5 ms·

Neat. I maintain a blog myself[1] and prefer reading content written by actual human beings, not corporate shills or spammers masquerading on Medium and Dev.to.

Neat. I maintain a blog myself[1] and prefer reading content written by actual human beings, not corporate shills or spammers masquerading on Medium and Dev.to. But I feel like the whole indie web thing hasn’t taken off because of discoverability issues. RSS and Atom are nice, but they aren’t mainstream enough. Also, adding support for them is difficult for non-technical or even semi-technical people. My blog does support RSS, and I use a reader to keep tabs on people I find interesting. But personally, I’m not a great fan of the protocol itself. It’s old, written in XML. There is JSON RSS, but that’s not widely supported and is fragmented as hell. Also, most RSS readers are just firehose feeds and don’t offer much in terms of organization. I’m yet to find a solution for this that I genuinely like. [1]: https://rednafi.com/ https://rednafi.com/

RadiozRadioz 2y ago
Are we really abandoning established, stable protocols because we don't like the serialisation format they use? The practical difference here between XML and JSON is negligible, the value here comes from the ecosystem (which is extensive on the RSS/atom side, and non-existent on the other). As a user, you'll never interact with the XML. As a developer, if you're interacting with the XML rather than using one of the many, MANY, libraries, you're doing something wrong.
- j45 2y ago
  The comment read to me more about distribution that has some network effect. RSS/atom is fine.
  - rednafi 2y ago
    Not sure I fully understand what you mean by distribution here. What I meant is that the ratio of personal blogs supporting RSS to the total number of blogs is too low, indicating a lack of adoption. I’ve emailed many technical writers whose work I liked, asking them to add feed support, and most didn’t bother. One possible reason could be the protocol itself and the fragmentation between RSS, Atom, JSON RSS, etc.—or it could be something else entirely.
- rednafi 2y ago
  Not saying we need to abandon it, but I’m not a big fan of RSS itself. Yes, there’s an ecosystem, but it’s neither extensive nor mainstream. Feed readers are hit or miss, and I haven’t found one I like. Subscribing to 50 people is enough to make the feed unusable since there’s little to no organization. While this isn’t entirely the protocol’s fault, its poor state is largely due to its lack of mainstream adoption—too few people care about it. The protocol itself might also be part of the problem. So discoverability is still a problem because not enough people care about the existing solutions.
  - netghost 2y ago
    Okay, I'll shill my feed reader since it's an example of one that lets you organize feeds and doesn't present a firehose: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-reader/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re... It's only for Firefox though because I like my reader being integrated into my browser and Firefox was the only one that supported a sidebar at the time. Looks like Chrome supports sidebars to now. So mayhaps I'll update it.
    - rednafi 2y ago
      Shilling is welcome as long as it’s not corporate ;) Love FF, this looks promising.
  - basscomm 2y ago
    > Subscribing to 50 people is enough to make the feed unusable since there’s little to no organization. What kind of organization do you want? Every feed reader I've ever used let me categorize/organize feeds in whatever way I wanted, but it's a manual process.
    - rednafi 2y ago
      Exactly this, but with some automatic content grouping. Also, the ability to read the whole content in the reader instead of having to go to the site. But that depends on how RSS/Atom exposes the content; this is why I am not a big fan of the protocol. Too much fragmentation: RSS, RSS2, Atom.
jrowen 2y ago
I think the indie web hasn't taken off because it's...indie...and it's competing with businesses that spend lots of money on growth. This will always be the case. You have to jump into the melee if you want the eyeballs, or just be content on a free island. Personally I find plenty of actual human beings publishing on popular platforms.
- basscomm 2y ago
  I remember the Internet before Google, Facebook, YouTube, Myspace, etc. The whole thing was what is now being referred to as 'the indieweb' and it was the best incarnation of the Internet. Consolidating most of the web into giant content silos is one of the worst things to happen to it
  - trinix912 2y ago
    Yes, and back then the way to go was to have a personal website with links to all your friends and some other cool sites around the web. If you wanted more discoverability, you'd join a webring (or try your shot at getting listed in a directory). I'm still a fan of webrings, hosting a personal website is now easier and cheaper than ever, but it's not the norm anymore. Back then it was, as you had nowhere else to go, more people were browsing the directories, weblinks, links on personal pages, than now.
  - Syonyk 2y ago
    > Consolidating most of the web into giant content silos is one of the worst things to happen to it I'm not sure that "giant content silos," alone, is the harm. But as soon as you start adding "algorithmic feeds," and "supported by advertising," then all the dark "engagement hacks" start showing up, and it turns toxic in a heartbeat. To use a specific example, I don't think LiveJournal, despite being a "giant content silo" back in the early 2000s, was particularly harmful. It was a chronological feed, with pagination - you had to decide, at the bottom of the page, to click next. You didn't have "endless scrolling." And because it was purely chronological, if you refreshed, and there was no new content, well, go do something else. Nobody has posted anything new. If it got too much to manage, there was the ever-popular "LJ Friends Cut" - trimming who you follow to people you actually get value out of. It was a useful ecosystem, but didn't have any of the nasty dark corners of our modern content silos. But it was also not ad-funded - it was funded by premium memberships, and IIRC some merchandise sales, and in general, "funded by the people who got value out of it," so the goals of those funding it were generally aligned with the goals of those running and using it. DreamWidth, today, is a fork of LJ that seems to be doing just fine with the same approach LJ had. It is a "moderate sized content silo," at least, and it doesn't have any of the dark patterns of modern ad-based platforms that I've seen.
