader. I think the default is 14 days. You can create and delete channels, which you can choose the names of. You edit the feeds of the people or the content you wanna have within each channel. So here's my domain of one's own channel on my own site with some of the sites I'm following. You'll probably recognize a few of them. You'll notice there is a box for putting in new sites. When you input a new domain into that search, Yarns will find all the available feeds that that site puts out. And then you can pick and choose which ones you wanna follow. Most sites like word press will only have one or two feeds out of the box. But obviously you could put in other custom ones if you'd like. My site here is an example has probably 30 or 40 different feeds. So you can pick and choose based on either post types or taxonomies and get the content from me or others that you'd like to have. So Yarns is one of a variety of available reader servers. Let's look at some of the available reader clients. So it's two pieces of server and a client. One of the benefits of the server client setup is you can switch from one reader client to another and each successive one will remember what you've read or what you haven't. This will let you move from your desktop. For example, to your mobile without missing a beat. Each reader offers a different user interface and some of them different functionalities. So for today's purposes, let's look at Monocle as an example and try it out. Here's the site. You can, it's a website for UI version. I'll click on the sign in indicator in the corner and it pops up and it asks me for my domain name. I'm going to type that in. I'm not gonna use Twitter, Facebook, not Google to log myself in. I'm gonna use my own domain name. You might notice too underneath here that it indicates I'll need a micro sub server. In our case, we're using Yarns as I indicated. If you're on some other platform and don't have a micro pub server that you can install with a simple one or two click aperture is a web-based free service that'll keep I think up to two weeks of data for you for free. So Monocle will, once I put my domain in, it sends me to my own website to log in. If I were already logged in, my site would authenticate automatically and I'd be rerouted back to Monocle. This technology is underpinned by the Indie Auth plugin for WordPress. It's literally a download and activate and you're ready to go. It's using an extension of OAuth 2 which is the same web security protocol used by Google and Twitter, Facebook and others so that you can use those services to log into other services. This is doing exactly that same thing. But in our case, we're now relying on our own site for this login functionality. And I can literally from Los Angeles here gym room, swooning from Italy. So once we've done that, I get to allow Monocle to create, update, read, follow, handle my channels. So I'm gonna click authorize here and it's gonna send me back to Monocle. I'm now signed into the reader. Here's what it looks like. You'll notice the self-defined channels on the left with indicators of what I haven't read yet. And the main part of the window is a stream of time-ordered posts within that channel. It's very Twitter-like. Here you will see my domain of one's own channel with posts it's taught there by Dr. Kimberly Hirsch and a tweet from Helen that came in through my OER by domains hashtag from Twitter. But here's where things get interesting. Much like Twitter, my reader has the ability to write replies to posts in line as well as create likes, favorites and reposts. Other feed readers like InnoReader have the same sort of interface as did the now-defunct GoogleReader. You can post a reply or a like and that would be saved in your account in the reader. But this social reader, its functionality is dramatically different. How? That green reply button does something that many might not expect or believe because of the social media world we've been living in. When I click that button a moment or two goes by, the interface has changed and you'll see my domain. There's a link here that goes to my domain at baphosaco.com. So let's click on that and see where it goes. Monocle, which was authenticated to my website, has posted my reply on my own domain. Yeah, my own domain. I own that reply on my site now. Here it is, this is what it looks like. Perhaps even more clever, my site pulls the URL from Kimberly's post from the reader into it. My site parses her page, pulls out the title, her avatar, her name, a little bit of context here about the thing to which I'm replying. So even if Kimberly's posts were to disappear from the web, I'd have an idea about what it was that I had originally replied to. But as Billy Mays was fond of saying, wait, there's more. Don't forget that notifications piece we mentioned earlier. So if you guessed that my site sent Kimberly a notification, you'd be exactly right. It was sent and Kimberly chose, actively chose somewhere in her setting to display it as a comment under her original post. Kimberly and I now both have copies of our conversation on our sites, on our domains. More importantly, if we're both using similar sorts of building blocks, our websites can now have site to site conversations. We don't need Twitter anymore. We don't need Instagram or Facebook. We can do it from one domain to the next the same way those sites do Twitter and Facebook could add this and you could have Twitter talk to Facebook and back and forth. I highlight out that's ever gonna happen but our domains now can do this. Even more impressive in this particular case, my website is running WordPress and Kimberly's site is powered by micro.blog which is built on a Hugo static site generator code base. So now domain to domain conversations are a reality in the world and this is happening at a reasonable scale. It's happening out of the box with some content management systems. Other systems like Drupal or WordPress have plugins or modules. Those in the OER space will be clamoring for platforms like Press Books or Manaful to support this I'm sure. Imagine one book being able to talk to another or perhaps my thesis in progress can send updates to my advisor's website. Maybe the journal article on my website can link to your book and send you a notification of citation. Suddenly these basic web standards have given us alt metrics for free for the low, low cost of publishing your own work on your own domain. Open Science, anyone? Digital Humanities. These notifications are already being used to aggregate content on discussion like hubs much like the RSS planets of yesterday or even today we're still using these. Why not use it to build your institution's preprint server? That would be cool. Teachers could post