Chris Aldrich

tl;dr: It's easy enough to support microformats v2 (and even backcompat for v1) and they don't/shouldn't create any conflicts so why not support them out of the box?

I think that a forward-looking platform like Auttomatic should definitely be supporting (and perhaps even iterating internally) on microformats2, particularly since they're simple added classes that give semantic meaning to the massive amounts of data that are put on the web via the platform. This makes them much more valuable to end users of the web (and doesn't mean they're simply a cut-and-dried SEO tool for Google's benefit.)

Though schema and microformats are meant for the same types of general functionality, their implementations and pros/cons are different. In part, Google controls the schema structure while microformats are more open and extensible, particularly if/when additional classes seem necessary in the wild. Additionally, Google, et al. certainly don't ding sites that use one or the other or even both.

I also know there were a few plugins in the repository that used to support microformats v1 that aren't actively supported anymore (see https://wordpress.org/plugins/hrecipe/ for example with an install base of 600+). Since a plugin really isn't required to add support, putting it into the canonical end-all shortcode for recipes on WordPress is probably the easiest thing for wide-based support.

Kevin Marks does a pretty good job of laying out microformats vs. schema here: http://www.kevinmarks.com/microformatschema.html. Because of the ease of use of microformats2, back in May Kevin was able to build a quick parser to inject mf2 into their site to attempt to save the BBC's Food & Recipe database (http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/) when they announced they might discontinue it and take it offline. (See: https://twitter.com/kevinmarks/status/732586363128664064; https://twitter.com/kevinmarks/status/733115448410116097)

Amy Guy, part of the W3C Team and co-staff contact for the Social Web working group, also has some useful thoughts on the benefits of microformats (and comparison with linked data) as well: http://rhiaro.co.uk/2015/08/extensibility

I'm doing some parsing related work on my suggested (pending) pull request to make sure that parsers will properly read the recipe data. It may require a tweak or two prior to pulling.

Additional References:
http://tlks.io/talk/microformats-with-tantek-celik
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/166612/schema-org-vs-microformats

I have just gone through the process of setting up Medium's plugin, so I'm giving that a spin for a couple weeks prior to kicking the tires of SNAP's integration. SNAP has done an excellent job on other platforms, so I'm guessing they're using all the available features there and probably have a stronger 1-1 mapping of data from one platform to the other, particularly as Medium is aiming at WordPress directly first. The one thing you might want to be careful about with Medium is making sure you don't have a "rel=canonical" tag [https://indieweb.org/rel-canonical] showing up on your Medium post, otherwise you might be getting docked by Google and others with respect to SEO. I know the Medium plugin handles this well, but haven't checked on how IFTTT or SNAP handle this yet.

I'm curious what specifically you found confusing about IndieWeb? Some of us in the WordPress group have been trying to make the value proposition and workflow better, particularly over the past several months. (Admittedly, before about April, the onboarding process was MUCH messier and the end user had to do a lot more reading/discovery and work to set things up, but I think the hurdle has moved much lower since then.) If you take a look at it again, I'd love to know where you experience problems/issues, so we can make things better for others. If you need help, there are many of us on IRC [https://indieweb.org/IRC] who can often help in real time.

As for privacy, in general, Facebook, Google+, et all are all public facing networks, so people posting there are really posting for everyone to see in the first place. If they're posting privately, I believe that the IndieWeb protocols respect that and don't import private webmentions. Most of the rest is about data ownership for you and your blog as well as trying to maintain a central repository for your blogs posts of all the conversation taking place around what you're posting. Part of the downfall of social media is that it can often fragment conversations. In some sense IndieWeb helps glue them all back together.

On your last point, I had a bit of cognitive dissonance with this as well when I started into IndieWeb, but I've just streamlined my workflow significantly (and for the better). I've turned off all the emails and notifications from individual social media platforms (at least as they relate to my content) and I rely on my WordPress install to do all the notifications. This way, for example, when someone replies to one of my posts on Facebook, I see the webmention via WordPress, and then use that to click on the contained link to the reply on Facebook. I'll then reply natively on Facebook so the other party sees it there (typically by Facebook notification), but then the IndieWeb backend ports over my comment back to the comments section of my own blog. My "audience" can follow me on their platform of choice, and I can still interact, but I still own all the resulting data: Win-win-win!