browningstreet 2y ago
Is there a MotherJones of indie RSS?
MortyWaves 2y ago
Medium and dev.to are possibly the worst sites in the industry.
- rednafi 2y ago
  Along with Hashnode. They all started with the promise of democratizing blogging, only to adopt all the dark patterns within a few years.
  - MortyWaves 2y ago
    Yes that one too. All three are trash tier shit content.
- trinix912 2y ago
  Dev.to started out pretty well, tried to keep the algorithms to the minimum, but ended up being flooded with half-assed beginner content and promotion listicles. It's almost like it's impossible to start a platform without algorithmic curation nowadays and not have it turn into a place of repetitive low-effort content.
earth2mars 2y ago
I created a GitHub repo where you write markdown files as blog posts. And it has a GitHub action that automatically publishes to GitHub pages. One can simply fork and make their own. Here is the blog that I wrote about how I created that repo (so meta) https://blog.tldrversion.com/posts/vibe-coding https://blog.tldrversion.com/posts/vibe-coding And this the GitHub repo for that https://github.com/veeragoni/blog https://github.com/veeragoni/blog
- rednafi 2y ago
  My blog works similarly [1]. Everything is written in Markdown, then Hugo builds the site, and GitHub Actions publishes it to Pages. While my blog gets around 20k monthly views, discoverability is still a problem. [1]: https://rednafi.com/misc/behind_the_blog/ https://rednafi.com/misc/behind_the_blog/
deivid 2y ago
> discoverability issues Webrings[0] are somewhat being used again. I keep a list of the blogs I follow[1] in OPML & HTML, so that you can either bulk-subscribe, or browse through blogs that you might find relevant; you can do the same! On RSS readers/organization, I didn't need a solution, because "personal blogs" post rarely enough that even following ~100 blogs, I see 3~5 updates per week. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring [1]: https://blog.davidv.dev/blogs-i-follow.html https://blog.davidv.dev/blogs-i-follow.html
- rednafi 2y ago
  I also maintain a rough list of people I follow on my own blog. But I’ll be honest: I came to the game way later than most of the veterans here (circa 2018). I don’t understand how webrings work, what problem they solve, or how to add one to my Hugo-generated static site.
- mac-attack 2y ago
  Another good resource is https://searchmysite.net https://searchmysite.net It is great for searching the indieweb with your interests as the keywords
1shooner 2y ago
>hasn’t taken off because of discoverability issues I just don't think of all of indie web as mass media. Blogs can be for friends and colleagues, they don't necessarily want to maximize 'reach'. I hope part of this movement manages to reset the whole dynamic of social media. Imagine if instead of always writing for the panopticon, you were just writing to people you cared about. Maybe not even publicly available by default.
- rednafi 2y ago
  One reason to abandon analytics scripts and obsess over the stats. Fell into this trap when a few of my posts surfaced on the front page here.
- trinix912 2y ago
  There was a period where blogging was seen as a great way to make easy money, so everyone ended up with ads and analytics on their sites, obsessing over maximizing reach, just like how YouTube is nowadays. Perhaps most people just never went back to thinking of blogging as something you do for the sake of it instead of for some expectation of financial compensation in the future?
  - kevindamm 2y ago
    I think it is a change in proportion instead of a change in perspective. The people who write for the love of the process were doing it before it became mainstream and many kept doing it after too, or found a different venue, maybe even just writing on paper or a typewriter, as it wasn't about the income for them anyway. In the early days when 90% of bloggers were doing it for passion it seemed like most blogs were good. There was an inflection point around the MySpace & LiveJournal days where it became very easy to be a blogger and some really good writers who otherwise wouldn't have set up a server were part of blogging.. but it went as you say, riding the commercialization train, until 90% of bloggers are doing it for income (or link-farming or whatever). But that doesn't mean all the passionate bloggers became commercially-biased, they are just harder to find. That's my reading of it, though. I'm sure it's biased by nostalgia. And I'm sure there were people who got caught up in the commercialization and maybe it went as you say, that they never went back to doing it for non-commercial reasons. Like when a hobby becomes an occupation becomes a source of stress. But I've also seen quite a few old blogs that still don't run ads and still post occasionally.
root_axis 2y ago
The reason the indi web hasn't taken off is because the masses don't care about that kind of content, and they never have. The people who are interested in home grown blogs are dwarfed by the masses that came online by way of billion dollar marketing budgets, driven by the business mechanics of dopamine farming. The indie web will always be relegated to nerds and eccentrics.
- regularjack 2y ago
  The indieweb cannot, by definition, go mainstream.
  - dleeftink 2y ago
    I think, what is meant though, the generic Web has shifted the balance away from what once was diffuse to what is now consolidated. That personal connections could and would be monetised was not a given, but has become the norm rather than the exception. That people are retreating from the networks that enable that is not surprising.
- superkuh 2y ago
  Exactly this. And this is a good thing. Small communities have good properties that just don't scale. And the people that want big communities generally want things that federated networkscan't offer (ie, no ability to be authoritive, gather enough attention to make money, transfer money). And because of government interference in such things no non-incorporated network will ever be able to provide those things. Attempts to cater to the masses is a waste of time.
fsiefken 2y ago
AT protocol blogging, or wouldn't that get into the AT search index? https://github.com/rwietter/atproto-blog https://github.com/rwietter/atproto-blog
Gormo 2y ago
> RSS and Atom are nice, but they aren’t mainstream enough. That's a feature, not a bug. "Mainstream" is where the corporate shills and spammers you want to avoid are.

