Post-XOXO Ramble on Websites and Freedom: Everybody Comes To Ricks

I am writing this from IndieWeb Camp 2024 Portland. It’s the day after the 2024 XOXO Festival. It was the last XOXO.

In 2023, the boy billionaire Musk purchased Twitter, on credit. The enthusiasm for moving to Mastodon (started 2016) took off. Right now there’s a zeal to join Blue Sky. People are desperate for something better. People hate censorship, shadow-banning, “the algorithm.” Twitter is full of hate speech. The Trust & Safety team was gutted. Bad actors were reinstated in the name of free speech.

During XOXO, Andy Baio said “Every one of you should have a home on the web not controlled by a billionaire.” Cabel Sasser recommended that we all “put up the dang portfolio.” Molly White asked us to think back to “when was the first time you thought the web was magic?” She cited her young-kid self writing on her Neopets “user lookup page” as the moment when she realized the world wide web wasn’t just “a book she could read” but also a “canvas she could paint on.” That young kid kept painting. In May she shared We can have a different web:

Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.

As true as I think that is, most of us have drifted away from websites. In the IndieWeb we ask folks new to us “do you have a personal website?” Some answers are sheepish or embarrassed–old sites, updated years ago. We’ve been stuck in the silos we complain about. It’s where the people are.

1942’s Casablanca begins with vivid narration about those escaping Europe under the Nazis.

Paris to Marseilles — Across the Mediterranean to Oran — Then by train — or auto — or foot — across the rim of Africa to Casablanca in French Morocco — Here — the fortunate ones through money — or influence — or luck — obtain exit visas and scurry to Lisbon — and from Lisbon to the Americas — but the others — wait in Casablanca — and wait — and wait —

We’re waiting for our exit visas. We’re waiting for letters of transit. “Join the Discord server” or “watch my streams on YouTube” or “sponsor me on Patreon.” Maybe these are good escapes. Maybe they’ll be a fight for another day.

It’s all too easy to say “quit using silos such as Instagram, Facebook, X.” If your livelihood depends on the audience, the friends, the family on those sites, can you truly leave? That’s one challenge.

Personal websites represent a terrific opportunity for a different and potentially better social web. IndieWeb building blocks like microformats and webmention are powerful tools. ActivityPub and atproto glue blocks together to create social media that is controlled by the person who posts them and not a remote monopoly.

But we don’t know what a social web that’s truly open and democratic will look like. In her XOXO talk, Erin Kissane said the COVID Tracking Project could probably not form today, given the ways Twitter has devolved. Our experience with social media at planet-scale is limited. The current silos are extractive and hateful and often include harmful “middle school cruelty.” Harrowing tales of abuse stories were recounted in the XOXO talks by Sarah Jeong, Kim Belair, and Charlie Jane Anders.

My hope is we find ways to incrementally build on the wonderful parts of the web. Empower and uplift. Not depress and suppress. Sarah Jeong told a painful truth she learned “success comes with a threat mob.” Her mob included both Musk and Trump.

So, what will it take to disempower the next threat mob? What will it take to move to the web? What will it take to remove the power of algorithms that hide our work, to evade abuse and hacks? If I could never heat the sentences “my Instagram got hacked” and “my Facebook got hacked” again that would be a phenomenal win.

Bad actors seem not to have discovered the independent web. The man who won the 2016 US election used Twitter as a bludgeon on friends and enemies alike. When he was removed from Twitter in 2021, I feared Trump and his ilk would embrace the IndieWeb. But didn’t, he embraced a new silo: TruthSocial. I see screenshots of that terrible site regularly in news and on other sites. I note that his administration’s transition Twitter account, @transition2017 is not properly archived. The greatagain dot gov website is likewise defunct and not archived that I can tell. I seem to remember that the Trump White House also broke the Obama-era executive branch RSS feeds when they came in. It may be that fascists are bad at open data, open networks, open protocols. This gives me hope.

Erin Kissane exhorted that we must “fix the fucking networks.”

Like I said, I don’t know what that looks like, but the small, indie, slow web gives me hope.

The work being done in federated and ad-hoc networks is positive and ongoing. Mistakes are absolutely occurring, but the people running the servers seem to be listening. There slow death of Twitter has created opportunities for the old ways, the ways of the World Wide Web, of HTML, to return.

We’re stuck in Casablanca now. We’re waiting. But I think it’s time to join the fight. Update that website. Check that domain registration. Add microformats to your HTML. Check out indiewebify.me. Get started. Tell a friend. Spread the word.

Ed Yong left XOXO attendees with a few guidelines for what kept him sane as he worked to document COVID. The fifth was “acknowledge and uplift community.”

Ed also cited Mariame Kaba’s aphorism: “hope is a discipline.”

The full quote, from We Do This ’til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice:

I think that love is a requirement of principled struggle, both self-love and love of others, that we must all do what we can, that it is better to do something rather than nothing, that we have to trust others as well as ourselves. I often repeat the adage that “hope is a discipline.” We must practice it daily.

After XOXO 2024, I have more of that hope. To quote Rick Blaine from Casablanca, just after Vichy Captain Louis Renault has decided to stop supporting fascists (by killing the local Nazi commanding officer):

“Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”