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✏️ I want the Read Write Suggest-Edit Accept-Edit Update Web.

The consumer Infinite Scroll Web leaves us feeling empty.

Too few of us participate in the Read Write Web, whether with personal sites or Wikipedia.

A week ago when we wrapped up #IndieWebCamp Portland and I was reading Kevin Marks (@kevinmarks@indieweb.social) live-tooting of the demos¹, I noticed a few errors, typos or miscaptures, and pointed them out in-person.

Kevin was able to quickly edit his toots and update them for anyone reading, thanks to #Mastodon’s post editing feature and its support of #ActivityPub Updates. But this shouldn’t require being in the same room, whether IRL or chat.

We should be able to suggest edits to each other’s posts, as easily as we can reply and add a comment.

13 years ago I wrote²:

 “The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web.”

Now I want the Read Write Suggest-Edit Accept-Edit Update Web.

The ↪ Reply button is fairly ubiquitous in modern post user interfaces (UIs).

Why not also a ✏️ Suggest Edit button, to craft a fix for a typo, grammar, or other minor error, and send the author for their review, and acceptance or rejection? Perhaps viewable only by the suggester and the author, to avoid "performative" suggested edits.

If the author’s posts provide revision histories, when a suggested edit is accepted, a post’s history could show the contributor of the edit.

Instead of asking Kevin in-person, what if I could have posted special "Suggested Edit" responses in reply to his toots, for which he would receive special notifications, and could choose to one-click accept and update (or further edit) his toots?

To enable such UIs and interactions across servers and implementations, we may need a new type of response³, perhaps with a special property (or more) to convey the edits being suggested.

There is documentation of this and similar use-cases, prior art / UIs, as well as some brainstorming on the #IndieWeb wiki:
* https://indieweb.org/edit

Our interaction after IndieWebCamp has inspired me to take another look at how can we design and prototype solutions to this problem.

For now, if you host your blog and posts as static files on GitHub (or equivalent), you could add a button like this to your posts alongside Like, Reply, Repost buttons:

✏️ Suggest Edit

and link it to an edit URL for the static file for the post.

I don’t use GitHub static files myself for posts, but here’s an example of such an edit link for one of my projects:

https://tantek.com/github/cassis/edit/main/README.md

This will start the process of creating a “pull request”, GitHub’s jargon⁴ for a “suggested edit”.

After completing GitHub’s ceremony of entering multiple text fields (summary & description), and multiple clicks to create said “pull request”, it’ll be sent to the author to review. Presuming the author likes the suggested edit, they can perform the other half of GitHub’s jargon-filled ceremonies to “Merge” or “Squash & Merge”, “Delete fork”, etc. to accept the edit.

It’s an awkward interaction⁵, however useful for at least prototyping a ✏️ Suggest Edit button on sites that store their posts as files in GitHub. Certainly worthy of experimenting with and gathering experience to design and build even better interactions.

We can start with the shortest path to getting something working, then learn, iterate, improve, repeat.

#readWriteWeb #editableWeb #suggestEdit #acceptEdit

References:

¹ https://indieweb.social/@kevinmarks/113025295600067213
² https://tantek.com/2011/174/t1/read-fork-write-merge-web-osb11
³ https://indieweb.org/responses
⁴ The phrase “pull request” was derived from the git command: “git request-pull” according to https://www.reddit.com/r/git/comments/nvahcp/comment/h12hzj7/
⁵ “edits” in GitHub require taking far more steps, and navigating far more jargon, then say, Wikipedia pages, which come down to “Edit” and “Save”. We should aspire to Wikipedia’s simplicity, not GitHub’s ceremonies.

This is post 20 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts

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