RadiozRadioz 2y ago

Are we really abandoning established, stable protocols because we don't like the serialisation format they use? The practical difference here between XML and JSON is negligible, the value here comes from the ecosystem (which is extensive on the RSS/atom side, and non-existent on the other). As a user, you'll never interact with the XML. As a developer, if you're interacting with the XML rather than using one of the many, MANY, libraries, you're doing something wrong.

j45 2y ago
The comment read to me more about distribution that has some network effect. RSS/atom is fine.
- rednafi 2y ago
  Not sure I fully understand what you mean by distribution here. What I meant is that the ratio of personal blogs supporting RSS to the total number of blogs is too low, indicating a lack of adoption. I’ve emailed many technical writers whose work I liked, asking them to add feed support, and most didn’t bother. One possible reason could be the protocol itself and the fragmentation between RSS, Atom, JSON RSS, etc.—or it could be something else entirely.
rednafi 2y ago
Not saying we need to abandon it, but I’m not a big fan of RSS itself. Yes, there’s an ecosystem, but it’s neither extensive nor mainstream. Feed readers are hit or miss, and I haven’t found one I like. Subscribing to 50 people is enough to make the feed unusable since there’s little to no organization. While this isn’t entirely the protocol’s fault, its poor state is largely due to its lack of mainstream adoption—too few people care about it. The protocol itself might also be part of the problem. So discoverability is still a problem because not enough people care about the existing solutions.
- netghost 2y ago
  Okay, I'll shill my feed reader since it's an example of one that lets you organize feeds and doesn't present a firehose: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-reader/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re... It's only for Firefox though because I like my reader being integrated into my browser and Firefox was the only one that supported a sidebar at the time. Looks like Chrome supports sidebars to now. So mayhaps I'll update it.
  - rednafi 2y ago
    Shilling is welcome as long as it’s not corporate ;) Love FF, this looks promising.
- basscomm 2y ago
  > Subscribing to 50 people is enough to make the feed unusable since there’s little to no organization. What kind of organization do you want? Every feed reader I've ever used let me categorize/organize feeds in whatever way I wanted, but it's a manual process.
  - rednafi 2y ago
    Exactly this, but with some automatic content grouping. Also, the ability to read the whole content in the reader instead of having to go to the site. But that depends on how RSS/Atom exposes the content; this is why I am not a big fan of the protocol. Too much fragmentation: RSS, RSS2, Atom.

