9 ms·

Show HN: Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time

241 points by splitbrain 4y ago

Inspired by the "Ask HN: Share your personal site" last week, I finally came around and built a thing I wanted for a long time: a simple website to randomly explore all the awesome personal blogs without having to subscribe to them all. So this is what I built over the weekend. You click a button and indieblog.page will redirect you to a random page from a personal page... I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.

b3nji 4y ago
Amazing, I was just thinking, how would I be able to find all these wonderful personal sites? It's like Stumbleupon has been reborn! And now you have gone and done it. Thank you.
- flobosg 4y ago
  > It's like Stumbleupon has been reborn! My thoughts exactly.
dmje 4y ago
The flaw here is that I’m not interested in the indie web per se. I’m interested in specific, interesting looking articles, some of which might happen to be indie web in nature…
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
csw-001 4y ago
This is cool! I read almost all my web content via RSS - I’d love an RSS feed of random posts from these sources, just to get a daily sample and see what’s worth following.
- splitbrain 4y ago
  That's an interesting idea. Would you expect one RSS item with let's say 5 links in the item body? Or 5 RSS items directly linking to the original post?
  - jrruethe 4y ago
    I agreee that RSS would be awesome. I would prefer 5 RSS items with direct links to the original post.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    I definitely would prefer the second. That way I can read and dismiss them one-by-one. Maybe an option would be to pick a update rate and have something like hourly, daily, weekly and monthly feeds. It would be a cool way to trickle possibly interesting new blogs into my feed reader.
    - mawise 4y ago
      This would be really cool! A great way to add some discoverability to the feed-reader modus operandi.
    - splitbrain 4y ago
      RSS Feeds added. I may tweak this in the coming days.
  - csw-001 4y ago
    5 items with direct links for sure.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rodolphoarruda 4y ago
I have submitted my website's URL but didn't get any confirmation afterwards. Maybe it's just me and my browser, but it would be nice to have something like "ok, got that link! Thanks!" somewhere.
- splitbrain 4y ago
  You should get exactly that. It might take a few seconds as I try to find the RSS feed right away... Just try submitting again, it will tell you if the link is already in the submissions.
  - rodolphoarruda 4y ago
    Yes, it told me it has been added already. Thanks.
q-base 4y ago
Now that explains it. I was just looking at the stats from my WordPress site and found traffic from a indieblog.page - I thought it was some shady marketing page and ignored it. Here 10 minutes later I am on HN and see this. Great idea and probs for shipping!
- jmmv 4y ago
  Same here. Impressive to see this referral making a dent on my site stats considering that, in theory, my pages were surfaced randomly among many, many others.
mrzool 4y ago
Clicked several times on that button and this is what I've got: - Performant A/B Testing with Cloudflare Workers - 12 Useful Tools for DevOps - Simplest alternative IDs with Rails - How do I update my website using the iPad - Certified Blockchain Professional - Module 03: Blockchain Mining - Principles for the Metaverse - Overloading & Creating New Operators In Swift 5 - Is Agility Related to Commitment? – Money Flows Part II Is the "IndieWeb" basically just English-written personal blogs from HN folks now? I'd have hoped to find a bit more of a diverse landscape.
- splitbrain 4y ago
  Unfortunatly, it's currently heavily biased towards the HN crowd because of the sources I used to initially seed the list.
- mawise 4y ago
  I really like a lot of what the IndieWeb community has come up with. There is a big focus on building things yourself within that community which means a lot of the members of the community are very dev-heavy. https://micro.blog https://micro.blog seems to be the public-facing, easy-to-use platform that adopts most of the IndieWeb technology but for a non-tech crowd--very different community that you might also enjoy perusing.
- rodolphoarruda 4y ago
  Just for the records. I have added mine, which is written mainly in Brazilian Portuguese and has low tech content that derives from my day to day observations of this crazy world.
  - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
    Is that good though? This seems to be for an English speaking audience
    - Shared404 4y ago
