Tending towards 1.0

[Ben Werdmüller]

Dear all,

I wanted to send you an update about the Known open source project. Thanks for hanging in there.

Before we begin -

1. Hi! I'm going to return to spending more time on Known. As you may know, I was Director of Investments at Matter Ventures for the last two years or so, which occupied a disproportionate amount of my time. This is no longer the case. While I'm working on another open source project - Unlock - during the day, I'll be able to devote more attention to Known.
2. Known deserves a 1.0 release, and will get one. Marcus and I have spoken quite a bit about the route forward.
   
3. Commercial enhancements to Known, like the hosted service and Convoy, will get their own update. Going forward, any commercial ambitions or support for Known will be secondary to the open source project, if they exist at all.

Okay. With all of that said, I'd like to put the following out for discussion. Replies, questions, and criticisms are welcome!

What is Known?

Known is the most flexible way to publish a stream of content on the web.

It's a way to publish serialized information so that it can become ... known. ;)

That might be a blog. It might be audio. It might be an automated set of readings from a sensor or a collection of sensors. It might be a collaborative stream of media with 20,000 authors. It might be something that hasn't been invented yet.

What does that mean in practice?

Known should be:

• Easy to install - including from the command line, from Composer, and using a preconfigured VPS. You should be able to spin up a Known stream in a couple of minutes.
• East to publish to - including from the web (using any web-capable device), using open APIs like micropub, and via webhooks. It should be trivial to hook other tools up to post to a Known stream.
• Easy to extend - both via plugins and outgoing webhooks. Ideally you should be able to use Known as the basis of new projects that have streams of content at their center.
• Easy to subscribe to - data should be compatible with feed standards like RSS, ActivityPub, and h-feed, with others (email?) provided by third-party plugins.
  

What is Known not?

Known is not:

• A way to syndicate to social media. I think the syndication plugins should be discontinued immediately. Many of them already don't work. In the current climate, social media platforms are closing their publishing APIs. That's their right.
• Opinionated about standards, except that they should be open. Known should continue to support indieweb standards like microformats, webmention, micropub, etc. It should also support schema.org data and ActivityPub.
• A startup.
  

Some things you should be aware of:

• The withknown.com website already just talks about the open source project. Over time, the URL will be known.co and withknown.com will be deprecated.
• I've updated the GitHub project to require peer reviewed pull requests. Volunteers to review pull requests are wanted! (If you're writing Known code, I highly recommend Hub as a way to make things like submitting PRs from the command line easier.)
• Marcus is a superhero.

Thanks!

Ben

[David Wilcox]

Thanks Ben … but I’m rather confused, particularly by

> Going forward, any commercial ambitions or support for Known will be secondary to the open source project, if they exist at all.

I currently use the hosted Withknown service, and have valued simple posting, ability to syndicate to social media and see responses under the blog. I’ve valued support from Erin. 

Is this an early warning that I should move to Wordpress :-)?

I appreciate this post is for the developer community, but something about the hosted service would be helpful

Please excuse me if I have misunderstood

David

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[Ben Werdmüller]

Hi David,

We're still figuring out the commercial services. I've had a few great suggestions, and there are some good ideas on the table. Overall, I don't think you should be alarmed.

Erin now works elsewhere, and won't be able to provide ongoing support - but of course is a co-founder and heavily invested in Known's future.

Ben

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[David Wilcox]

Thanks Ben

I’ve loved Known, but for what you say it is time to move

David

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[Joe Sadoski]

I'm a new Known user, but it totally aligns with my ideas of how content publishing should work and I'm excited for what comes next.

The comment about social features concerns me. I have enjoyed syndicating through Twitter and Facebook, although I don't see that as a crucial feature. Perhaps Known can be open to a third-party plugin that supports this? I'm empathetic to the idea that this feature is not crucial to the time spent developing Known at its core.

Similarly, social media commenting is a huge reason I was attracted to Known. I would be disappointed to see it go away in new versions. Without this feature, I may also need to find another solution for my blog.

I hope my feedback is useful, and I wish you all the best. Thanks!

Joe

[Ben Werdmüller]

Unfortunately the syndication is mostly out of our hands. Twitter still works, but Facebook removed API support last month. I strongly suspect that other services will follow suit. And it's always been tough to explain why we couldn't, eg, integrate with Instagram, which has never had a public publishing API.

In my opinion, it's more reliable to syndicate through a service like Bridgy - and I think that's what I'd recommend going forward.

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[Joe Sadoski]

Thanks for the response!

Ya, it is out of your hands really. Also, I think I misunderstood and thought this meant you were dripping support for Bridgy! This is excellent news and I think I can continue as long as that app (or similar) is supported.

Thanks,
Joe

[David Wilcox]

Yes, good news if stuff will still work with Bridgy

Thanks Ben

David

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[Ben Werdmüller]

Yes. To be clear: while I can't speak for Bridgy, Known will remain compatible and work closely with their team where appropriate.

Ben

On Fri, Sep 7, 2018 at 11:07 PM, David Wilcox <da...@socialreporter.com> wrote:

Yes, good news if stuff will still work with Bridgy

Thanks Ben

David

On Sat, 8 Sep 2018 at 00:36, Joe Sadoski <pingp...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the response!

Ya, it is out of your hands really. Also, I think I misunderstood and thought this meant you were dripping support for Bridgy! This is excellent news and I think I can continue as long as that app (or similar) is supported.

Thanks,
Joe

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[Tim Owens]

This is great news from my standpoint. I’d love to revitalize our installatron package when a 1.0 is released. On one hand removing the social publishing aspect will remove the appeal for a set of users that saw Known as a POSSE hub, but on the flip side I think it still serves a purpose for the reasons you mention regarding group authoring, personal data collection, and multimedia archiving. Look forward to hearing more as things progress.

--

Tim

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[Chris Aldrich]

David, if you don't have the patience to wait for commercial solutions Ben may ultimately suggest, I suspect that hosts like Reclaim Hosting (somewhere here in the thread Tim Owens has mentioned it) will shortly offer simple and very inexpensive one click installs and support that will let you do what you've always been able to do before with Known. 

If you do move to WordPress (and particularly self-hosted) there are small handful of plugins that will offer similar syndication and responses functionality (at least for social services that allow it either directly or via Brid.gy) as well as cross-site communication in much the same way that Known does.  I've documented many of them here: https://boffosocko.com/research/indieweb/ with lots of additional resources and pointers.

I do hope you'll find that it's worth the effort to stay with the community here on Known as the platform continues to improve.

Best regards,

Chris

PS: Ben's email, which I've only just recently seen is the best news I've heard in months. And he's completely correct in saying, "Marcus is a superhero." though I would have used an exclamation point.

[David Wilcox]

Hi Chris - thanks so much for those really useful resources … and I look forward to Known hosting options

David

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