Domains 2019 Reflections from Afar
Not being able to attend Domains 2019 in person, I was bound and determined to attend as much of it as I could manage remotely. A lot of this revolved around following the hashtag for the conference, watching the Virtually Connecting sessions, interacting online, and starting to watch the archived videos after-the-fact. Even with all of this, for a while I had been meaning to flesh out my ability to follow the domains (aka websites) of other attendees and people in the space. Currently the easiest way (for me) to do this is via RSS with a feed reader, so I began collecting feeds of those from the Twitter list of Domains ā17 and Domains ā19 attendees as well as others in the education-related space who tweet about A Domain of Oneās Own or IndieWeb. In some sense, I would be doing some additional aggregation work on expanding my blogroll, or, as I call it now, my following page since itās much too large and diverse to fit into a sidebar on my website.
For some brief background, my following page is built on some old functionality in WordPress core that has since been hidden. Iām using the old Links Manager for collecting links and feeds of people, projects, groups, and institutions. This link manager creates standard OPML files, which WordPress can break up by categories, that can easily be imported/exported into most standard feed readers. Even better, some feed readers like Inoreader, support OPML subscriptions, so one could subscribe to my OPML file, and any time I update it in the future with new subscriptions, your feed reader would automatically update to follow those as well. I use this functionality in my own Inoreader account, so that any new subscriptions I add to my own site are simply synced to my feed reader without needing to be separately added or updated.
The best part of creating such a list and publishing it in a standard format is that you, dear reader, donāt need to spend the several hours I did to find, curate, and compile the list to recreate it for yourself, but you can now download it, modify it if necessary, and have a copy for yourself in just a few minutes. (Toward that end, Iām also happy to update it or make additions if others think itās missing anyone interesting in the spaceāfeedback, questions, and comments are heartily encouraged.) You can see a human-readable version of the list at this link, or find the computer parse-able/feed reader subscribe-able link here.
To make it explicit, Iāll also note that these lists also help me to keep up with people and changes in the timeframe between conferences.
Anecdotal Domains observations
In executing this OPML project I noticed some interesting things about the Domains community at large (or at least those who are avid enough to travel and attend in person or actively engage online). Iāll lay these out below. Perhaps at a future date, Iāll do a more explicit capture of the data with some analysis.
The largest majority of sites I came across were, unsurprisingly, WordPress-based, which made it much easier to find RSS feeds to read/consume material. I could simply take a domain name and add /feed/ to the end of the URL, and voilĆ , a relatively quick follow!
There are a lot of people whose sites didnāt have obvious links to their feeds. To me this is a desperate tragedy for the open web. Weāre already behind the eight ball compared to social media and corporate controlled sites, why make it harder for people to read/consume our content from our own domains? And as if to add insult to injury, the places on oneās website where an RSS feed link/icon would typically live were instead populated by links to corporate social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. In a few cases I also saw legacy links to Google+ which ended service and disappeared from the web along with a tremendous number of online identities and personal data on April 2, 2019. (Hereās a reminder to remove those if youāve forgotten.) For those who are also facing this problem, thereās a fantastic service called SubToMe that has a universal follow button that can be installed or which works well with a browser bookmarklet and a wide variety of feed readers.
I was thrilled to see a few people were using interesting alternate content management systems/site generators like WithKnown and Grav. There wereĀ also several people who had branched out to static site generators (sites without a database). This sort of plurality is a great thing for the community and competition in the space for sites, design, user experience, etc. is awesome. Itās thrilling to see people in the Domains space taking advantage of alternate options, experimenting with them, and using them in the wild.
lol, I agree #domains19 pic.twitter.com/aMdwJlhogr
ā Lauren Brumfield (@brumface) June 10, 2019
Iāll note that I did see a few poor souls who were using Wix. I know there was at least one warning about Wix at the conference, but in case it wasnāt stated explicitly, Wix does not support exporting data, which makes any potential future migration of sites difficult. Definitely donāt use it for any extended writing, as cutting and pasting more than a few simple static pages becomes onerous. To make matters worse, Wix doesnāt offer any sort of back up service, so if they chose to shut your site off for any reason, youād be completely out of luck. No back up + no export = I couldnāt recommend using.
If your account or any of your services are cancelled, it may result in loss of content and data. You are responsible to back up your data and materials. āWix Terms of Use
I also noticed a few people had generic domain names that they didnāt really own (and not even in the sense of rental ownership). Here Iām talking about domain names of the form username.domainsproject.com. While Iām glad that they have a domain that they can use and generally control, itās not one that they can truly exert full ownership over. (They just canāt pick it up and take it with them.) Even if they could export/import their data to another service or even a different content management system, all their old links would immediately disappear from the web. In the case of students, while itās nice that their school may provide this space, it is more problematic for data portability and longevity on the web that theyāll eventually lose that institutional domain name when they graduate. On the other hand, if you have something like yourname.com as your digital home, you can export/import, change content management services, hosting companies, etc. and all your content will still resolve and youāll be imminently more find-able by your friends and colleagues. This choice is essentially the internet equivalent of changing cellular providers from Sprint to AT&T but taking your phone number with youāyou may change providers, but people will still know where to find you without being any the wiser about your service provider changes. I think that for allowing students and faculty the ability to more easily move their content and their sites, Domains projects should require individual custom domains.
