Thoughtful conversations via Social Web Annotations
Overview of annotations.lindylearn.io, and what's next.
Hey friends!
I hope the last weeks have been busy for you, as they have for me. This short letter is about the new focus for LindyLearn (“a series of experiments in thoughtfully engaging with, talking about, and learning from time-tested content together.”)
The Hacker News inline comments project is now part of annotations.lindylearn.io, which evolved to a general social layer for web annotations. The website connects you to people who read and write notes about similar articles like you do.
Technically, annotations.lindylearn.io indexes public web annotations from Hypothes.is and Hacker News to make them discoverable per domain, tag, or in a social feed. Each user has a profile page you can follow per email if you’re interested in their thoughts. All these pages are linked together by similarity.
Many read-it-later and note-taking tools make it exceedingly rare to come across other people’s notes, or otherwise lock you into their service to reply to them. LindyLearn works in addition to those — you create, store, and talk about your annotations wherever you want.
How to use it:
Install the open-source Hypothes.is web annotations browser extension.
Annotate articles that you’re reading, with ideas to remember or to think about. You’ll see your notes on your searchable Hypothes.is profile page.
Your public annotations will turn up on annotations.lindylearn.io, for others to reply to. You can browse across the website to find and engage with similar thoughts and articles.
You’ll get an email when somebody replies to your annotations, or replies to your replies. If you want to talk to that person more, follow them on LindyLearn.
A few of you are already using the website, and I’m grateful for all the feedback and inspiration! Curiously, nearly all the conversations via web annotations feel intrinsically useful and thoughtful — possibly because learning and thinking are the reasons to create notes. Until now, web annotations were just hard to find.
Our next step is to improve integrations into note-taking tools such as Obsidian, Logseq, or Roam. That would put these great conversations as starting points into our private notes, and put selected private thoughts (and better incentives) into our conversations.
So I’ll see you again soon!
Peter