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IndieWeb: A people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”
- emrah 6y agoI love the concept, but it is not obvious how to join so I'm afraid it'll likely fail or won't grow much :-( "Get Started Now" information should be on the homepage (not behind a click) and it should be dead simple, not require any digging. Or perhaps I didn't actually get the concept
- enumjorge 6y agoSame. I was intrigued and wanted to start exploring the sites that make up this “indie web”, but the landing page doesn’t list them. Clicked on “Getting Started Now” which took me to a busy looking wiki page talking about Wordpress? Confused, I left.
- toto444 6y agoI have a website that would qualify as an Indie website. I have tried several times to 'add it to the indieweb database' in one way or another but I have never really understood what your were supposed to do or if you could do such a thing.
- epeus 6y agoIt's a very informal organisation - you are part of the indieweb if you have your own site. If you want to talk about it, there's https://chat.indieweb.org/ https://chat.indieweb.org/ (which bridges to IRC, Matrix and Slack). You can sign into the wiki with your own website, and add yourself to the list of people here https://indieweb.org/chat-names https://indieweb.org/chat-names
- telmo 6y ago> or won't grow much I don't understand this idea that everything has to grow. Who cares if it grows or not, as long as the people who use it enjoy it?
- ducharmdev 6y agoImo the issue is not that this ambiguity prevents growth, but more that it contradicts the principles described here. If you have a community that strives to be different than siloed monocultures, then it's important to make participation in the community easier for outsiders, and to make it's ideas accessible to people from different backgrounds.
- wccrawford 6y agoFor some reason, it's buried. I had to click over to the news, and then I found it in the nav bar there. https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started
- lloydatkinson 6y agoNothing says "indie" like all your websites apparently needing to be using wikipedia's wiki software I guess? At least that's what is indicated by clicking the getting started. I share the same confusion as the other commenters.
- epeus 6y agoFor an action oriented list, try https://indiewebify.me/ https://indiewebify.me/
- lloydatkinson 6y agoLooks like I made the creators mad for pointing out their docs suck
- aaronpk 6y agoNo it was just a bad take
- lloydatkinson 6y agoYeah, who wants websites to explain themselves? /s
- gloriousternary 6y agoIf the Wikimedia Foundation stopped development or decided they didn't like indieweb, it wouldn't affect this site; worst-case scenario, they could just move to something else. That independence is the point of indieweb, not to specifically avoid software from other people or corporations.
- thrwaeasddsaf 6y agoSounds like this is a new term for "your website hosted on your domain."
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoThat's a first step, it's not an accurate overview of their whole project. They have a term for posting on your own site, under your control, while also syndicating elsewhere (e.g. Twitter). [0] They also support ideas like federation. [1] [0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE [1] https://indieweb.org/federation https://indieweb.org/federation
- rchaud 6y agoIt may as well be a new definition. Most websites today are selling something. Even worse, most websites creating content (articles, tutorials, reviews) are doing so for SEO to their SaaS side hustle, online course or for affiliate revenue. There should be a separate term for websites made for purely personal use, and it's not 'social media'. The early web was about making exploration fun. Nobody wants to explore someone's cookie cutter social media profile or the workplace for their second job.
- iovrthoughtthis 6y agoI wish that NAT wasn't a thing, then every computer could be a known entity on a web without technical setup. I understand the security concerns (and they are many) but why can't my phone, which is almost always on, host and serve my content to the 20 odd people who care?
- squarefoot 6y ago> I wish that NAT wasn't a thing, then every computer could be a known entity on a web without technical setup. IPV6 would solve this problem easily, if there weren't so many businesses linked to the IPV4 scarcity.
