On the indie web... again

Async conversations are fun so I'm going to keep this one going. What's most interesting to me when it comes to the whole indie web movement, is this entanglement of tech and human intentions. The developer in me sees the point in discussing the importance of the tech but I can't help but think that the human intentions are what really matters.

The first thing I’d note is that only one of them generated an incoming webmention.

I'll be honest with you: I never bothered checking if my site is set up to correctly send out web mentions. I know I can receive them thanks to webmention.io but I never bothered checking if I'm also set up to send them. And you know why? Because if I reply to a person I usually simply send that person an email. It's that simple.

All that said though, as I wrote at the beginning, this entire discussion is a mix of tech and human intentions and the latter is what's been on my mind a lot lately. The more I think and write about tech, the more I'm convinced that the tech doesn't really matter all that much without the correct mindset. The tools to make good things are already out there. If you're a tech savvy person you have already a plethora of solutions to put a site online. There's countless CMS and web servers and SAAS, you name it. If people are not having more interesting and profound interactions online, it is not for lack of tools. It's for lack of good intentions.

That isn't to say that tech doesn't play a role here. It absolutely does, and social platforms are not helping in this endeavor. But blaming social media is easy. Actually doing something to fix the problem is hard. And it's hard because we inevitably end up reinventing the wheel. I often thought that what we need is a web developer friend as a service kind of thing. Because I'm sure a lot more people would be willing to have their own site if it wasn't too much of a pain in the ass. But that idea is a topic for another time.