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I joined the IndieWeb, here's what I learned
- rmdes 3mo agoGood work! Both the explainer and the implementation! I'm using indiekit which basically comes with IndieWeb batteries included! https://rmendes.net https://rmendes.net and I'm working to get it implemented on https://textcaster.app https://textcaster.app
- andros 3mo agoGood job to you too!
- superkuh 3mo agoAlthough not explicitly part of the indieweb protocols, RSS and Atom feeds are important too.
- andros 3mo agoh-feed is recommended for the IndieWeb, making your HTML your feed, and RSS/Atom for the rest of the planet.
- superkuh 3mo agoI don't know about you, but I don't know of any native (non website/javascript) software that supports h-feeds. IndiePass was only ever for smartphones and it's fully dead. h-feed is more of a html integrated mark-up for posts than any form of actual separate feed file. This is claimed to be a positive aspect of h-feeds, not being a separate file... but it really isn't. I keep track of all the other indieweb sites I care about via normal rss/atom feeds. h-feeds were an aspiration that did not actually come about. The rest of the indieweb protocols rock though. I looked around andros.dev and found no (real) feeds so I'll probably just forget the site in a week. If it had had a feed I'd have added it to my desktop native readers.
- andros 3mo agoWell, don't shoot the messenger. I'm just letting you know what they recommend :D By the way, andros.dev has an RSS feed.
- account42 3mo ago> Well, don't shoot the messenger. I'm just letting you know what they recommend :D The great thing about hosting your own website is that you can decide for yourself what "standards" and "recommendations" actually make sense for you. > By the way, andros.dev has an RSS feed. You should add <link rel="alternate"> links to the RSS/Atom feed. The way people (or at least I) discover RSS feeds is to paste the blog/article URL into my feed reader - if that can't find the feed then I more than likely just give up and move on. All I can find on your site is a button in the side bar that doesn't even work.
- BoingBoomTschak 3mo agoIt's at https://andros.dev/blog/feed/en/ https://andros.dev/blog/feed/en/ Had to look at the page source to find it, since without JS, the bottom left button does nothing.
- BoingBoomTschak 3mo agoThey're not just "important", a blog without RSS/Atom feed is like a car without wheels.
- AndrewKemendo 3mo agoI’ve never had an rss on any blog/site I’ve ever hosted and never felt like I’m missing anything What is the advantage to me of maintaining an rss? Is there some giant rss feed following community I’m missing?
- andros 3mo agoCurrently, the RSS feed is what's driving the most traffic to my blog.
- sjs382 3mo agoIs there some giant rss feed following community I’m missing? Yes
- BoingBoomTschak 3mo agoDo you think I'll just check manually every day to see if you wrote a new post? That for each and every blog I follow? That's like comparing old school Windows software updating where you "just have to go on the website and read the news" vs `apt update && apt upgrade`.
- AndrewKemendo 3mo agoMy assumption was that nobody checks rss feeds since the iPhone came out anymore, but apparently I’m wrong
- mbrndtgn 3mo agoWhy since the iPhone? RSS feeds on my phone were my preferred way of reading blogs before responsive web design was a thing.
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- inigyou 3mo agoWere you aware that the .dev domain name belongs to Google?
- andros 3mo agoYes, I knew that. I would have liked to obtain my personal top-level domain, but it seems complicated to me.
- inigyou 3mo agoIt's not possible. But there are more and less neutral ones.
- andros 3mo agoI'm asking you out of pure curiosity, it's not an attack: what difference does it make to have a domain controlled by Google versus a more general one?
- b112 3mo agoWho is 'he'? Did you use an LLM for translation, and it used he instead of I?
- andros 3mo agoHuman error, thanks for the heads-up!
- inigyou 3mo agoIf Google doesn't like you, it can remove your domain. Also, many people (apparently not you) are uncomfortable giving money to Google. Google also ends up with some limited information about who is accessing your website.