- Jonnax 6y agoAny network engineer will tell you that NAT is an illusion of security. It's the job of a firewall to prevent routing to private networks. The issue with IPv4 is that there is a limited amount of addresses so we've had to make do. With IPv6, every device in the world can have millions of IP addresses which are globally routeable. However we're only at about 33% of traffic being IPv6 capable. [0] On the mobile phone side, it's a choice by network providers to prevent routing. More of a security thing than anything else. There is a product class called Mobile Private Network, which offers private networks over mobile to businesses. My personal hot take for the low uptake of IPv6 is that there's a lot of people in the industry that have the attitude of "I don't need it so nobody else does which informs management" You can see it when people bring up the low upload speeds and someone says "5mbps is all you need for video conferencing". Ignoring how it's painful to upload videos or other binary data for collaboration. [0] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6-adoption https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6...
- EzJBg4GS 6y agoIt's a good idea in theory but they recommend hosting your pages on GitHub [0] which puts your own data out of control. [0] https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started#GitHub_Pages_.26_GitLab_Pages https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started#GitHub_Pages_.26_GitLab...
- epeus 6y agoThat's a start, but having your own domain means that you can choose to host elsewhere later. There is a quick start github project https://github.com/indieweb/blank-gh-site https://github.com/indieweb/blank-gh-site
- mikecarter 6y agoI really enjoyed this beautiful, informative and entertaining intro video to the IndieWeb: https://briefs.video/videos/why-the-indieweb/ https://briefs.video/videos/why-the-indieweb/
- dusted 6y agoI've looked at this before and failed to get the idea.. I thought all you needed was a raspberry pi, a domain name and a public IP to be "indie web".
- epeus 6y agoIf you have your own website, you are indieweb. Having your own domain name is better as then you can decide to change hosting later. After that there are a series of protocols you can adopt to fit in with other indieweb people. Have a look at https://indiewebify.me/ https://indiewebify.me/ for an interactive way to try these out.
- throwanem 6y agoWell, yeah. Easier to advocate for something if it has a name, I guess, especially when the primary discovery interface for the modern web has become largely a brand search engine.
- tlarkworthy 6y agoI recently decided to switch my Auth for cloud services over to Indieweb. It has huge benefits on platforms hosting user generated code as the user identities are transferable out of the box and don't require pre-approved redirect URIs. Hence, it works very well for authors on observablehq.com who move code around user content domains. https://observablehq.com/@endpointservices/auth https://observablehq.com/@endpointservices/auth I use this Auth as replacement for Firebase Auth... I can issues tokens for backend services using Indieweb identities that engage with Firebase security rules. Anyway, I am super excited to have observable/Firebase/Indieweb all interoperable
- chriswarbo 6y agoI like the idea, but it seems to live in a strange in-between niche of people wanting lots of control over their data and content, whilst also being heavily tied to a few social media silos. Since I don't use social media, I'm probably not their target audience. I've implemented a few of their microformats on my site ( http://chriswarbo.net http://chriswarbo.net ), but the rest of it seems rather over-engineered without offering much benefit. For example 'indieauth' seems to rely on third parties; this didn't seem too bad when Mozilla Persona was around, but these days it seems like a NotInventedHere alternative to OAuth 'sign in with Twitter'.
- epeus 6y agoIndieauth uses OAuth; there's also tools to delegate auth to silos via RelMeAuth https://indieweb.org/RelMeAuth https://indieweb.org/RelMeAuth
- chriswarbo 6y agoYes, like I say it seems over-engineered for no benefit. For example, why go to all this effort to be "indie", only to end up with this sort of nonsense: http://microformats.org/wiki/web-sign-in http://microformats.org/wiki/web-sign-in > Link from your personal site to your other profiles. Add rel="me" to those hyperlinks. E.g.: > <a rel="me" href="http://twitter.com/your_twitter_alias http://twitter.com/your_twitter_alias">... > When you use your personal site with web sign-in the first time, your browser will redirect you to to your online profile, e.g. Twitter I can dig the markup, but all the user flows and use cases appear to devolve into an unofficial API for Twitter.
