Does it have custom domains?

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Chickens and crazed geo-location are attributes that few posts will have. Chicken is a specific "kind" of WP post. It just demonstrates that you can add anything to the WP "kind" taxonomy (which lays on top of and doesn't map to WP's core Post Format). If you store the Kind, you can store Chickens, or Exercises, or Reading or whatever. Do you have to decide in advance? It's just an object.

That's a very valid question. I think the main sense in which you own it is that it is in your domain (as long as you keep up the rental!). And you can back up everything to your computer. Which means that you can upload it to a different host, still with your domain, if for some reason you don't like Dreamhost any more. And you can even, with a bit more nerdery, host it yourself on your computer.

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Your question is probably a lot deeper than I understand. Basically, you store the data you want to store. You present the data you want to present. So, for example, I have links to posts of yours at matigo.ca. If you had a micropub server, on your site or elsewhere, as I have, it would receive webmentions from me. You could choose to store all or none of the payload, and display whichever bits of it you want to.

I'm storing my data. You're storing your data. Webmention is tying us together, if we want to be tied together.

And microformats are telling our various systems which bits mean what.

Known won't do paid hosting for you any more unless you are in education, but it is completely open source and you can easily download and host your own instance.

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I don't think you are overanalysing it. I think you are mistaken in thinking of it as a thing. It isn't. It's a set of interactions. And those are implemented in different ways by different people. There is no overarching data model.

Simpler, and not gone forever by any means.

Some people are starting to host multi-user Known installs for their family and friends. If you could FTP to Claranet, you could manage that.

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the first thing I would do would be to design a WP theme that just worked.

Believe me, people are trying. But it isn't anybody's day job.

As for the wiki, I confess that that is an area where I have sometimes been annoyed that edits of mine have been reverted for reasons I cannot agree with, and that aren't explained well either. But again, the best thing you can do is point to areas of confusion, either publicly or privately, IYKWIM, and someone will attempt to fix it up.

I find bits of it confusing myself, but I'm not able to fix those, usually. I may, however, be able to fix things other people find confusing.

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I'm hoping David will let him do more of that. They were talking over one another a little too often for my taste.

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By what one thing was AOL replaced?

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