- andros 3mo ago
- yevhen_builds 3mo ago[flagged]
- nicbou 3mo agoGreat writeup, and welcome aboard! A few things I would add: - Make it a habit to share other blogs that you love. The IndieWeb relies on word of mouth and human curation. I love "what I enjoyed this month" posts. - Be lavish in your praise and hearty in your approval. Email your appreciation, initiate conversations. Static sites without user tracking can feel like talking to yourself at times. Reader mail feels awesome. - Have fun! Personal sites should be personal. Allow yourself to be incomplete, to be whimsical. - Digital gardens are great. Not everything needs to be a chronological feed. This is your space. Arrange it as you please.
- andros 3mo agoI really like your comments! I'll include them when I have some time. Thank you so much!
- rjakobsson 3mo agoReally cool! Have you checked out Nostr as well? I prefer the mental model of Nostr, it seems to be more in line with POSSE than Mastodon and the AT protocol.
- andros 3mo agoI prefer Org Social a million times over Nostr :) https://en.andros.dev/blog/8c640241/why-org-social-when-you-can-use-anything/ https://en.andros.dev/blog/8c640241/why-org-social-when-you-...
- rjakobsson 3mo agoInteresting, will check out!
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- KajMagnus 3mo agohttps://github.com/tanrax/org-social-host https://github.com/tanrax/org-social-host > If you don't update your social.org at least once a month, you will lose the domain and the nickname will be released I usually don't post once a month. Nickname released, that's a security problem. Looks as if: org-social.org is a single point of failure? Hmm I wonder if there's ways to solve those problems. Maybe you'd end up w sth like AT Proto in the end
- andros 3mo agoIf you don't want limitations, host your social.org site yourself, or move it to GitHub Pages or similar services. org-social-host is a free hosting service I offer openly to help you get started, but it's not unlimited.
- aduty 3mo agoHas nostr evolved beyond brocoins at this point?
- xtiansimon 3mo ago> “Use what you make: use what you build every day. ‘If you aren't depending on it, why should anybody else?’” Having difficulty imagining this constraint. For example, I use my iPhone’s Note app daily for personal notes. I don’t currently host a site, but if I did I might have content/write on no more than monthly cadence, or per-project. Does this rule suggest that I should ‘publish’ more (ie. elevate private note content to public more frequently) or build something for my private notes to be hosted on my server? Or something else? In the first instance we’re talking about that micro commentary you get with social media sites. Becomes something like Kottke’s site. A feed of interesting things. In the second instance you’re using your server infrastructure more, and so it’s not a machine you interact with only infrequently. Or am I totally missing the point?
- andros 3mo agoToday it's quite easy to keep your private notes on your infrastructure, manage them with your iPhone, and even store them in plain text: Joplin, Syncthing, WebDAV (https://en.andros.dev/blog/9abcdcfe/your-denote-notes-on-the-iphone/ https://en.andros.dev/blog/9abcdcfe/your-denote-notes-on-the...)...
- xtiansimon 3mo ago> “Today it's quite easy…” Not sure if you’re responding to my confusion (“Having difficulty imagining this constraint”). I’m not asking about implementation of a solution nor of capability, but how the maxim “use what you make” is envisaged by the authors as a mechanism of engagement, management and quality for the IndieWeb. Why is it a pilar?
- andros 3mo agoI'm not in the authors' heads, but I suppose they want to enhance the feeling of belonging.
- Insimwytim 3mo agoSo many numbered and non-numbered lists...
- newsomix9xl 3mo agoWhat about all my content on Friendster ? Man was I bummed.
- TheOtherHobbes 3mo agoIf IndieWeb wants content, burying it under a ton of tech soup is the exact opposite of what they claim they want. How do the developers not realise that this set of protocols is completely unworkable for 90% of users? Please stop developing systems where the engineering is front and centre. If you want to put content UX first, you need to do exactly that, with a one-click solution that gets users up and running instantly. If you users have to go anywhere near a command line, or Docker, or they have to hand-edit HTML or CSS, you're creating walls most users aren't going to scale. At the moment this looks more like NerdNet than IndieWeb.