      I appreciate it - I know a little Portuguese, but even other languages I would support being added. Google translate is usually good enough, and there's a lot of content that is worth getting further perspectives from.
byteski 4y ago
cool idea! i like to explore someone's websites sometimes.
mediocregopher 4y ago
Love this, reminds me quite a bit of stumbleupon. In putting together my own RSS feed recently, and trying to figure out the best way to sync it with all my devices, I realized the simplest way was to just turn the aggregated links into a webpage and publish that publicly. There's no reason not to, and now others can use it as well! It's at https://news.cryptic.io https://news.cryptic.io, if anyone wants to see the output. I recommend others do the same if you like. The difficult part of using RSS is the actual curation part, so it's cool to see a trend (2 datapoints is a trend?) of folks doing that work up front and sharing it with others.
- mhitza 4y ago
  > and trying to figure out the best way to sync it with all my devices Store it as an email? I generate a daily digest for my subscriptions and have them emailed in my inbox.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
I've been dabbling in this general field as well, I do think there's new things to be made here. StumbleUpon was great, but I think it can be greater still. I started with <https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random> but then I made <https://explore.marginalia.nu/ https://explore.marginalia.nu/> which I feel is the superior version.
- Etheryte 4y ago
  As a heads up, it isn't compliant with the ePrivacy Directive (aka "the EU cookie law") that the site can't be used without giving consent. Consent must be given freely. If the cookie is purely functional and the site can't function without it, then consent is not required. If the cookie is optional then consent is required but it can't be forced.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    The cookie is purely functional and necessary to the functionality, but I'll still ask for consent even if is not required.
    - Etheryte 4y ago
      It is not consent if the only option is to say yes.
      - marginalia_nu 4y ago
        I want the visitor to be informed that clicking the button places a cookie on their computer and why that is so that clicking the button is an informed choice. The other option is to not click the button.
        Etheryte 4y ago
        To try and perhaps explain a different way, that's exactly what's not legal. According to the directive, consent must be free, and sites must also be usable if no consent is given. The setup where you either accept cookies or you can't use the site at all is exactly what's disallowed.
soco 4y ago
The moment the dev.to nonsense* folk discover you, it's gonna be useless. *Newly dev.to RSS feed is 90% either pill promotion or zero value "my first post" notifications. Or posts in languages I don't speak and have no way to filter out.
rodric 4y ago
Now invite the various blogs to which this links to embed it on their web pages, and bring back the web ring of old.
- pmlnr 4y ago
  You mean like https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/ https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/ and https://yesterweb.org/webring/ https://yesterweb.org/webring/ ? :)
- dvtrn 4y ago
  I think this is what you’re looking for https://indieweb.xyz https://indieweb.xyz And here’s how you link back: https://indieweb.xyz/howto/en https://indieweb.xyz/howto/en (Not my site, I’m just a fan of indieweb)
AndrewStephens 4y ago
I love stuff like this. I just went to add my own site only to be told that somehow my feed was there already. I guess I am officially part of the IndieWeb!
legrande 4y ago
Anyone feel amazed at how many blogs are under a {user}.github.io domain? Github is not just about open source, it's a blogging platform too. People forget that.
- mxuribe 4y ago
  I feel somewhat torn on folks having a blog hosted on {user}.github.io; well, at least an indie blog. One of the fun points of having an indie website is not depending/nor hosting it on a centralized service...though, i can totally acknowledge that sometimes cost is a factor. So for some folks - to avoid hosting/tech. costs - leveraging a free, though central platform might be one of the few ways to have a web presence. Then again, i would miuch rather live in a world where there are tons of indie websites, even if they have to live on github's infrastructure; the more indie, the better!
  - jmmv 4y ago
    Does it count if we host on GitHub Pages but use a custom domain? I do that to have the freedom to move out, which is what I’m about to do to gain some features elsewhere.
