Reply to Aaron Parecki and Larry Stager
Larry I am going to reply here and on your comments (in case you do not accept webmentions).
The conversation you and https://aaronparecki.com had on Twiiter has been great. Glad we incentivized you to move it off of Twitter and on to our blogs...
It's like the opposite of Field of Dreams, if you ask them to leave they will (well we built a way cooler ball park so I guess its still exactly like Field of Dreams)..
But the problem is that there is just no sufficient incentive to leave, to get acquainted with alternative social media, and (most importantly) to start actually caring about the fact that you don’t have to let Big Tech rule such a large part of your life.
Be a Model
I am that incentive. I teach.You are that incentive. Wikipedia is a model. The next person you find on Twiiter they will be the next incentive.
Let us not expect blitzscaling level of adoption when we seek to retake the web based on human values rather than inflated valuations.
I take 90 or so kids a year and get them online for the first time. Sometimes this requires a scaffold like Medium or Wordpress.com (who didn't have Livejournal or MySpace)...What you are asking is equivalent to asking someone to skip those baby steps we all got.
Build Tools by Using Tools
Tired and engendered stereotypes aside (let's leave grandmas alone...gender or age doesn;t reflect interest in turn key platforms) you are correct this needs to be easier in two issues you mention discovery and the tools.
The tools are there. People can get a https://micro.blog subscription and be ready to go. Known (which I use) is a step up, WordPress themes exist, and then you get into the heavy code options.
The other issue of discovery we are working all the time. Been playing with web rings, and no joke they will also be great tools to find content.
I also think so many sites exist in the wild that connect to the IndieWeb we will soon be able to build really neat open data queries..Want to know most popular song listened to last week on Indieweb? That possibility is coming.
Incentivize Others
We also are trying to expand our tools to other platforms. In fact during this Winter WikiMedia Foundation meeting we submitted three proposals, one for webmention badges for contributors, one for an h-feed and one to add IndieAuth support so I could log in with my domain. It isn't just Twitter we want to play with, but wikipedia as well.
More and more publishing platforms and journalisms sites turning to IndieWeb tools to ensure maximum inter operability and resilence.
In fact any network that relies on open apis can connect.
See that's the beauty of IndieWeb, it doesn't take any new killer social media platform.
Just a bit of HTML.