- myzek 3mo agoI'm pretty new to this so I can't speak for IndieWeb, but I wouldn't blame them. People who seek independence from the social silos are usually engineers or other web-aware people. It is only natural that they want to solve the problem with the knowledge they possess and tools they know - and I think it's fine. If you look back at how internet evolved, it was always like this - the geeks and nerds coming up with something fun but naturally hard to get into for the regular folk. But then it would get more and more approachable until it adopted for the said regular folk. I think the IndieWeb is at this early stage. The adoption for a broader audience will come naturally (if this survives), but for now - let them cook
- jcgl 3mo agoFirst of all, techy nerdy people like things to be easy too. They're just somewhat more likely than other people (on average) to overcome not-easiness. Second of all, how long is IndieWeb supposed to cook for before it's supposed to be ready for a broader audience? This is no shade on the IW folks if they like what they're building. But if what they're building is supposed to catch on somewhat, what's the path supposed to be? The project seems to be 15 years old already: https://indieweb.org/IndieWebCamps# https://indieweb.org/IndieWebCamps#
- ozim 3mo agoExactly I have limited time in my life to tinker with stuff. If something is important for me I can waste hours setting it up and running. If it is something new to me, if it doesn’t work out of the box I most likely will just move on.
- myzek 3mo agoThis intrigued me a lot! I have been searching for a way to break out of the social silos, but all the other alternatives just weren't doing it for me. They usually chased thr nostalgia of the 90s for nostalgia's sake, but apart from making me nostalgic for 10 minutes I haven't found much use of them. This seems different. It embraces the modern web and tries to fit in, while still giving the creator full control over their yard. I might be overly optimistic, but I'm excited for this! I will try to make my myzopotamia.dev blog join the IndieWeb as soon as I find some time
- andros 3mo agoGood luck :)
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- ronbenton 3mo agoI feel like the DRY concern with RSS feeds is overstated. I can’t remember the last time I had trouble with automagically generating an RSS feed using whatever open source framework I was authoring with at the time.
- andros 3mo agoI don't think anyone enjoys generating or reading RSS feeds. You have many alternatives, but none surpass the popularity of RSS...
- bluebarbet 3mo agoBut the unDRYness of RSS is pretty stark. It's literally a dupe of the list page of any website. I've often been frustrated at having to maintain two versions of the exact same content, and deal with XML, when `h-entry` exists. RSS was invented just before the semantic-markup revolution (i.e. the end of table layouts). Bad timing.
- mbrndtgn 3mo agoI haven't used it myself, but you could probably just use a microformat like h-feed and generate an RSS feed with the hosted version of granary: https://github.com/snarfed/granary https://github.com/snarfed/granary
- AndrewKemendo 3mo agoThe Internet is already independent - warez and torrents amd smuggling sites and groups prove this Anyone can go right now to a DNS registry and set up a url with tld and as many redirects as needed and host locally or remote servers.
- slmjkdbtl 3mo ago> MySpace: in 2019, during a server migration, it lost all the music uploaded during its first 12 years, more than 50 million songs from 14 million artists. How much of these are archived by third party? If not it's huge loss to humanity...
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- EGreg 3mo agoToday we've added support for IndieWeb to the Qbix Platform, so people can have a powerful way to publish and maintain sites on the IndieWeb: https://github.com/Qbix/IndieWeb https://github.com/Qbix/IndieWeb Qbix Platform is based on PHP, and everything else (MySQL, NginX, Apache etc.) is optional. PHP can be used by itself to host your site, including turning it into a static site, and even manage HTTPS certificates for you. But even beyond that, it can also enable personal mesh networks without the Internet. It's completely free and open source, and designed to work out of the box. Here is the overview of how it all works: https://qbix.com/server.html https://qbix.com/server.html
- jdw64 3mo agoI also have my own personal homepage [1]. The content isn't that great, but I do have some curated content on there. What kind of topics and people are usually involved in the IndieWeb community? I'm thinking about joining, but I'm still debating it. [1] https://www.makonea.com/en-US https://www.makonea.com/en-US
- andros 3mo agoI like your website design! Next.js, React, TailwindCSS in Vercel? Is this your design? It's very nice. They have monthly and annual events; perhaps you can discover them for yourself! However, I recommend that you first understand and apply some of their philosophy!
- jdw64 3mo agoExactly! It's Next.js 16 + React 18. I'm using the App Router, the frontend is on Vercel, and DNS/CDN/WAF are on Cloudflare. The style is neo-brutalist, but since it wasn't well-received in Korea, I softened it into a custom UI. The animation is the Gooey Navigation I designed myself. I'm glad you like the design.