    - mxuribe 4y ago
      I am by no means an arbiter of what counts or does not. :-) That being said, whatever freedoms you can exercise is always a great thing! If you leverage github underneath as a platform via a custom domain to run your indie blog, then i say go for it! At least that is better than an alternative like living as a sharecropper on someone else's digital land like Medium.com, etc.
- MaxLeiter 4y ago
  I did some scraping of the same post as OP and found that 146 (21%) of the HN comments on the “share your personal site” were github pages. It’s popular!
Vox_Leone 4y ago
>>Inspired by the "Ask HN: Share your personal site" last week, I see you scraped the links on that thread [which was the smart thing to do]. Cool project. Good luck.
- splitbrain 4y ago
  Luckily MaxLeiter already did that for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30963947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30963947
EamonnMR 4y ago
Must have scraped the 'show me your blog' thread from last week, since my blog is already in there.
KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
We used to call this a "blog-ring"
- aendruk 4y ago
  It still is; [1] is listed as a source in the FAQ. [1] I typed <spider web emoji><ring emoji> but HN ate it. Apparently the name of this webring is unspeakable here.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
Oh man, it's StumbleUpon for the indieweb! I love it! I'll definitely using this in my spare time. My own site is part of the webring but I do love just being able to click a button and land on something surprising. Thanks for sharing!
devmunchies 4y ago
I’d love something like HN for a curated list of blog posts, but it’s just technical or tech business (e.g. team dynamics, leadership, finance, product management, etc) blogs. No news or tweets or blurbs, just good high quality writings. Do I just need to start curating my own RSS feed? “Indie” is cool but I just care if it’s good. But I guess this is just more for fun and child-like exploration, for the love of indie
- asiachick 4y ago
  isn't this effectively the curated list? https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best
  - devmunchies 4y ago
    yeah but "No news or tweets or blurbs, just good high quality writings"
- saperyton 4y ago
  Check out Read Something Interesting, which is that exact premise. https://readsomethinginteresting.com https://readsomethinginteresting.com
- zdunn 4y ago
  https://indieweb.xyz https://indieweb.xyz is a reddit-like link aggregator and https://www.indieforums.net/ https://www.indieforums.net/ is a forum for independent blogs. Neither is curated since theyre user submitted content, but still might be of interest to you. I think the "indie" in both of these is less directly about being IndieWeb and more about being small, independent blogs, so hopefully more likely to be "No news or tweets or blurbs, just good high quality writings"
mattrighetti 4y ago
I will try this and see if I discover something nice, cool idea! Not a long time ago I wanted to build something where users could share their favorite RSS feeds/blogs (like Julia Evans does [0]) so that others could, maybe, find something new and interesting. This is a similar concept. [0]: https://jvns.ca/blogroll/ https://jvns.ca/blogroll/
- kixiQu 4y ago
  I would like to advocate making one's OPML files human-readable. It can be done [simply] or [ridiculously] -- and then the result is aggregatable in its own right because it's an established format used by every RSS reader. [simply]: https://zylstra.org/opml/tonzylstra.opml https://zylstra.org/opml/tonzylstra.opml [ridiculously]: https://maya.land/blogroll.opml https://maya.land/blogroll.opml
floren 4y ago
Looks great, look forward to poking around some more. Hope it doesn't get destroyed by spammers!
MisterSandman 4y ago
This could do with a language setting, but not a huge deal.
teucris 4y ago
This is such a great idea. My only feedback is to try and add non-technical stuff too. How are you collecting sites to include in this?
MrJagil 4y ago
I found http://owensoft.net/v4/item/2924/ http://owensoft.net/v4/item/2924/ Which seems to be just a photo of the wendys menu. Quite amusing and probably the most “old web” site i’ve visited in years.
saperyton 4y ago
Read Something Interesting is very similar, but less focused on tech. https://readsomethinginteresting.com https://readsomethinginteresting.com
saperyton 4y ago
You might also enjoy Read Something Interesting! Unrelated to HN but there are great posts there. https://readsomethinginteresting.com https://readsomethinginteresting.com
bitwize 4y ago
This reminds me of the What's New and What's Cool buttons at the top of old-school Netscape.

