I changed my silo (social media) profiles to private today to:
- Take an incremental step toward outright leaving silos, as others have:
- Treat Instagram in particular as primarily a means to the ends of processing/posting photos and videos on my own site.
- Though I continue to admire (and document) their “reading” user experience: how much more focused, primarily positive (perhaps choice of followings), and just overall pleasant it is to follow posts from people on Instagram.
- To be an indieweb canary. Many of the tools and services we have built in the IndieWebCamp.com community are designed for public posts and interactions, including with silos. I changed my silo profiles to private, or to make private posts by default, e.g. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Flickr and documented how to do so here:
- To learn firsthand what the challenges are, both user experience and technical, e.g.
- To start better understanding existing private account and privacy user experiences & expectations, and documenting them to accelerate indieweb “best of the best” privacy & private publishing design.
In that last respect, this is just one of many private vs. public experiments I will be conducting, including with my own website and posts, to gain real world experience of the privacy design challenges and opportunities for individual or small group independent web sites, inspired but not burdened by existing silo designs.
Starting in 2010-2011 we the IndieWeb community pioneered and documented details and best practices of how to POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) by doing so live on our own sites to various silos like Twitter.
By 2015, POSSE had grown far beyond the indieweb community and became an accepted open independent web practice, with many others reconceptulaizing or redeveloping it, e.g. POSSE to Medium by “Creating Medium stories via RSS”.
It’s now 2016, and just as 2010 felt like the right time to develop and show POSSE (and outdo silos at & with it), now feels like the right time for those of us with our own indieweb sites to take steps with those sites to pioneer, develop, document, and show how the independent web can do better at private accounts & posts, improving upon silos both technically, and more importantly, with better user experiences.