jrowen 2y ago

I think the indie web hasn't taken off because it's...indie...and it's competing with businesses that spend lots of money on growth. This will always be the case. You have to jump into the melee if you want the eyeballs, or just be content on a free island. Personally I find plenty of actual human beings publishing on popular platforms.

basscomm 2y ago
I remember the Internet before Google, Facebook, YouTube, Myspace, etc. The whole thing was what is now being referred to as 'the indieweb' and it was the best incarnation of the Internet. Consolidating most of the web into giant content silos is one of the worst things to happen to it
- trinix912 2y ago
  Yes, and back then the way to go was to have a personal website with links to all your friends and some other cool sites around the web. If you wanted more discoverability, you'd join a webring (or try your shot at getting listed in a directory). I'm still a fan of webrings, hosting a personal website is now easier and cheaper than ever, but it's not the norm anymore. Back then it was, as you had nowhere else to go, more people were browsing the directories, weblinks, links on personal pages, than now.
- Syonyk 2y ago
  > Consolidating most of the web into giant content silos is one of the worst things to happen to it I'm not sure that "giant content silos," alone, is the harm. But as soon as you start adding "algorithmic feeds," and "supported by advertising," then all the dark "engagement hacks" start showing up, and it turns toxic in a heartbeat. To use a specific example, I don't think LiveJournal, despite being a "giant content silo" back in the early 2000s, was particularly harmful. It was a chronological feed, with pagination - you had to decide, at the bottom of the page, to click next. You didn't have "endless scrolling." And because it was purely chronological, if you refreshed, and there was no new content, well, go do something else. Nobody has posted anything new. If it got too much to manage, there was the ever-popular "LJ Friends Cut" - trimming who you follow to people you actually get value out of. It was a useful ecosystem, but didn't have any of the nasty dark corners of our modern content silos. But it was also not ad-funded - it was funded by premium memberships, and IIRC some merchandise sales, and in general, "funded by the people who got value out of it," so the goals of those funding it were generally aligned with the goals of those running and using it. DreamWidth, today, is a fork of LJ that seems to be doing just fine with the same approach LJ had. It is a "moderate sized content silo," at least, and it doesn't have any of the dark patterns of modern ad-based platforms that I've seen.

browningstreet 2y ago

Is there a MotherJones of indie RSS?

MortyWaves 2y ago

Medium and dev.to are possibly the worst sites in the industry.

rednafi 2y ago
Along with Hashnode. They all started with the promise of democratizing blogging, only to adopt all the dark patterns within a few years.
- MortyWaves 2y ago
  Yes that one too. All three are trash tier shit content.
trinix912 2y ago
Dev.to started out pretty well, tried to keep the algorithms to the minimum, but ended up being flooded with half-assed beginner content and promotion listicles. It's almost like it's impossible to start a platform without algorithmic curation nowadays and not have it turn into a place of repetitive low-effort content.