241 points by splitbrain 4y ago

b3nji 4y ago

Amazing, I was just thinking, how would I be able to find all these wonderful personal sites? It's like Stumbleupon has been reborn! And now you have gone and done it. Thank you.

flobosg 4y ago
> It's like Stumbleupon has been reborn! My thoughts exactly.

dmje 4y ago

The flaw here is that I’m not interested in the indie web per se. I’m interested in specific, interesting looking articles, some of which might happen to be indie web in nature…

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

csw-001 4y ago

This is cool! I read almost all my web content via RSS - I’d love an RSS feed of random posts from these sources, just to get a daily sample and see what’s worth following.

splitbrain 4y ago
That's an interesting idea. Would you expect one RSS item with let's say 5 links in the item body? Or 5 RSS items directly linking to the original post?
- jrruethe 4y ago
  I agreee that RSS would be awesome. I would prefer 5 RSS items with direct links to the original post.
- kevincox 4y ago
  I definitely would prefer the second. That way I can read and dismiss them one-by-one. Maybe an option would be to pick a update rate and have something like hourly, daily, weekly and monthly feeds. It would be a cool way to trickle possibly interesting new blogs into my feed reader.
  - mawise 4y ago
    This would be really cool! A great way to add some discoverability to the feed-reader modus operandi.
  - splitbrain 4y ago
    RSS Feeds added. I may tweak this in the coming days.
- csw-001 4y ago
  5 items with direct links for sure.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

rodolphoarruda 4y ago

I have submitted my website's URL but didn't get any confirmation afterwards. Maybe it's just me and my browser, but it would be nice to have something like "ok, got that link! Thanks!" somewhere.

splitbrain 4y ago
You should get exactly that. It might take a few seconds as I try to find the RSS feed right away... Just try submitting again, it will tell you if the link is already in the submissions.
- rodolphoarruda 4y ago
  Yes, it told me it has been added already. Thanks.

q-base 4y ago

Now that explains it. I was just looking at the stats from my WordPress site and found traffic from a indieblog.page - I thought it was some shady marketing page and ignored it. Here 10 minutes later I am on HN and see this. Great idea and probs for shipping!

jmmv 4y ago
Same here. Impressive to see this referral making a dent on my site stats considering that, in theory, my pages were surfaced randomly among many, many others.

mrzool 4y ago

Clicked several times on that button and this is what I've got: - Performant A/B Testing with Cloudflare Workers - 12 Useful Tools for DevOps - Simplest alternative IDs with Rails - How do I update my website using the iPad - Certified Blockchain Professional - Module 03: Blockchain Mining - Principles for the Metaverse - Overloading & Creating New Operators In Swift 5 - Is Agility Related to Commitment? – Money Flows Part II Is the "IndieWeb" basically just English-written personal blogs from HN folks now? I'd have hoped to find a bit more of a diverse landscape.

splitbrain 4y ago
Unfortunatly, it's currently heavily biased towards the HN crowd because of the sources I used to initially seed the list.
mawise 4y ago
I really like a lot of what the IndieWeb community has come up with. There is a big focus on building things yourself within that community which means a lot of the members of the community are very dev-heavy. https://micro.blog https://micro.blog seems to be the public-facing, easy-to-use platform that adopts most of the IndieWeb technology but for a non-tech crowd--very different community that you might also enjoy perusing.
rodolphoarruda 4y ago
Just for the records. I have added mine, which is written mainly in Brazilian Portuguese and has low tech content that derives from my day to day observations of this crazy world.
- weird-eye-issue 4y ago
  Is that good though? This seems to be for an English speaking audience
  - Shared404 4y ago
    I appreciate it - I know a little Portuguese, but even other languages I would support being added. Google translate is usually good enough, and there's a lot of content that is worth getting further perspectives from.

