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silo
or web content hosting silo (AKA
walled garden
), in the context of the IndieWeb, is a centralized web site (like most
social media
) typically owned by a for-profit corporation that stakes some claim to content contributed to it and restricts access in some way (has walls).
Silos are characterized by the following:
require you to create an
account
specific to that site to use it (silo identity)
allow you to interact on the site
only
with others with accounts on the site (silo contacts / social network)
allows you to post some type of content (text, hypertext, images, video)
and typically one or more of the following:
an access wall that prevents indexing of (at least some of the) content you contribute
a restrictive terms of service (TOS)
claims some ownership or license to any content you create within the silo
restricts your ability to import/export your content, or content about your content (e.g. comments, tags)
In contrast, see:
commons
Perspectives
What are the silos? Control. The silos are computer-generated dream worlds built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.
[holds up chart showing clicks on ad units]
(with apologies to
[1]
[2]
History
Main article:
History
For a brief history of the rise and fall of various silos, see the
History
page for launch, acquisition, death, and zombification years/dates. See
site-deaths
for upcoming and past silo deaths in particular.
Popular Silos
These silos are both popular, and used by a number of indiewebcamp community members (often via
POSSE
) to stay in touch with their friends.
Flickr
Medium
Pinterest
Tumblr
...
If you have friends that are active on a popular silo, feel free to add it to this list.
Historical Popular Silos
Many popular silos have ceased functioning or otherwise
shut down
, debunking "too big to fail" assumptions.
Google+
MySpace
(~2002-2009?) - so much control over the HTML and CSS of your profile page that many compared it to
GeoCities
, and not in a flattering way.
See
site-deaths
for more.
Specialized Silos
Netflix
- Movie ratings and reviews
Nike+
- tracks some
exercise
information
Strava
- GPS sport tracking
Geocaching.com
geocaching
activity tracking
Bandcamp
- independent music publishing
...
Add any silo to this list that you're an active user of and especially if you can document how to export data from it.
Silo Flexibility
A few silos have given users tremendous flexibility in the look and feel of their experience and the content they post, and sometimes even allow using your own domain, for an extra fee:
Currently:
Blogger
- quite a bit of control via templates
Tumblr
- also lots of control via templates
WordPress.com
- some choice of free templates, and more choices as a paid option. Of all these, WordPress.com has some of the best import/export support, very low walls as it were for a walled-garden
Silo Innovations
Silos have innovated
UX
since 2003 far more than the blogging/RSS/Atom "communities" (as much as there was such a thing).
Here are some examples of UX innovations that silos either created, popularized, or refined to be much more usable, in rough temporal order.
favorites
Flickr
(2004)
Integrated
reading
creating
UI
LiveJournal
Delicious
(2004),
Tumblr
(2006),
(2006? when did Facebook launch their Newsfeed?)
checkins
Dodgeball
(2005),
Foursquare
(2009?), copied by
(2010?)
scrobbles
Last.fm
(2000-2005? what year exactly?)
block
Flickr
(2005-07-27 per
[3]
, before that they had an
ignore
feature (superseded by block) which sounds like a harsher form of
mute
likes
- introduced by
FriendFeed
2007-10-03
[4]
, then copied soon after by
which quickly popularized them.
reply-context
(20??-??-??). It was a small but important incremental step to go from
reply
posts on their own pages (see "User Innovation Inside Silos" below) to displaying the context of what those reply posts (tweets) were in reply to.
recursive reply-contexts
. Another incremental if obvious step, Twitter started displaying the reply contexts of reply contexts themselves, all the way on up to an original tweet.
Aaron Swartz invented this first -
example
legacy contact
introduced 2015-02-12
... add more and attribute the innovating silo
User Innovations Inside
Despite silos typically exerting tight control over their look, feel, and overall user experience, users have found ways of innovating inside silos, which silos have often adopted and integrated into their UX.
reply
permalinks
- reply posts on their own permalinks instead of just fragment links on a post.