earth2mars 2y ago

I created a GitHub repo where you write markdown files as blog posts. And it has a GitHub action that automatically publishes to GitHub pages. One can simply fork and make their own. Here is the blog that I wrote about how I created that repo (so meta) https://blog.tldrversion.com/posts/vibe-coding https://blog.tldrversion.com/posts/vibe-coding And this the GitHub repo for that https://github.com/veeragoni/blog https://github.com/veeragoni/blog

rednafi 2y ago
My blog works similarly [1]. Everything is written in Markdown, then Hugo builds the site, and GitHub Actions publishes it to Pages. While my blog gets around 20k monthly views, discoverability is still a problem. [1]: https://rednafi.com/misc/behind_the_blog/ https://rednafi.com/misc/behind_the_blog/

deivid 2y ago

> discoverability issues Webrings[0] are somewhat being used again. I keep a list of the blogs I follow[1] in OPML & HTML, so that you can either bulk-subscribe, or browse through blogs that you might find relevant; you can do the same! On RSS readers/organization, I didn't need a solution, because "personal blogs" post rarely enough that even following ~100 blogs, I see 3~5 updates per week. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring [1]: https://blog.davidv.dev/blogs-i-follow.html https://blog.davidv.dev/blogs-i-follow.html

rednafi 2y ago
I also maintain a rough list of people I follow on my own blog. But I’ll be honest: I came to the game way later than most of the veterans here (circa 2018). I don’t understand how webrings work, what problem they solve, or how to add one to my Hugo-generated static site.
mac-attack 2y ago
Another good resource is https://searchmysite.net https://searchmysite.net It is great for searching the indieweb with your interests as the keywords

1shooner 2y ago

>hasn’t taken off because of discoverability issues I just don't think of all of indie web as mass media. Blogs can be for friends and colleagues, they don't necessarily want to maximize 'reach'. I hope part of this movement manages to reset the whole dynamic of social media. Imagine if instead of always writing for the panopticon, you were just writing to people you cared about. Maybe not even publicly available by default.

rednafi 2y ago
One reason to abandon analytics scripts and obsess over the stats. Fell into this trap when a few of my posts surfaced on the front page here.
trinix912 2y ago
There was a period where blogging was seen as a great way to make easy money, so everyone ended up with ads and analytics on their sites, obsessing over maximizing reach, just like how YouTube is nowadays. Perhaps most people just never went back to thinking of blogging as something you do for the sake of it instead of for some expectation of financial compensation in the future?
- kevindamm 2y ago
  I think it is a change in proportion instead of a change in perspective. The people who write for the love of the process were doing it before it became mainstream and many kept doing it after too, or found a different venue, maybe even just writing on paper or a typewriter, as it wasn't about the income for them anyway. In the early days when 90% of bloggers were doing it for passion it seemed like most blogs were good. There was an inflection point around the MySpace & LiveJournal days where it became very easy to be a blogger and some really good writers who otherwise wouldn't have set up a server were part of blogging.. but it went as you say, riding the commercialization train, until 90% of bloggers are doing it for income (or link-farming or whatever). But that doesn't mean all the passionate bloggers became commercially-biased, they are just harder to find. That's my reading of it, though. I'm sure it's biased by nostalgia. And I'm sure there were people who got caught up in the commercialization and maybe it went as you say, that they never went back to doing it for non-commercial reasons. Like when a hobby becomes an occupation becomes a source of stress. But I've also seen quite a few old blogs that still don't run ads and still post occasionally.

root_axis 2y ago

The reason the indi web hasn't taken off is because the masses don't care about that kind of content, and they never have. The people who are interested in home grown blogs are dwarfed by the masses that came online by way of billion dollar marketing budgets, driven by the business mechanics of dopamine farming. The indie web will always be relegated to nerds and eccentrics.

regularjack 2y ago
The indieweb cannot, by definition, go mainstream.
- dleeftink 2y ago
  I think, what is meant though, the generic Web has shifted the balance away from what once was diffuse to what is now consolidated. That personal connections could and would be monetised was not a given, but has become the norm rather than the exception. That people are retreating from the networks that enable that is not surprising.
superkuh 2y ago
Exactly this. And this is a good thing. Small communities have good properties that just don't scale. And the people that want big communities generally want things that federated networkscan't offer (ie, no ability to be authoritive, gather enough attention to make money, transfer money). And because of government interference in such things no non-incorporated network will ever be able to provide those things. Attempts to cater to the masses is a waste of time.

fsiefken 2y ago

AT protocol blogging, or wouldn't that get into the AT search index? https://github.com/rwietter/atproto-blog https://github.com/rwietter/atproto-blog

Gormo 2y ago

> RSS and Atom are nice, but they aren’t mainstream enough. That's a feature, not a bug. "Mainstream" is where the corporate shills and spammers you want to avoid are.