- exiguus 3mo agoIndieWeb is a form of social media. People have a certain image of themselves, and the internet helps them live up to it. Whether we're writing comments on HN, posting toots on Mastodon, uploading videos to TikTok, or writing a post on our own blog, there’s a lot of self-expression involved. However, for a lot of people, platforms like TikTok are more appealing than IndieWeb, but for some, it's fun to set up an OpenBSD VPS, a static web server, and learn to write better in text files using their favorite editor. A self-determined workflow can be more important than being seen. However, one doesn't rule out the other, and the Author and IndieWeb offers some good tips. Thanks for the post.
- andros 3mo agoYou remind me of the article "Nobody Cares About Quality Anymore" by Shawn Seymour where convenience is always valued. Or where people use information as a tool, without any desire or motivation to preserve it. Thank you for your comment! It motivates me a lot.
- pibaker 3mo agoI feel some uneasiness when I go to a website branded as "indieweb," and see a link to the author's CV prominently on the page. Sometimes you also see a professional taken headshot of the author or an enthusiastic description of his work history at prestigious institutions. And it's always a professionally made blog. You know the drill. It feels like walking into a brightly lit clothing store in a fancy mall and seeing the anarchy symbol on all items. Look closer and you'll see an almost four digit price tag.
- andros 3mo agoA CV on your personal domain is the most IndieWeb thing you can do, it means your professional identity lives under your control, not LinkedIn's. The "anarchy symbol on expensive clothes" critique works when someone claims to reject the system while feeding it. IndieWeb does not claim to reject professionalism, it claims that your content should belong to you and outlive any platform. The headshot, the CV, the polished blog... those are fine. Locking them inside a silo that can shut down, sell your data, or vanish is the thing being criticized.
- pibaker 3mo agoWhen i think about being indie, I think about the era when personal websites were not meant to be money business and the common sense on the internet was to adopt a pseudonym and never tell anyone where you live. Having a CV seems antithetical to the entire idea of indieness.
- axus 3mo agoI think you can be both indie and self-serving.
- andros 3mo agoIndieWeb wasn't born as an anti-capitalist movement, but rather at a time when protocols were more prevalent than content. If you review its core principles, everything revolves around creating, sharing, and persevering over time. Companies aren't the enemy.
- sourcecodeplz 3mo agoso indieweb is like your own personal website?
- sara011 3mo ago[flagged]
- account42 3mo ago> microformats2 solves one problem: making your content machine-readable without publishing parallel files or building an API. Which isn't generally a problem that ever needed solving. Just like the previous onthologies, all this does is feed your adversaries while being useless to your human visitors.
- smcg 3mo agoOnce again I will say my theory of how the internet became a few walled gardens: NOBODY WANTS TO HOST. Hosting sucks. It costs time and money. There are constantly new exploits to work around.
- andros 3mo agoYes, there are people who want their own host (The IndieWeb or Gemini communities are a clear example). The problem is that convenience is always the priority; there are no incentives.
- marysol5 3mo agoI go through ebbs-and-flow of self hosting. Having an entire stack, with backups, even some HA when I'm feeling fancy. Then I get my electricity bill
- fernly 3mo agoI've done, and still do, regular blogging. I have a domain, and everything I post is mine. However it can't be "indieweb" because I used Wordpress. Hence my current blog is dependent on a corporation, as were a couple of older ones that were built in Blogger (and still exist, last updated nearly a decade ago). That dependency is because isn't feasible for me to own my own server. If I did, it would either be virtual, in amazon's or microsoft's cloud, or it would be real hardware but still in some corporate server farm. It just wouldn't be practical for me to own (and maintain) a physical server with an UPS and permanent uplink to the net.
- MartV0 3mo agoI have my own hosted server on some old nuc pc I got for free. You don't need an UPS or permanent uplink. A blog isn't so important that the world will end if your blog goes offline for a day. How often do you lose power or internet, is that one time a year really that big of a deal?
- hoyd 3mo ago«Keep the web weird and interesting.» This made me smile and I agree.