byteski 4y ago

cool idea! i like to explore someone's websites sometimes.

mediocregopher 4y ago

Love this, reminds me quite a bit of stumbleupon. In putting together my own RSS feed recently, and trying to figure out the best way to sync it with all my devices, I realized the simplest way was to just turn the aggregated links into a webpage and publish that publicly. There's no reason not to, and now others can use it as well! It's at https://news.cryptic.io https://news.cryptic.io, if anyone wants to see the output. I recommend others do the same if you like. The difficult part of using RSS is the actual curation part, so it's cool to see a trend (2 datapoints is a trend?) of folks doing that work up front and sharing it with others.

mhitza 4y ago
> and trying to figure out the best way to sync it with all my devices Store it as an email? I generate a daily digest for my subscriptions and have them emailed in my inbox.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

I've been dabbling in this general field as well, I do think there's new things to be made here. StumbleUpon was great, but I think it can be greater still. I started with <https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random> but then I made <https://explore.marginalia.nu/ https://explore.marginalia.nu/> which I feel is the superior version.

Etheryte 4y ago
As a heads up, it isn't compliant with the ePrivacy Directive (aka "the EU cookie law") that the site can't be used without giving consent. Consent must be given freely. If the cookie is purely functional and the site can't function without it, then consent is not required. If the cookie is optional then consent is required but it can't be forced.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  The cookie is purely functional and necessary to the functionality, but I'll still ask for consent even if is not required.
  - Etheryte 4y ago
    It is not consent if the only option is to say yes.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      I want the visitor to be informed that clicking the button places a cookie on their computer and why that is so that clicking the button is an informed choice. The other option is to not click the button.
      - Etheryte 4y ago
        To try and perhaps explain a different way, that's exactly what's not legal. According to the directive, consent must be free, and sites must also be usable if no consent is given. The setup where you either accept cookies or you can't use the site at all is exactly what's disallowed.

soco 4y ago

The moment the dev.to nonsense* folk discover you, it's gonna be useless. *Newly dev.to RSS feed is 90% either pill promotion or zero value "my first post" notifications. Or posts in languages I don't speak and have no way to filter out.

rodric 4y ago

Now invite the various blogs to which this links to embed it on their web pages, and bring back the web ring of old.

pmlnr 4y ago
You mean like https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/ https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/ and https://yesterweb.org/webring/ https://yesterweb.org/webring/ ? :)
dvtrn 4y ago
I think this is what you’re looking for https://indieweb.xyz https://indieweb.xyz And here’s how you link back: https://indieweb.xyz/howto/en https://indieweb.xyz/howto/en (Not my site, I’m just a fan of indieweb)

AndrewStephens 4y ago

I love stuff like this. I just went to add my own site only to be told that somehow my feed was there already. I guess I am officially part of the IndieWeb!

legrande 4y ago

Anyone feel amazed at how many blogs are under a {user}.github.io domain? Github is not just about open source, it's a blogging platform too. People forget that.

mxuribe 4y ago
I feel somewhat torn on folks having a blog hosted on {user}.github.io; well, at least an indie blog. One of the fun points of having an indie website is not depending/nor hosting it on a centralized service...though, i can totally acknowledge that sometimes cost is a factor. So for some folks - to avoid hosting/tech. costs - leveraging a free, though central platform might be one of the few ways to have a web presence. Then again, i would miuch rather live in a world where there are tons of indie websites, even if they have to live on github's infrastructure; the more indie, the better!
- jmmv 4y ago
  Does it count if we host on GitHub Pages but use a custom domain? I do that to have the freedom to move out, which is what I’m about to do to gain some features elsewhere.
  - mxuribe 4y ago
    I am by no means an arbiter of what counts or does not. :-) That being said, whatever freedoms you can exercise is always a great thing! If you leverage github underneath as a platform via a custom domain to run your indie blog, then i say go for it! At least that is better than an alternative like living as a sharecropper on someone else's digital land like Medium.com, etc.
MaxLeiter 4y ago
I did some scraping of the same post as OP and found that 146 (21%) of the HN comments on the “share your personal site” were github pages. It’s popular!

