@Chronotope I noticed it yesterday for you and 2 others while reading on mobile, thought it was an app glitch...

Jeremy, congrats on owning your reading! I'd recently seen your note about using reading.am, but I've been on holiday and not had a chance to get back to you.

In general it seems like you've found most of the salient pieces I liked about it. For the record these include:
* I like the idea of "bookmarking" everything I'm reading as I read it. Even for things I don't quite finish, I often will want to know what the thing was or how to easily find it at a later date.
* It has an easy to use desktop bookmarklet that makes the friction of using it negligible. (On mobile I use the ubiquitous sharing icon and use my account's custom email address to email links to my account which is quick enough too.)
* Its RSS feed is useful (as you've discovered), but I've integrated it into my WordPress site using IFTTT.com for porting the data I want over. In my case I typically save the post as a draft and don't publicly publish everything that my lesser followed reading.am account does. Generally once a day I'll look at drafts to add some notes if necessary, or do some follow up reading/research (especially when I've read something interesting via mobile and didn't have the time), and then publish a subsection of the captured reads as public.

I've filed an issue with the developer to see if he'd include the comment data within Reading.am into the RSS feed so that it could be included in the passed data, so that when commenting there, the commentary could also be passed across to my site as well.

While I typically prefer to default to POSSE when I can, this PESOS workflow is generally acceptable to me because it required very little effort and I like having the drafts to determine which I should post publicly/privately as well as for a nudge on potential follow up for some of what I've read.

One other small thing I had done was (via plugin) to have any links on my site auto-post to the WayBackMachine on archive.org as I read/post them that way there's a back up version of what I'd read so that in the future copies are available even if the site goes down at a future date. I suspect you could do this with a simple POST call, an example of which I think is documented in the wiki.

As a subtle tweak you may wish to take a look at https://www.reading.am/p/4MDd/https://www.wired.com/2014/08/handle_change/. I noticed that you bookmarked something as read a second time having clicked through via a reading.am link. This causes reading.am to mark the second one as "Jeremy Cherfas is reading this because of Jeremy Cherfas" which means the "because of Jeremy Cherfas" manages to sneak into your RSS feed in the title. I suspect this wouldn't happen often, so you could probably ignore it, but you could throw it into your Regex filter to trim it out when it does happen. (When you click on reading.am links, they process to show that you're reading something as a result of someone else having posted it, which could show some interesting network effects though the reading.am network is relatively small.)

I know you're always saying that you're not a developer, but you've puzzled out a regex filter, implemented it, and posted it to your site for others to benefit. I would submit that you could now proudly wear the title even if you have no intention to do it professionally. Neither of us may be at the level of people like aaronpk or snarfed, but then, really, who is?

I also love that you've got a Webmention form set up, working, and looking great. Congratulations! If you want a small challenge, perhaps you could massage it to create a Grav plugin so others could easily implement it? If you want less challenge (and obligation for support), perhaps submit what you've got as an issue to the Grav Webemention plugin https://github.com/Perlkonig/grav-plugin-webmention and see if they'd add it into the bigger plugin where it would also make sense having it. (They may also default to having it use their own webmention implementation instead of the heroku version.) If nothing else, consider linking/documenting it on the wiki page for Grav where others may find it more easily in the future.

Congratulations again Mr. Developer!

I think a lot of the problem comes down to all of the siloed walls out there which are causing most of the friction. We're still relatively early days yet and only a tiny few are using the concept of salmention which would help keep running threads working properly. Admittedly having the context live somewhere and then having proper threaded communications isn't easy, so many do what they're able to for the moment.

I'm usually attempting to manually accomplish salmention as best as I'm able, but I may not hit every syndicated target unless you're displaying it directly. Additionally some targets just don't make sense--I'll webmention your original, for example, but this lengthy reply just won't look right at micro.blog if you syndicated a simple headline and URL there, so why bother since you'll see it at the original anyway? Others who are on micro.blog may miss out on part of the conversation, but presumably if they're looking at your copy on micro.blog, they'll be able to see the original as it was intended.

