wall

From IndieWeb


wall is the original name for a feature launched on Facebook which is a user's stream of updates shown on their profile page, similar to the main stream of posts you might show on your indieweb homepage, however with key innovations such as allowing your friends to "write" (create) posts on your wall, and also showing others' public posts that person-tag you.

Since its launch, Facebook has renamed the "wall" feature to "timeline", but the term has been in use so long that it's still used.

IndieWeb Examples

Aaron Parecki

On 2018-01-21 at IndieWebCamp Baltimore, Aaron Parecki launched a feature on his home page which allows visitors to toggle the colors of a 20x3 grid of pixels.

This is quite different from Facebook's "wall" feature, but has some similarities.

  • No authentication is required to contribute
  • After 5 minutes of no changes, the current state is saved as a post
  • All the past saved states of the grid are visible at https://aaronparecki.com/grid
  • 20x3 was chosen deliberately to make it difficult to spell words
  • Only two colors are used in order to make it a more consistent design element of the site

Silo Examples

Facebook

Posts from others written to/for your Facebook timeline appear to be authored by the person who posted them, and include a right pointing triangle and then your name.

Both names (in blue) are linked to their respective profiles.

Brainstorming

Posting to another wall

Tantek Γ‡elik from an indieweb user perspective, posting on someone's wall (on their own site) could be like syndicating to it perhaps the way syndicating to Bridgy Publish or IndieNews works.

However syndication implies that the destination is "just" a copy, whereas when posting to another wall, there is an intent of that being the primary version of the post, not a copy. This is conceptually challenging since indieweb posts in general has the implication that the primary version is the one you have on your own site.

Or perhaps this conceptual dissonance doesn't matter to the user model of cross-site wall-posting. Opinions welcome!

Markup

In addition to "just" being a normal "h-entry" post, there has to be some way to indicate whose or which wall you are posting to.

The obvious thing to do would be to have your post link to person whose wall you're posting to, and it's clear from the FB screenshot above, that you could do so by hyperlink the second person's name to their wall (or maybe it's just their homepage).

But then what property should we use?

Does it make sense to re-use u-syndication ?

Or is it deserving of a new u-* property, and if so, how is it functionally different from syndication if at all?

The markup has to work as something that can be recognized as a wall post from the receiver of the webmention to someone else's wall/homepage, and from there, there has to be enough for the receiver to create and show the cross-site wall post on their own homepage / composite stream.

Bridgy support

See Issue 316: backfeed FB wall posts from other people

For Bridgy to support backfeeding of FB wall posts to your own site, Bridgy needs to know what mf2 markup to use for it to construct a synthetic post with which to webmention your site.

See Also