- aaronpk 6y agoCheck out the actual spec, there's nothing in IndieAuth that relies on third parties. The whole point is so you can authenticate as your own domain to other things. There are some helper services that let you authenticate via Twitter/GitHub in case your website doesn't support IndieAuth natively. https://indieauth.net https://indieauth.net
- ilaksh 6y agoAlso check out the Gemini Protocol if you are interested in getting away from the corporate web.
- jamesvandyne 6y agoThe indieweb is what got me back in to blogging and RSS again. Being able to be social on the net without FB/Twitter has made being on the 'net fun again. Adding your feed to micro.blog even gives you a full-social modern social-experience, except it's completely powered by blogs and RSS. There's still a bit of faff required to get setup (even with Wordpress), so I've been building what I hope will be a faff-free blogging engine ( http://tanzawa.blog http://tanzawa.blog ). It's finally gotten feature-complete enough for me to move my own blog it last week ( https://jamesvandyne.com https://jamesvandyne.com ).
- raelmiu 6y agoSame here. I love the indie web movement. Want to try to build supporting products.
- jlelse 6y agoSame. Blogging is fun again. I built my own blogging engine as well :D (also focused on being lightweight and fast)
- Seirdy 6y agoThe best part of the IndieWeb is that you don't have to go "all-in" on day 1. I have a static JS-free site with a self-hosted Webmention receiver (https://seirdy.one); https://seirdy.one); Hugo pulls in the JSON-encoded Webmentions during `hugo build` in CI. The combination of Webmentions and Microformats creates a self-hosted comments section where everyone's comment is hosted on their preferred platforms: comments/likes are preferably hosted on commenters' own websites, but they can also be hosted on silos like Twitter or the Fediverse.
- girrodocus 6y agoI’ve watched a few interesting videos about this and love the general ideas: https://youtu.be/i6Ixyi_I9g4 https://youtu.be/i6Ixyi_I9g4 https://youtu.be/qFXOZww5mmE https://youtu.be/qFXOZww5mmE I’d like to move towards having more ownership and control of my data, my site, and greater integration with IndieWeb technologies like webmentions, IndieAuth, and more. It’s also a lively community.
- mark_l_watson 6y agoI am not sure what to say here, since I simply agree so strongly with this: “” The IndieWeb is a community of individual personal websites, connected by simple standards, based on the principles of owning your domain, using it as your primary identity, to publish on your own site (optionally syndicate elsewhere), and own your data.”” Personal plug: all of my recent eBooks are available for free on my personal web site https://markwatson.com https://markwatson.com Even given the fact that Apple is a walled garden, I think that largely replacing social media with iMessage to communicate with just one or a few people at a time, and couple this with a personal web site and blog is the right way to go. Social media can just be a place to leave links to stuff in your own domain.
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- ducharmdev 6y agoI'm confused about the line "Selfdogfood instead of email." I followed the link to get an understanding of the concept of selfdogfooding, but am not sure I understand this binary opposition.
- epeus 6y agoIt is a very ugly term; 'eat what you cook' is clearer. The point is that rather than theorising about 'what people want' you should build tools that solve your own problems, and practice with your own site first. This was important early on in Indieweb as there are a lot of people proposing that online social networks should work in a specific way, and demanding others change; building something you use daily yourself is a better basis for discussion.
- ducharmdev 6y agoThanks for the context - I read that 'eat what you cook' line but was unsure what that had to do with email. Ultimately I agree with the ideas here, even if they require a little unpacking. A lot of great things have come about from people solving their own problems first, later realizing that other people experience the same problems. Evan You's initial work on Vue is a good example of this: he created it to solve actual problems in his own work, not to solve hypothetical problems on day one.
- epeus 6y agoThe specific reference to email was based on frustration with endless mailing list bikeshedding, especially on 'standards' mailing lists. Building a community around irc, wikis and posting on our own sites was a deliberate alternative.
- jamietanna 6y agoI recently did a talk about it if you fancy a watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFXOZww5mmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFXOZww5mmE