2019/NYC/whypublish

Why Publish? was a session at IndieWebCamp NYC 2019.

<!Video: ▶️43:53s

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

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IndieWebCamp NYC 2019
Session: Why Publish?
When: 2019-10-05 14:30

Participants

• Tantek Çelik - facilitator
• David Shanske
• Tiara Miller
• Dmitri Shuralyov
• mfgriffin
• Josephine
• Marty McGuire
• gRegor Morrill (remote)
• Sven Knebel remote

Notes

David Shanske: ego!

Tantek Çelik: start w/ why not publish?

Frustration with having a backlog of things to publish

• Tantek Çelik: finds backlog exceptionally helpful when deciding whether or not to publish something. a foil against ranting on the web (most of the time)
  • e.g. "someone is wrong on the internet!" "but i have a long list of better things to publish. i shouldn't spend time on this rant publicly."

takeway - you can game your impulse to react to things that piss you out by monitoring a list of what you prioritize to share with the world. (tantek's trick)

Tantek Çelik: to critique power is a great reason to post.

dmitshur: what kinds of content are we talking about?

• Tantek Çelik: what's important to you?

David Shanske: are we talking posting or publishing? posting can be private.

• Tantek Çelik: we're focusing on publicly sharing.

ultimate q: why make something public? setting out to make something public affects how you write it.

dmitshur: finds it hard to write posts even though they're valuable and useful. looking for motivation to post more!

• Tantek Çelik: do you post on twitter? that's publishing.

David Shanske: when people respond to me i am more likely to publish. a conversation!

• Tiara Miller: it's a further way to connect and broaden connections.

mfgriffin: sharing a portrait of yourself over time can help others learn how you process and think.

dmitshur: to influence the world! inspire or teach others. summarize complicated topics.

marty: I publish for my future self. E.g. I have learned something and don't want to have to learn it again. Sometimes useful to others too!

mfgriffin: when i think about communicating online, sharing personal thoughts/feelings/info over time, there are times i reflect on things where "now" might not be the right time to publish. e.g. capturing something now to reflect on in the future. example: a family member going through a hard time and capturing your thoughts to share with them in the future when the hard time is past.

• Tantek Çelik: a reason to delayed-publish
• David Shanske: i have a topic i want to write about but haven't felt like i am able to comment on it. i still feel that way!

josephine: publishing keeps you accountable! publishing into a community can help you keep engaged. i try to eat less meat and journaled about it, but fell off. perhaps if posting that publicly, would have felt more accountable.

• mfgriffin: quantified self artists do exactly this, though the presentation is abstracted.
• David Shanske: have a religious problem. "sins committed privately have less weight than sins committed publicly".
• martymcguire: collective posting like inktober, february thing-a-day, nanowrimo, etc. ( David Shanske: indieweb advent calendar), indieweb commitments

dmitshur: why publish: because it's fun?

• mfgriffin: yes! in fiction writing challenges you can't express things as clearly without working through the process.

Marty: I've made a bunch of micropub tools for publishing small content

dmitshur: omg, i'm succeeding! i just realized that when we talk publishing we don't necessarily mean feature-length blog posts. i publish all the time when i commit code to open source projects. index page of my website shows my github activity, including comments and coding.

Tantek Çelik: i don't want to publish half-formed ideas or thoughts.

Tiara takeaway: all activities posting online to the public are a form of publishing; on the flip side, each of these are a chance to form something complete (but a different scales of ambition) and opportunities to share something developed and not half-baked.

Marty: humor is a good reason to post

E.g. someone posts something with the words "send tweet" at the end, implying they are dictating it.

Seemingly incomplete posts can be a way to post humor.

Tiara Miller: when posting is a habit, it's easy. when out of the habit, it gets hard. when the website is broken, it's really easy to stop and leave it for months. want to get my site back up and working well. i always have my phone and if its easy to write a draft it should be easy to publish.

• Tantek Çelik: saw someone writing about using twitter's drafts as a note-taking tool.
• dmitshur: i use gmail for this. ( Tantek Çelik: the mobile interface is painful for this now).
• mfgriffin: i know authors that write in emails to themselves. allows them to look busy for boss mode.

josephine: one reason not to post: feeling like you have to defend yourself if a topic gets heated. don't want to address the fallout or what happens next. thinking about the unintended consequences makes it feel risky.

another reason not to post: authorities. if CBP doesn't like something on your feed while you are crossing a border, that's not helpful.

• aaronpk has a conference mode that shows professional-related posts only. could do a travel mode that works similarly.

Tantek Çelik: speaking of atomic posting, i just posted that i am facilitating this session.

See Also

• 2019/NYC/Schedule