What do you want from the internet, anyway?
I want to follow people who are interesting to me, in a way that’s simple, expressive, and predictable.
I want this to work, furthermore, whether those people are sharing a random thought every day, a blog post every week, or an art project every two years.
And I want it to work, of course, across media, so I can follow writers, musicians, programmers, theorists, troublemakers …
Agreed, these points describe exactly what I want from the internet, yet is almost impossible to achieve. In the IndieWeb we’ve talked a bunch about following people rather than feeds, and wanting to be able to see that in one place rather than going to each service. For two years I checked Instagram, which I don’t use anymore, monthly just so I’d find out if/when one of my favorite artists released a specific image as a print because he doesn’t announce prints on his email list (magically I checked the day after he released it and it wasn’t sold out! Kismet. This is probably not something I should admit? 😅 I really wanted that print.).
So, I am excited to hear ideas for better ways to follow people. I’m not technical so I skipped over those details, but the sample images of ad and comic pages as a virtual poster board / nonlinear feed (with each person only getting one display block) caught my attention.
That visual layout is appealing. As a visual person, I find a lot of the feeds I follow tend to blur together in my reader’s chronological feed, so I can’t remember whose article I’m reading or which feeds I like best and which have mostly duds so I can unsubscribe.
Per the example, boards could be kind of picture-less Insta Stories made with html so they’re accessible (I assume screen readers can’t read the text in a Story?) – or text-only like a microblog post, with html markup (so, better than a tweet).