One of the things I’m enjoying about getting into the indie web and fediverse is that I have so much more agency over the form that my content takes.
Every social media platform inscribes a specific format. Many of them are defined by it, particularly in their early years, e.g. vertical short videos on Tiktok, square photos on Instagram, 140-character messages on Twitter. This has many benefits: it shapes the culture that emerges, and provides enough creative constraints to make the task of creating a post feel manageable. The downside is that if you have something you want to share with the world, you have to learn how to represent it in the formats required by the largest social media platforms. This adds a huge amount of work for many artists or small business owners, particularly those whose core focus is not the social media platform itself, but who need to use these platforms to raise their profile. For example, making Tiktoks to promote Intrapology is a significant task for me, requiring major edits to create content that is vertical and short, and that demonstrates the audience interaction without getting in the way of the story.
As platforms age, they gradually widen their constraints regarding format, to achieve goals such as boosting session length, increasing user participation, or competing with other platforms. Even non-corporate platforms adjust their format restrictions in response to the needs of their users: the mastodon/hometown server I’m on, Merveilles.town, polled its users a few months ago to gauge the level of interest in allowing longer posts, and based on the result, increased the maximum length of posts significantly (for which I am very grateful). However, on corporate social media, the fundamental character of these platforms (enshittification) often means that changes in format are hostile to users, forcing people to learn new skills and give up old ones; Facebook’s “pivot to video” in the 2010s is a particularly notorious example that impacted many writers' livelihoods.
As I learn more about ActivityPub, webmentions, and microformats, particularly through using micro.blog, I’m realising that I can customise the format of my content to a very high degree while still benefitting from the network effects of the platforms on which my work is syndicated. To give a low-impact example, I’ve been practising the alternative writing system Shavian for about a year. I created custom styling for my Shavian transcriptions blog to allow a side-by-side view with Latin-script source text. I couldn’t create something like this on Facebook or Medium. To post side-by-side transliterations, I first had to find a platform that could supports the specific kind of content that I want to create: Micro.blog allows a high degree of theme customisation.
If my chosen platform had been a walled garden, which is typical for corporate social media, I would also have to ensure that the platform hosts a community of people who are interested in seeing this particular type of niche content. Users are unlikely to move to another platform just to see content by a specific person, especially someone they don’t know. People go where their friends are, and usually dislike the onboarding phase of a platform that is unfamiliar to them. They have limited patience or interest in learning the workings and cultures of additional apps and websites. People want to make new relationships and learn new things, but prefer to do so on the platform that they already use.
Of course, it was always possible to create your own website and post updates to an RSS feed so that people are informed of new content. Wordpress would have allowed me to create something like this, with built-in cross-posting to various social media platforms. These are examples of technologies that allow an indie web approach. ActivityPub, and interoperability with other protocols, extends this by allowing two-way interactions regardless of the user’s preferred portal. For example, I’ve had a conversation about errors in my Shavian transcription with a Bluesky user, without even being aware that the user was on a different platform to me, let alone needing to download the Bluesky app in order to respond.
I first learned about Shavian via a video essay on Youtube. Imagine if other users who became interested via that video were immediately able to find, via the #shavian hashtag, content in and about Shavian from around the social web. Imagine if users of the Shavian subreddit could subscribe to a feed of new content posted to that hashtag on any number of different sites, without having to leave Reddit. They wouldn’t have to open another account on another platform, learn how to use it, and get into the habit of checking it or agree to receive notifications from another app. It would all happen within the platform that they already use, as an extension of their existing media habits.
I’m newer to exploring webmentions and microformats, and I find them considerably more abstract and challenging to conceptualise. I think they work best when the user does not need to be aware of them, but just takes them for granted as part of how the internet works. Some use cases relevant to my Shavian side project come to mind: with webmentions, an author could receive a notification when I transcribe an extract of their work, if I include the source url in a link or cite property. My site could even import an updated version of their bio and social media links, using the hcard microformat. There is also a microformat that tracks the syndicated copies of posts, which could connect the various copies of my posts syndicated on different platforms, so that people commenting on one site can interact with those commenting on another.
I still find some degree of intentional translation between formats necessary when cross-posting to other platforms. I’m finding little workarounds that make a post more likely to be formatted well on Mastodon and Bluesky when I am creating it on micro.blog, which I expect will be obviated by future updates that extend the cross-posting features. Despite various forms of friction and confusion, it feels like I’m learning something very helpful about how to be a creative person on the internet after the Great Enshittening. I can imagine a future where I take this kind of distributed approach when creating videos, or even when mounting an interactive performance. It opens up the possibility of having a very high degree of autonomy over how my work is presented, while also maximising opportunities for quality interactions with people who care about the kind of thing I’m doing.
