For the life of me I can’t remember where I came across it, and apparently I forgot to make a note of it, but there’s all sorts of great stuff in this epic post about the indieweb and fandom spaces. You don’t have to care about fandom, specifically, to find this worth your time if you care at all about the past, present, and future states of online community.
There are some especially terrific thoughts on how too much of a move into the indieweb ideal of having everything you do up for access on your own site might not actually be ideal for community-building.
Basically, if “own your content and host it on your site” also applies to your comments, interactions, etc, it starts running counter to one of the strengths of the Old Web. Which was community contexts where you explicitly weren’t posting to your own space or addressing everyone who might be looking at the main clearinghouse of all your different stuff. You were posting to the commons shared by a particular group with a particular culture and interests, not all of whom were people you’d necessarily want to follow outside that limited context, some of whom you might disagree with or dislike, but in any case you knew what audience you were broadcasting to. You knew what the conversation was, how similar conversations had gone in the past, and the reputations of all the main participants–not just the ones you yourself would subscribe to and the ones attention-grabbing enough to get shared by the people on your subscription list. And you weren’t spamming all your other acquaintances with chatter on a topic they weren’t interested in.
This is a tension between the ideals of the indieweb and the idea community that had never occurred to me, but to highlight it and raise concerns about it certainly makes a great deal of sense to me.
To my mind, what we need is not so much everyone having a central, personally-owned-and-hosted clearinghouse of all their online activity as a way for both personal sites and smaller community sites to have areas through which they can interact or follow each other in some fashion, without turning one’s own “personal feed” into just another unceasing river of noise.
Marianne also has some great thoughts about whether relentlessly organizing things chronologically (or, rather, reverse-chronologically) itself can have a detrimental effect on community. To wit: “Relentless chronological ordering + the signal-to-noise ratio of any space with regular social interaction = greatest hits falling down the memory hole unless a community practices extensive manual cataloguing.”
These two sets of observations aren’t even the half of what’s on offer over there, and if there’s anything I’ve run across in the past few months that I would shove to the top of the reading list for anyone looking at where the indieweb could, should, or might take us, it would be this post.