If you donāt own/control your physical domain name, youāre prone to lose a lot of value built up in your permalinks. Iām also reminded of here of the situation encountered by faculty who move from one university to another. (Congratulations by the way to Martha Burtis on the pending move to Plymouth State. Youāll notice she wonāt face this problem.)Ā Thereās also the situation of Matthew Green, a security researcher at Johns Hopkins whose institutional website was taken down by his university when the National Security Agency flagged an apparent issue. Fortunately in his case, he had his own separate domain name and content on an external server and his institutional account was just a mirrored copy of his own domain.
If youāve got it, flaunt it.
āMel Brooks from The Producers (1968), obviously with the it being a referent to A Domain of Oneās Own.
Also during my project, I noted that quite a lot of people donāt list their own personal/professional domains within their Twitter or other social media profiles. This seems a glaring omission particularly for at least one whose Twitter bio creatively and proactively claims that theyāre an avid proponent of A Domain of Oneās Own.
And finally there were a smallābut still reasonableānumber of people within the community for whom I couldnāt find their domain at all! A small number assuredly are new to the space or exploring it, and so Iād give a pass, but I was honestly shocked that some just didnāt.
(Caveat: Iāll freely admit that the value of Domains is that one has ultimate control including the right not to have or use one or even to have a private, hidden, and completely locked down one, just the way that Dalton chose not to walk in the conformity scene in The Dead Poetās Society. But even with this in mind, how can we ethically recommend this pathway to students, friends, and colleagues if weāre not willing to participate ourselves?)
Too much Twitter & a challenge for the next Domains Conference
One of the things that shocked me most at a working conference about the idea of A Domain of Oneās Own within education where there was more than significant time given to the ideas of privacy, tracking, and surveillance, was the extent that nearly everyone present gave up their identity, authority, and digital autonomy to Twitter, a company which actively represents almost every version of the poor ethics, surveillance, tracking, and design choices we all abhor within the edtech space.
Why werenāt people proactively using their own domains to communicate instead? Why werenāt their notes, observations, highlights, bookmarks, likes, reposts, etc. posted to their own websites? Isnāt that part of what weāre in all this for?!
One of the shining examples from Domains 2019 that I caught as it was occurring was John Stewartās site where he was aggregating talk titles, abstracts, notes, and other details relevant to himself and his practice. He then published them in the open and syndicated the copies to Twitter where the rest of the conversation seemed to be happening. His living notebookā or digital commmonplace book if you willāis of immense value not only to him, but to all who are able to access it. But you may ask, āChris, didnāt you notice them on Twitter first?ā In fact, I did not! I caught them because I was following the live feed of some of the researchers, educators, and technologists I follow in my feed reader using the OPML files mentioned above. I would submit, especially as a remote participant/follower of the conversation, that his individual posts were worth 50 or more individual tweets. Just the additional context they contained made them proverbially worth their weight in gold.
Perhaps for the next conference, we might build a planet or site that could aggregate all the feeds of peopleās domains using their categories/tags or other means to create our own version of the Twitter stream? Alternately, by that time, I suspect that work on some of the new IndieWeb readers will have solidified to allow people to read feeds and interact with that content directly and immediately in much the way Twitter works now except that all the interaction will occur on our own domains.
Seeing good examples of existing domains is crucial for showing students what is possible in creating their own domain, says @CassieNooyen #domains19
ā Mo Pelzel (@MorrisPelzel) June 10, 2019
As educators, one of the most valuable things we can and should do is model appropriate behavior for students. I think itās high time that when attending a professional conference about A Domain of Oneās Own that we all ought to be actively doing it using our own domains. Maybe we could even quit putting our Twitter handles on our slides, and just put our domain names on them instead?
Of course, I wouldnāt and couldnāt suggest or even ask others to do this if I werenāt willing and able to do it myself.Ā So as a trial and proof of concept, Iāve actively posted all my interactions related to Domains 2019 that I was interested in to my own website using the tag Domains 2019.Ā At that URL, youāll find all the things I liked and bookmarked, as well as the bits of conversation on Twitter and othersā sites that Iāve commented on or replied to. All of it originated on my own domain, and, when it appeared on Twitter, it was syndicated only secondarily so that others would see it since that was where the conversation was generally being aggregated. You can almost go back and recreate my entire Domains 2019 experience in real time by following my posts, notes, and details on my personal website.
So, next time around can we make an attempt to dump Twitter!? The technology for pulling it off certainly already exists, and is reasonably well-supported by WordPress, WithKnown, Grav, and even some of the static site generators I noticed in my brief survey above. (Wix obviously doesnāt even come closeā¦)
Iām more than happy to help people build and flesh out the infrastructure necessary to try to make the jump. Even if just a few of us began doing it, we could serve as that all-important model for others as well as for our students and other constituencies. With a bit of help and effort before the next Domains Conference, Iāll bet we could collectively pull it off. I think many of us are either well- or even over-versed in the toxicities and surveillance underpinnings of social media, learning management systems, and other digital products in the edtech space, but now we ought to attempt a move away from it with an infrastructure that is our ownāour Domains.