assignments on their sites, students can reply directly. They can say I read this assignment or I watched this video, I listened to your podcast. Naturally they may choose to moderate the responses so that they're only seen on the back end and not necessarily on the front because it's your own domain. There's a lot of choice and flexibility in what you might do with these types of notifications and replies. So let's also look at an example from a post yesterday that I made on my website and I cross posted it to Twitter. I'll mention that I'm using a free service called Bridgy that sends notifications of web mentions, replies and likes from Twitter back to my original copy where they live as native replies. You'll also notice that threaded responses are possible. So here's that post. We popped it up by yesterday, late, late morning. You'll see I syndicated it to a few other platforms. That's even as my location at home and it was 54 Fahrenheit with a few clouds. Here are nine thoughts or replies. This one came from Twitter, another one here from Twitter. I wrote my reply to that tweet on my site and syndicated a copy out back to Twitter and then got another reply from Angelene back to Twitter and then here you can see a few more likes that occurred on Twitter or some of these other platforms. If you wanna write a reply on your own domain, put my link URL for this post into it, pop it into this box and hit ping, ping me and you don't even need the infrastructure yourself. So you might be saying to yourself now that you've seen how this works, I won't. But let's remember that with great power comes great responsibility. There's a standard of care that we'll need to keep in mind. As we implement this on our own domains, there's some work that certainly we're gonna need to do on some of the parts that come next. A lot of this functionality is already in place and available on a variety of common CMS platforms, many of which are super popular in the domain space. Here's where I'm gonna skip massively ahead to the future and miss all of that actual doing this with everyone who's here today. There's a lot of things that we're gonna need to consider in the future of this. But for those who feel comfortable and wanna try it, I'll share my slides later today. You can hopefully follow along and maybe do this with a little bit of hunting and pecking yourself where at a future session, we'll put those pieces in for you or help you do that. But I'm curious if we can at least a portion of us return to this conference next year and be primarily using our domains instead of Twitter. But we'll need to consider what else does this enable? How are we better empowered? What are the costs? What do we need to keep doing to design this system and design into it to help the less privileged? What are the things should we consider? I've got two quick more slides and then we'll be done. Absolutely, I can talk. You can click on when I share the slides but I'll make a quick pitch. The IndieWeb community is out there. They're warm, welcoming, inclusive. They've got a code of conduct that they enforce. They have regular bar camp style events a couple of times a year as well as weekly homebrew website clubs. So you can bring your domain, show off what you're using it for, get help in the interaction to figure out what you can do with it next. I've got a deal for a micro.blog. If folks want it, I've got some coupons I can give out that'll give you a free year of hosting. This might be particularly useful for students who want to try this out. But I'm sure Jim's got some questions in the last minute or two we've got. Absolutely, I mean, thank you very much, Chris. That was an awesome presentation and you hit on a lot of things and a few people in the comments have already mentioned mind blown, like really the idea of reclaiming a lot of that commentary back and forth between sites. And I wanted to ask, because one of the questions said, like what infrastructure are you running this on? And I imagine you're using a fairly, straightforward server and using web mentions and bridgey and a whole series of just plugins for Twitter or is there more? It's a, I think this might put my main site is on a shared server. It's running a pretty vanilla form of WordPress with all of all this functionality is probably about six plugins, I think. There's one or two free external services I'm leaning on or leveraging at the moment. But it's literally, most of these plugins are download, activate, go. One or two of them have a couple of options and settings you can throw in there, but it's reasonably straightforward. If you, I think if you can write a post on your site and click publish, you can make your site do this. Yeah, it's interesting, there was a question like, do you need a separate server or do you need to have a sub-server? And I know you just need a few services and Monocle is new to me. I really liked that reader set up in Monocle and how you did that, that's quite elegant. Yeah, there's, I think that list was seven or eight different versions. Some are mobile based, some are web based. There's one desktop based version even. But the nice part is these kind of building blocks are separated in such a way it's a lot easier to develop these readers or interfaces. In fact, the whole feed reader microcosm has been broken into two. It's the find the subscriptions and pull in all the data and then the reader can now be separate and just focus on the UI and pull that data in. So you don't need the overhead for making your own reader now is much, much, much lower than it was before. I always thought when I was playing with known and it kind of builds on your question that one of the things that known would have benefited from was a reader so that if you had the space to comment within a reader and then shoot it back out to the various services, it would have made things a lot cleaner in terms of staying unknown rather than always feeling you have to go to Twitter or go to Facebook or go to wherever to have actually the conversation. So that was one of the problems and it segues with another question. So think of this as a two-parter is how do we get to the mentality that you don't have to go to a silo like Twitter or Facebook to have a conversation? Because that's the bigger kind of question in the culture boat we have to shift. Like the technology, we can talk and figure that out together. It's the idea of not being or feeling that you have to go to this platform to get that sense of engagement. Yeah, it's, and even the difference of do I need it all on my own domain? In my case with yarns that I've shown here, you can but if you wanna use another server or set up like Aperture, you can use that as a third party to host and hold all