2017/Nuremberg/email

IndieWeb by mail was a session at IndieWebCamp Nuremberg 2017.

Notes archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/email

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IndieWebCamp Nuremberg 2017

Session: IndieWeb by mail

When: 2017-05-20 16:30

Participants

• sgreger
• sebastian
• jkphl
• cweiske
• julieanneonying
• walter ebert
• ??

Notes

Initial motivations for participating in session:

• target group of personal blog includes people not using "traditional" web tools (rss, indie reader, twitter)
• email is used by everybody
• easy way to reach people
• increasing popularity of e-mail newsletters, particularly in web scene
• indieweb site as a tool for newsletter/zine-style publishing
  • creating content on the web feed
  • semi-automated generation of a "zine"
• people's ability to permanently scan other websites is limited
• possibility to subscribe sparse "publication" from a source that has valuable information and is trustworthy

1. traditionally newspapers relevant because of the redactional filter
2. liberation "it is great to publish/read everything"
3. renaissance of curated publications?

important difference: active/passive

• thing on the web i need to pick up
• email comes to me (i once decided to subscribe, now i don't need to worry about it)
• Twitter is a stream that runs past ("llike a firefighter's hose that you can take into your mouth or not")
• related topic: notifications
  • now also possible in the browser
  • possibilities on/off
  • twitter "moments": user can aggregate reader-centric collections of tweets
• attitude as the pubisher is different:
  • here's my newsletter - i have curated this for you
  • vs. web: here's my stuff, i push it to my site and you can go read it if you want
• sending frequency is crucial design aspect

other differentiating aspect of e-mail:

• email has two content compontent: subject and message content
• this is similar in most feed readers
  • very efficient way to go through large amounts of information at once
  • reason for popularity of feed readers with power users
• twitter does not provide this
• allows pre-screening for the reader
• in social media silos often images serve to attract interest rather than a "subject line" in emails

big benefit:

• decentralized

posting by e-mail

• not used much
• WordPress enables posting-by-mail
• github enables reply-by-mail and adds mail as comment to issue

feedback loop on e-mail?

• link to a url that registers a "like"

privacy aspect

• tracking should be kept to a minimum
• carefully evaluate collection of personally identifiable data (opens/clicks) in the emails

html vs plain e-mails

• how to make plain text from html? (problems e.g. with hyperlinks indicated by footnotes)

Provocative question: what does e-mail have to do with indieweb? > email as distribution channel?

• email as a posse syndication channel:
• sending to various target groups
• targeting possibilities?
• every post separate or aggregate e-mails
• unclear how "this week on the indieweb"-email is created (manual component in the workflow?)

other ideas:

• bookmarking via e-mail: sending urls to indie bookmarking system

sgreger plans to use https://sendy.co/ to send mails