Specifically, @-replies, were previously "only" in comments (e.g. comments in MySpace and Flickr used @-name conventions to indicate who they were responding to in a thread). When Twitter
users started using @-reply syntax
[5]
[6]
in tweets to
intentionally direct their tweets
at particular people, Twitter adopted this in multiple ways:
auto-link @-mentions
to profile pages (was in response to user-behavior)
show @-reply tweets only to those who followed both
the replier
and
the user being replied to.
[7]
auto-fill "Reply" textarea
underneath a tweet with @-mention of the tweet author
auto-fill "Reply" textarea also with @-mentions of anyone else mentioned in the tweet.
hashtags
- as
proposed by Chris Messina
[8]
on
, then adopted by users, then eventually auto-linked by
to search results for mentions of that hashtag.
retweets
- the "RT @-name:" syntax (
originally ReTweet:
) was purely
a user innovation
to indicate that they were passing along text/content from another user.
both:
codified "RT" into a one-click button (so easy to use as to cause million+ retweeted posts)
showed the original author of the tweet, when presenting the retweet in others' reading views.
🍞 for
like
Ello
users in Germany adopted a convention of typing ":bread:" to generate a bread emoji (🍞) in a comment as a simple indicator of "liking" a post, since Ello lacks an explicit like/favorite feature.
... add more user innovation inside silos with attribution to user(s) if known, and inside which silo.
Criticism
See
why
for more common issues with silos in contrast to having your own website.
Linkwrapping
Many silos wrap any links posted on them with their own domains or link-wrapping domains, sometimes in an attempt to make links shorter, sometimes to provide a bottleneck which they can use to mass disable spam/phishing links.
Downsides:
Breaks link referrals
(you just see the silo wrapper, not the actual post that linked to your domain)
Fragile
for all the usual link-shorteners by a site other than the owner are fragile problem. As well as their typical use of
database
ids.
Examples:
: m.facebook.com/l.php...
[9]
: t.co
Feedly
Feedly Short URL fail
... others?
Artificially Slow UI
2016-07-06
The UX Secret That Will Ruin Apps For You
Facebook actually slows down its interface to make users feel safe, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed in an email.
... various services on the web including travel sites, mortgage engines, and security checks are all making a conscious effort to slow down their omnipotent minds because our puny human brains expect things to take longer.
... companies introduce what Kowitz calls an "artificial waiting" pattern into their interfaces. These are status bars, maybe a few update messages, to construct a facade of slow, hard, thoughtful work, even though the computer is done calculating your query.
Another good reason to
use your own tools
(if it's faster than expected, you feel accomplished, not distrusting), or at least re-use indieweb software etc. that others are eating what they cook because you know they won't be (or there's at least less chance of them) deliberately slowing it down.
Perverse Incentives on Content
2021-08-29
OnlyFans and the Myth of Owning Your Hustle
While it seems like platforms today are more interested in investing in the users responsible for their success via grants and creators programs aplenty, the reality is that the platform still dictates the terms. They’re not only the point of access to your audience; they’re also the ones deciding what metrics to use, and what counts as a success—and all of that is subject to change over any given quarter
On Instagram, the idea that accounts should make use of all the features the platform promotes in order to be successful lies somewhere between an open secret and industry-accepted theory. (This is at least partly why your chef influencer friend keeps posting Reels…)
If you create content on someone else’s platform, they can force you to make your content using a certain style or method by ranking you based on their own performance metrics.
Silo Quitting
A number of individuals, prominent and otherwise, have publicly "quit" various silos
silo-quits
Vaporware Silos
From time to time, silo projects are announced without shipping, and often never ship. As this list grows we can consider creating a separate
vaporware-silos
page.
Cybe
appears to be a splash screen and silo at cybe.me with a ton of rhetoric ("manifesto", "vision", etc.) but
no product
Their Twitter
hasn't been updated in over a year.
... add other silos that have been announced but not shipped, preferably with a citation to the announcement, preferably date-stamped.