that data for you and read it in various places and then reply and keep content on your domain. Unbeknownst to a lot, I think, there's a huge chunk of known code base that actually does implement the reader that was just never finished. My presumption is they're gonna eventually take that out and build something better out of it that follows this model. But it's, I think the bigger pieces, all these small little building blocks, the small pieces loosely joined is allowing us a lot more. The harder part really here was the 10 years of work that hundreds and thousands of developers that put into this to make this work so that you could be on Drupal or you could be on WordPress and those two dramatically different setups can talk to each other. So there's a lot of really hard blood, sweat, and tears in that standards work that makes this possible. And it's super easy. If you wanted to build Twitter tomorrow, you could probably spin up something reasonable in about a day, but it's gonna be self-contained and it's gonna be its own silo. It's not gonna be able to communicate with the rest of the world. And so we've now have kind of broken down those walls with some of these standards to make that possible. And how do you personally cross that gap? So it seems like do you have a Twitter account? Do you just send stuff to Twitter but not stay on it? Like how do you deal with the fact that people are having these conversations in another space that you may or may not be? So it's possible. It takes a little bit of gymnastics, but you can still pull RSS feeds out of Twitter if you have some crazy little tools. So I'm taking all those feeds and piping them into my reader and then I can reply within my reader and publish back out both to my website and then my website then syndicates it automatically on my behalf. And there's thousands of plugins that'll do that piece for you on your behalf. Some obviously better than others, but I spend almost no time on Twitter now. I post what I post and I send it out. I get the replies back. So at that example I showed you, I got a reply from someone and I wrote the reply in my own comments section on my own domain and hit publish and then syndicated that reply back. So if you've got it all in a reader you own and all on your own domain, it's that all those pieces are kind of within your control now. Yeah, I think one of the things you're pointing to and that's why I really look forward to this domain of one's own meetup so we can get on the ground and build some of this is the importance of a space where you can read and react to these communities that's distributed. Call it a reader, call it whatever you want. Bridgie, call it whatever. It's that space that allows us to publish seamlessly but then connect seamlessly that's been missing. And so the silo provides that cohesion. It provides that simplicity but at a great cost as you pointed out. Yeah, well, one of the other pieces I think that's missing that we'll have to do some work on is the discovery aspect. A lot of these algorithmic feeds are throwing things into your timeline they think you might be interested in whether that's a good thing or not is a question or even our likes a thing you wanna support. So platforms like micro.blog doesn't have likes as a thing. If you wanna respond to somebody using that setup you have to write an actual reply which I think makes it bring some of the humanity back into this doesn't do that instant notification gratification business. So it's those small even those small design pieces dramatically will change how you interact and work online but you have to think about that rather than here's what the silo gives me I'm forced to use this but what do I instead what do I choose to use? What UI what means of interaction and communication do I wanna use? I'm pushing on the edge. We have maybe a minute and that's still over but that's fine because we're in break here so people can leave if they want but my question for you is how do you use micro.blog versus your blog or versus some of these other spaces because I think there's also for me I have a micro blog and I've used it like for a few times but then I'm so used to doing everything on my own WordPress site that I kind of neglected it. How do you use it? So and this is where it gets super complicated because micro.blog is different to everybody with what they approach it with. So if you have nothing and no infrastructure you just have a domain name and you set it up micro.blog can act for you as your content management system your feed reader, everything from soup to nuts but if you're like me and you have your own domain already you can have an account there. There's a little bit of setup you can throw and what I've done is I've picked and chosen the feeds from my site that I think will work best for that micro.blog community. So my posts or my short status updates my site uses an RSS feed and it pipes it into micro.blog. So as soon as I hit publish within a minute it pops up and it's on the micro.blog stream so people can read. They then interact and reply and communicate there and these notifications that are kind of powered by the web mention standard. Then micro.blog sends those notifications back to my site to say, hey, somebody replied to you and then I can in a threaded manner on my own site I can write my replies and hit publish and my reply then goes back. So you can do that back and forth. So it's the tough part about micro.blog I think that confuses some is it tries to meet you with the technology you already have and bring with you rather than if you want to treat it as a silo like Twitter or Facebook or maybe mastodon you can do that but if you already have your own site it then becomes an extra distributed space. What I love about it is for I think like $5 a month or even less if you do it an annual plan it's dead simple enough, I hate to say this but my mom is a technophobe to some extent but she can use it and she doesn't have to worry about any of the moving pieces. No plug-ins, no technology at all. If she wanted to have an account there and customize it, that piece is there as well but if she just wants the communication piece and the technology and it's there as a turnkey solution as well so. Well Chris I want to say thank you because I'm re-inspired to not only revisit micro blog but to actually revisit the broader notion of web mentions and bridgey and all the things you talked about to kind of reclaim a little bit of the reader because that's a place where I've still falling off. So I look forward to our session. I want to thank you for sharing with us today and everybody else in the comments as well and just say thanks for presenting at Domain's 21. Thanks for having me, take care. Bye. Om nom nom.