Colin, you mention that not all of your content needs to go to micro.blog. Perhaps, but to think so in my mind is part of the older silo way of thinking. The only reason you're syndicating there is as a stopgap to reach the people who don't currently have the time or luxury to be doing things the way you are. Otherwise they could subscribe to you directly at the source (and potentially even circumscribe the types of posts, keywords, or content to get exactly what they want from your site.) In some sense you syndicate there to reach and communicate with the non-IndieWeb crowd. Perhaps some of your content doesn't make as much sense there as Micro.blog is limited in what it is able to do, but that is its limitation, not yours. Eventually in a fully IndieWeb-ified world, everyone would have their own domain, their own data, and syndication of any sort won't have a real need to exist at all.

As to Jack's comment, syndicating things out to multiple places is often difficult as is getting all the responses back. (Fortunately services like Brid.gy make things far easier though they don't cover all the bases.) I do it in large part because while I prefer to own all of my content and have all the conversation take place on my personal site, I can't necessarily make that choice for everyone else. My mom is likely to never have her own domain much less a site. The only way she'll see my content (whether it's meant for her or not) is to syndicate it to Facebook. For those who aren't yet aware of the IndieWeb or using it, they're still reading and interacting on other platforms, which, for me is fine since I can still have my cake and eat it too. Eventually there will be inexpensive platforms that will let people who don't want to deal with the development cost and overhead that allow much of the IndieWeb-types of functionalities they're not currently getting from their silo platforms for free. I suspect that these will be easier and easier (as well as cheaper) to use over time. I suspect more people will use them for their freedom, flexibility, and increased control. Until then, I have the privilege of using my site much the way I would Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Flickr, GoodReads, etc., etc., I just get to do it through a more unified experience instead of having to juggle dozens of accounts and only being able to interact with my fractions of friends, family, and colleagues who coincidentally happen to be spending the time and effort to interact on those websites. As an example, I have dozens of friends who interact with me on Facebook about things I'm currently reading or finished reading, but if I was only doing this on GoodReads, they'd never have a chance to see it as they don't have accounts there or even know it exists. (Coincidentally, this is also the reason that GoodReads and most other silos allow one to syndicate their accounts to Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

Not all social sites are as lucky as Facebook to have such massive adoption. This creates a value imbalance with respect to the classic "network effect" (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect). Philosophically I think that an decentralized and distributed version of IndieWeb philosophies add far more value than having hundreds or even thousands of individual silos.

Invariably some people are likely to stick with Twitter, Facebook, or others because they don't have the same values I do. (Currently I suspect the majority do it because it's frictionless and easy.) But this doesn't change the fact that one can't have a "universal" conversation if one prefers. When I look at various platforms, some of them have different personalities and types of conversations because of the (possibly) self-selecting group of people on them. I loved Twitter more in the early days because of it's smaller and more engaged community--things have naturally changed drastically since those early days. Micro.blog is a bit more like it now, but to me it's not so much a social media replacement for Twitter. To me it's really a social reader that I use to quickly follow a subset of interesting and thoughtful people until I have a better social reader built into my own site. The conversation would be somewhat different if these silos were working on niche audience content like knitting or quantum mechanics, but typically they're not. Most social silos are geared toward mass adoption and broad topic discussion or content posting for everyone/everywhere. Their goal is for their site to be the proverbial "phone number and dial-tone of the web". Why do this when I already have a connection and a "phone number" that is my own site URL?

Jack, while some bloggers have turned off comments, they've often done so saying "Post your reply on your own site, or on Twitter, Facebook, etc." This has just pushed the conversation on their ideas off somewhere else which is disconnected and not as easily searchable or discoverable. And without some kind of notification mechanism, the author of the original post has no idea it exists. (I'll elide a conversation about blocking trolls and abuse here.) I've written some thoughts on comments sections in reply to such a blogger who recently re-enabled comments which also links to several interesting articles about the pros/cons of having comments at all. To me, between webmentions, spam filtering, and even moderation, we're lightyears ahead of where we were in the early 2000s.

One other thing I do find interesting is that the way all of this is set up is allowing us the ability to write extended thoughts and extended multiple replies (with civility as relative strangers). I don't think there are many sites on the web that allow this type of interaction, and they certainly don't do it with anything remotely close to the open architecture we're using. While at times it can be a headache for maintenance and problems, I find far more value in it than using anything else.

@RamaKunapuli I just finished reading the book this morning! Great stuff.

I'm curious if you've actually physically quit twitter? I much prefer reading your blog directly, but I'm always curious about people who've mentally/physically made the decision to leave.

A few days ago, in part based on something that [Richard MacManus wrote](https://richardmacmanus.com/2017/06/22/openness-rivers-indieweb/) (and which may have prompted @scripting's response), I noticed that Inoreader differentiates between importing an OPML and subscribing to an OPML.