Vox_Leone 4y ago

>>Inspired by the "Ask HN: Share your personal site" last week, I see you scraped the links on that thread [which was the smart thing to do]. Cool project. Good luck.

splitbrain 4y ago
Luckily MaxLeiter already did that for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30963947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30963947

EamonnMR 4y ago

Must have scraped the 'show me your blog' thread from last week, since my blog is already in there.

KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago

We used to call this a "blog-ring"

aendruk 4y ago
It still is; [1] is listed as a source in the FAQ. [1] I typed <spider web emoji><ring emoji> but HN ate it. Apparently the name of this webring is unspeakable here.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

BaseballPhysics 4y ago

Oh man, it's StumbleUpon for the indieweb! I love it! I'll definitely using this in my spare time. My own site is part of the webring but I do love just being able to click a button and land on something surprising. Thanks for sharing!

devmunchies 4y ago

I’d love something like HN for a curated list of blog posts, but it’s just technical or tech business (e.g. team dynamics, leadership, finance, product management, etc) blogs. No news or tweets or blurbs, just good high quality writings. Do I just need to start curating my own RSS feed? “Indie” is cool but I just care if it’s good. But I guess this is just more for fun and child-like exploration, for the love of indie

asiachick 4y ago
isn't this effectively the curated list? https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best
- devmunchies 4y ago
  yeah but "No news or tweets or blurbs, just good high quality writings"
saperyton 4y ago
Check out Read Something Interesting, which is that exact premise. https://readsomethinginteresting.com https://readsomethinginteresting.com
zdunn 4y ago
https://indieweb.xyz https://indieweb.xyz is a reddit-like link aggregator and https://www.indieforums.net/ https://www.indieforums.net/ is a forum for independent blogs. Neither is curated since theyre user submitted content, but still might be of interest to you. I think the "indie" in both of these is less directly about being IndieWeb and more about being small, independent blogs, so hopefully more likely to be "No news or tweets or blurbs, just good high quality writings"

mattrighetti 4y ago

I will try this and see if I discover something nice, cool idea! Not a long time ago I wanted to build something where users could share their favorite RSS feeds/blogs (like Julia Evans does [0]) so that others could, maybe, find something new and interesting. This is a similar concept. [0]: https://jvns.ca/blogroll/ https://jvns.ca/blogroll/

kixiQu 4y ago
I would like to advocate making one's OPML files human-readable. It can be done [simply] or [ridiculously] -- and then the result is aggregatable in its own right because it's an established format used by every RSS reader. [simply]: https://zylstra.org/opml/tonzylstra.opml https://zylstra.org/opml/tonzylstra.opml [ridiculously]: https://maya.land/blogroll.opml https://maya.land/blogroll.opml

floren 4y ago

Looks great, look forward to poking around some more. Hope it doesn't get destroyed by spammers!

MisterSandman 4y ago

This could do with a language setting, but not a huge deal.

teucris 4y ago

This is such a great idea. My only feedback is to try and add non-technical stuff too. How are you collecting sites to include in this?

MrJagil 4y ago

I found http://owensoft.net/v4/item/2924/ http://owensoft.net/v4/item/2924/ Which seems to be just a photo of the wendys menu. Quite amusing and probably the most “old web” site i’ve visited in years.

saperyton 4y ago

Read Something Interesting is very similar, but less focused on tech. https://readsomethinginteresting.com https://readsomethinginteresting.com

saperyton 4y ago

You might also enjoy Read Something Interesting! Unrelated to HN but there are great posts there. https://readsomethinginteresting.com https://readsomethinginteresting.com

bitwize 4y ago

This reminds me of the What's New and What's Cool buttons at the top of old-school Netscape.