This is really helpful, h0p3!! Krikey, you’re such a friend.

Hear ye, hear ye. Tolle, lege; tolle, lege. Srsly, hyperbolic skiddie fanboi gushing here, so ignore me at-will, plz:

Haha, oh imagine if this was what you had to do to play well in the HN crowd. (This actually reminds me of that amazing story from The Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem where the robots all speak Chaucerian English.)

Don’t let the frisky aesthetic of this gem fool ya: underneath the hood is essentially an engine which is necessary (even if insufficient) for a functioning democracy, for treating people not as mere means but as ends, and for fixing the problems of the centralization of infrastructures and processes which commodify our attention spans. It’s a spicy tool for the people and about the people. It sprankles your browser with mana, dope maymays, and the people you like or love (or don’t, ;P).

Omgz - I hate to play into your hyperbole here, but I think you’re right. (Don’t get me wrong - this is a shit tool.) This “having a personal engine to negotiate your link to others” is maybe the whole of it. (For some reason, I was thinking it was the simplistic non-feed view, purely an organization thing.)

I think once it is approved in the Chrome and Firefox official extensions, it’ll be the right time for you to give it a swing. For now, we’re probably a month out on that. Still - I appreciate the motivating words. (And glad to have you back recently.) (And glad you got a break, too, of course!)

Would be sweet - discussion about that is happening here: #13.

Hey, I appreciate this. You’re sweet. You’re very sweet stuff. Just enjoy yourself and I’ll be glad. And, if Fraidy misbehaves - let me know.

I use it primarily with Vivaldi - works great for me. (And I love that Vivaldi encrypts my synced feeds - so the data is mine even if I’m syncing it through them for the time being.)

I’m just waiting for the extension to get approved through the Chrome Web Store. I expect that this will be something of an ordeal - getting my extension through Firefox’s approval system has had quite a few hang-ups that could take me a month to resolve. But thanks for your vote of confidence, Brad!

Yup—this is great. Feel free to just syndicate everything to Indieweb.xyz. It looks like there are some percent-20 characters I need to clean up and I should try to show your posts in chronological order—so this has already been great for catching problems.

Oooo… This is a great point. It hadn’t occured to me that YouTube has become somehow an Internet Archive to many people! (Well and, with ‘ALL YOUR BASE’, soon after it exploded, you had an allyourbasearebelongtous.com spring up which had a Flash animation—something like that, with music and meme images—that’s how I first saw it—so it’s unclear where its ‘home’ really is. Kind of like how heyyeyaaeyaaaeyaeyaa.com was ‘home’ for the he-man video for many years.)

Thank you for the reminder about Yacht Rock—you’re talking about this, right? I saw this on an old LiveJournal that I used to follow. Gah I can’t remember the name of that particular LJ any more! It was great!

Hey, glad you got this going!

I completely agree that Webmentions are too hard. However, they’ve been rock solid for me after I got my setup in place. And they were ultimately worth it for me. I’m a believer now. The technology is sick—it just needs more believers.

Ok, wow—this is interesting. First off, I feel so fortunate to have discovered your page right when you are starting! Thank you for the reply—right off I can see why e-mail is so appealing to you, as it strips away anything but our words to each other. There are no graphics to try to dazzle you with or any distractions from just our sentiments to each other. I realize now that I haven’t used e-mail much recently. I mean—tell me what you get out of e-mail. Am I close?

I’m very curious how people have found you. I think I found you through an are.na page that listed a bunch of simple, fascinating web pages—and yours was one. (Don’t ask me what are.na is—I am not really sure! I fell into it!) How do you let people know about such a page if you have no contact with the “social” sites? I couldn’t find a link on Reddit, for instance. (I ask this because one of the troubles with the Web right now is the inability to find smaller sites now that they are drowned out in the search results—and posting your own links on Reddit is seen as self-promotion.) Yet, people are finding you! It’s great!

Oh also, I really like the idea of you answering e-mails as a profession or as a community position or something like that. Do you see yourself as a kind of telephone operator at the switchboard? Or would this position be more a counselor—in the way that a counselor provides comfort and support—perhaps reliable, regular conversation?

Whatever the case, I can’t help but feel that it is a generous cause you are gained in, Brynn. Very antimisanthropic, for sure! - kicks

Hey there. I stumbled across your website today^[1] and I can’t resist writing you. I actually have a similar thing where I just like to meet random people through random chance. Don’t know if that’s part of your desire to respond to e-mails—clearly you like being useful to people—you mention that on the page.

I’m also really into The Web—particularly the people who choose to hang out there rather than on all of the corporate social sites. (For example, the two who write at philosopher.life and wiki.waifu.haus.) I kind of count you in that group now that I think about it—even though you’re only on the Web for three paragraphs—the rest happens for you in e-mail.

I can’t find any old snapshots of your site—so it seems it might be quite new, even though it looks as if it could have been there for many decades. Are you having fun with this so far? I’m a bit reluctant to pass the link on, because I don’t want you to become completely inundated. Perhaps you already are.

Well, I won’t go on. Pleasure to meet you. - kicks

Ahh—ok. Makes sense. I’m not doing this in my reader—I don’t want to risk rel=“self” being wrong. Is there a compelling reason to do this? I mean if I’m able to fetch the feed, why risk it?

Thank you for the response!!

Sweet! Hope we’ll see more posts there. Thank you—I was thinking about this yesterday but didn’t find time to check. So—much obliged to you, Anon.

Hey, thank you kindly for this elaborately outlined post! I don’t have a need for private posts, but I know it would help so many people to have the ability to post/message privately on the Indieweb—so work on this is absolutely vital. And I really appreciate you digging into all the nitty-gritty—I’m working on an RSS reader type thing too and want to take a whack at supporting this.

One question, though—could the Atom feed list ‘rel alternate’ versions of the feed? (That would have type ‘application/atom+xml’?) It also seems like ‘rel self’ could have the non-authenticated version of the feed. It doesn’t make sense for credentials to be in that URL. These are possibly naive suggestions—apologies, if so. Again, fantastic write-up!

This is good. Maybe it’s sad, but I try everyday to “begin anew”. Glad you’ve been posting alot lately, Brad.

Hey, thank you for piping up! It’s always nice to receive encouragement. Please let me know if you have a personal website or project that I can share. Take care.

Ahh, good to hear from you! Yes, I had seen your ‘www paleo’ page—and I am very glad it exists. I link to many of those same things at href.cool—I feel just as you do about them—(and whimsy.space, wwwtxt.org, etc.)—though I know that I first saw ‘keeping up appearances’ through you. (Your link is broken for me now, strangely.)

I think your site has that same kind of feel—self-organized, almost wiki-like, but still on the Indieweb… It’s cool to see you carve out your own place like that. (Salute.) That’s how it’s done.

I definitely like both kinds of irony—and perhaps there are both kinds of sincerity, too, of course. I like the quote and the whole book wrapped around it.

Your description of your cat today is fantastic. I’ve dealt with a lot of emotional pain in recent years (due to the deaths of many family members and children in my life) and nothing helps more than physical closeness like this—a ‘hug’ or holding the hand of the 86-year-old woman who lives across from me. But also laughter—if someone can make me laugh, it will reset everything. Having a ‘first responder’ who is light-hearted is great. I’m grateful that simple things can do good work confronting dark, heavy terrors.