> # Importing an OPML
> If you import an OPML file in your RSS reader, you are creating a static copy of the reading list. If the owner of the original list updates the list, this change will not be shown in your feed collection.
>
> # Subscribing to an OPML
> An OPML subscription, however, creates a live connection between the original source and your feed folder. Whenever a feed is added or deleted from the original list, the change will be reflected in your subscriptions. The notification system in Inoreader will notify you that new feeds were imported or existing feeds were removed.

Ideally, if a site had a blogroll or other mechanism by which they maintained and publicly published their own OPML list, then the user could plug that into the reader to subscribe to the list which could update dynamically. One could also subscribe to others' OPML lists (or subsets of them?) as well without needing to pay attention to them. In total, this sounds like what Ben's reader (and Known's subscription list) were doing, but by using a pre-existing standard that's broadly supported. (As an example WordPress sites with the Links module enabled publish their OPML files at example.com/wp-links-opml.php).

Andreas, The best way I'm aware of to do read posts with #WithKnown currently is to post a status update to the effect. I've been considering doing a plugin similar to Jonathan LaCour's Watching https://github.com/cleverdevil/Known-Watching but for books. In fact, other than some cut and paste work and changing the microformats, it should be a simple thing. I'd almost feel guilty for "stealing" it.

I've started hacking away at a Read plugin similar to the bookmark or like functionalities that simply bookmarks articles which I've read online, but it's got some quirky upstream issues that need to be solved before I can finish it. Ultimately it's really for online content more so than books (or even magazines) though. I may circle back around to it sometime toward the end of the summer as I'm trying to finish up some last pieces on my Reading workflows for WordPress.

Perhaps I'm not quite reading your meaning properly, but I'm curious about the portion about your having turned off comments. I also notice your link requesting to "Comment on this at Medium". Both seemed odd to me as some of the benefit of having an indieweb site is having things set up to have better two way communication with others, while still owning the and having control and agency over the conversation.

This being said, I have, however, been considering turning off generic public (and anonymous) comments in favor of receiving comments only via webmentions. I think the fact that users who wish to comment on my content needing to post it on their own site first helps cut down on the spam and poorly thought out me-too commentary.

To some extent I think this was the tremendous value of Tumblr's not having a native commenting system. In their paradigm, to comment on something, one needed to put their commentary into their own personal stream first to be able to push the comment to the receiver's site as a secondary action. The social consequences of this are much stronger in terms of cutting back on a lot of junk, spam, and personal attacks because it becomes personally identifiable as representing themselves first and foremost (especially on their own site). Some of the problems Twitter and others have stem from users not really owning their content or their identities on those platforms which makes it much easier to become a nameless/faceless bully.

In some sense I think of it by analogy as a "Christmas tree effect". One purchases a wonderful Christmas tree and only puts up the useful and pretty decorations on it because it's what they and others who visit will see in broad view--often even publicly through their window from the street outside their home. Very few will go out of their way to buy a shabby looking tree and festoon it with dreadful ornaments as it's something ugly that not only they see constantly within their own home, but which will publicly brand them as such to friends, family, and even outsiders within their community.

Separately, thanks for the example your site provides. There are many subtleties you've got within your theme that I've been slowly working my way toward as well. I appreciate the way you've laid out and delineated the content. I also love the idea of a microcast which is something I've been contemplating for ages, but have never gotten around to actually doing. Your version and conceptualization are inspiring me to take another hard look at actually doing something.

I do remember reading it, in part because the text wouldn't load for me on Chrome (paywall issue perhaps?), and in part because I've been to the two farmers' markets mentioned at the top and bottom of the article. They're probably actually worse than depicted in the piece, not to mention that they're all also anti-vaxxers to boot.

It reminds me of an April Fools prank news story last week which was pretty funny and that you'll likely appreciate: http://boffosocko.com/2017/04/01/literal-farm-to-table-heres-the-dirt-on-chefs-cooking-with-dirt-the-salt-npr/

Also a bit reminiscent of a piece my friend Matt wrote with his 2017 food predictions: https://medium.com/@worldmatt/my-2017-food-trend-predictions-are-the-only-2017-food-trend-predictions-you-need-to-read-because-8f0bdfba3e1d. To truly appreciate it be sure to read how well his 2016 predictions went at the bottom of the piece.