Articles and Talks
2017-04-18 Maciej Cegłowski talk:
Build a Better Monster: Morality, Machine Learning, and Mass Surveillance
2017-05-23 Eric Petitt:
Browse Against the Machine
See Also
site deaths
silo-quits
bulshytt
history
sites with data portability
commons
monoculture
site changes
2017-12-03 Joshua Topolsky / The Outline:
The death of the internet / If we lose this, we lose everything.
2017-10-30
The Web began dying in 2014, here's how
"If there is one thing we need to reassess as good stewards of the web, it is that we were right to be wary of centralised services. Easy personal websites and RSS were great ideas, and we need those revisiting. Censorship is harder when we have the control that was ceded."
@MattWilcox
December 3, 2018
Criticism: cultural mismatch with reality:
"basically every day someone tells me they figured it out & all the gov data should be on 1 enterprise system & according to 1 standard & linked & that’s it, no specific goal after that
🤔 fascinating idea w no understanding of reality or why things happen, ty for that, again"
@internetrebecca
February 19, 2019
“they absolutely have a cost: the cost is complexity, outsourced agency, and brittleness. The cost of ownership is up front and visible; the cost of access is back-dated and hidden.”
Terms of Service; Didn't Read has a ranking system and describes features that might serve as a proxy for defining a silo
Criticism:
"I've been researching social media developer ecosystems for a few days now. The one and only constant seems to be an obvious (and damning to me) one:
Inevitably the drawbridge gets pulled up."
@generativist
January 13, 2020
making indie site scaling harder by buying up operations as a service companies
Ryan Barrett
: this article seems out of touch. it feels like we've never seen more operations as service offerings. definitely way more than 20-30y ago, and probably also more than 10y ago. hell, the big shift over the last 10+y is that the big companies mentioned in the article all offer more of their own stuff as cloud services, which were often purely internal before. obviously google, amazon, MS, but also even FB and apple, etc)
corporate web
"silos took over because they're massively convenient in a lot of ways. the web3 folks don't seem to understand that (even as they cluster around convenient silos like opensea) and don't have answers to any of the compelling reasons people use silos in the first place"
@eevee
November 14, 2021
Why: thread:
"Centralization happened to the web as platforms emerged that made it even *easier* to post, share, and discover content.
You didn't need a web server or learn HTML.
You could just go on the platform and start creating content and sharing it with other people.
2/"
@danyork
November 23, 2021
Why:
"The platforms' success is because they made it EASIER than the "web 1.0" services to:
- discover, connect with, and message people (& avoid spammers)
- create content
- share content with other people
- discover new content
- make money (minus the platform's share of course)
8/"
@danyork
November 23, 2021
"The platforms made it "free" for all of us to have:
- publishing
- storage of content (text, images, videos)
- messaging and real-time communication in text, voice and video
- identity / authorization
- discovery through a centralized directory
All "free". AND...
9/"
@danyork
November 23, 2021
"primary motivators for centralization:
a) they copyrighted it
b) they scaled it first
c) their protocol isn't user controlled and needs central/federated servers
d) network-effect user collab
e) site-specific search outperforms crawlers"
@whitingdev
December 18, 2021
Needs to be a pull quote near the top:
"I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four."
@tveastman
December 3, 2018
Criticism:
"the days of usenet, irc, the web...even email (w PGP)...were amazing. centralizing discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet.
I realize I'm partially to blame, and regret it."
@jack
April 2, 2022
"@spolsky welcome to the ShittyWeb@tm
@WeAreDevs #WeAreDevs"
@thecodetrotter
June 15, 2022
“I am shifting my participation so that I only participate in commercial silos when absolutely necessary”
a silo can never provide digital autonomy to its users
Possible new silo header image, even a few of the names are defunct:
Walled Garden graphic:
"This:
reminded me of this...
which reminded me why I maintain this:-)
@dug
January 9, 2023
^ more like comic by Hugh:
Retrieved from "
Category
silo