#indieweb

Gemini isn't an old technology being dusted off, it was created in 2019. But it borrows heavily from Gopher's spirit, BBSes, and the decades-old phlogosphere. Yet, sadly, during my research and browsing of Geminispace, I came across nearly as many dead/abandoned links as I did active and alive ones. I get it. There's a lot of friction when it comes to using an entirely different protocol. I confess that it took me months until I finally got serious with it. I don't think Gemini will ever "take off" and I'm glad for that, really. It's a wonderfully peaceful and calm alternative to the Internet without having to unplug. I'm planning to use it a lot more, and I think I'm going to start adding some of my writing on the protocol exclusively.

"Hardcore" and "easy" IndieWeb aren't two camps you have to pick a side of. No, there are rungs on the ladder, and most people need to climb it, rather than getting dropped on whichever rung feels most ideologically pure and getting told to figure out the rest.

That’s me, in The Guardian a few days ago, trying to distill a message that I’ve been trying to get out as broadly as possible for quite a while now. It's sort of like hoping a comet will take out the major AI players and a bunch of smaller new players will be the smarter, better-adapted mammals that take their place instead.

Some things need to become enormous to survive. Other things survive because they never needed to become enormous.

But ultimately what matters is power. It is precisely because technologies like LLMs have powers that the authoritarians have rushed to try to take them over and wield them as effectively as they can. I don't think that platforms owned and operated by those bad actors can be the tools that disrupt their agenda. I do think it might be possible that the creative communities that built the web in the first place could use their same innovative spirit to build what could be, for lack of a better term, called "good AI". I think, if given the choice, people will pick home-cooked, locally-grown, heart-felt digital meals over factory-farmed fast food technology every time.

We must find moments of joy in the horror of our present. Joy is not a prize for getting through it all—joy is a tool that enables us to get through the horror. Our joy is an act of resistance. The independent web is already here, quietly thriving while Big Tech implodes under its own extractive weight. All you have to do is join it.

Yesterday’s “Webmentions Beyond Webmention.io” IndieWeb event (see notes) exposed a problem: many bloggers exploring the IndieWeb and Webmention world simply make use of webmention.io, a hosted solution that handles receiving mentions, enabling you to treat the whole system as a black box. Aaron wondered: “why are so many people using webmention.io?” - and the answer is quite obvious: because it’s easy. Just add <link rel="webmention href="https://webmention.io/something"> to your HTML header after signing up and you’re done.

IndieLogin enables users to sign in with their domain name by linking their domain name to existing authentication providers.

Static site generators like Eleventy, Jekyll or Hugo have become a popular choice for a blogging platform or a CMS. When using something like WordPress or Medium, you get a comment section out of the box. It isn't as straightforward in a static environment. In this article, I'll summarize different options to provide your audience with a way to leave a comment.

Webmentions are great! They're a way that personal websites can interact with each other — you can notify another site when you link to them, and receive notifications when someone links to you. I find them to allow for some of the nicer parts of social interaction on the web, but with much more agency and much less inflammatory or harmful material than something like Facebook or Instagram. However, then can also be a bit intimidating, especially for non-developers.

Easily enable webmentions on any web site

Ringspace is a proof-of-concept for how we might modernize the webring concept to provide a reasonable amount of trust within a small human community of creators. It attempts to provide readers of sites with a guarantee that the site is a) who they claim to be, and b) in good standing in the community. With a simple CLI and an accompanying browser extension (and a little asymmetric cryptography), the webring model blossoms into a trust model suitable for small to medium-sized communities.

Welcome to the last IndieWeb Carnival of 2025. Having been a part of this wonderful community for years now and having thought about the IndieWeb from various perspectives, I have plenty of ideas about where I hope we are headed in the near future. And I am sure you do too.

Depending on how social media changes over the next few years, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more people leave and give the indie web a try. Much like vinyl, it will probably never return to its peak like in the pre-Yahoo GeoCities days, but I think there will continue to be a consistent group of people who flock to this side of the internet to escape the modern internet.

PESOS is an acronym for Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site. It's a syndication model where publishing starts by posting to a 3rd party service, then using infrastructure (e.g. feeds, Micropub, webhooks) to create an archive copy on your site.

Slash pages are common pages you can add to your website, usually with a standard, root-level slug like /now, /about, or /uses. They tend to describe the individual behind the site and are distinguishing characteristics of the IndieWeb.

I feel that such claims about the IndieWeb not "taking off" are either stating the obvious or, if that's not the intention, completely missing the point. It's like saying that gardening hasn't taken off because most people buy their vegetables at the supermarket. The IndieWeb doesn't need to "take off" to be valuable to those who participate in it. Maintaining a personal website is about owning your digital presence, embracing creative freedom, and expressing your individuality! It's not about appealing to the masses!

Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you here

The fundamental problem is that in using most modern consumer-oriented applications, we lose control of the data we share with those applications. In creating documents, writing emails, or tracking our exercise or other activities, we share data with an application that’s useful for a particular purpose, but also allow the data live in a database controlled by the application’s owner. With the data outside of our control, it can then be restricted, lost, leaked, sold, resold, and exploited. The groups that control these databases accrue most of the benefits, and we accrue most of the costs.

My guiding principle for using BlueSky (or any platform or SaaS product for that matter) is to assume that it will go away in three years. It’ll either go bankrupt, get bought, or change its strategy to enshittify the product. You can make an argument that BlueSky has some technical protections against this (though Cory Doctorow is still skeptical about how enshittification may play out with BlueSky) but I think the heuristic above is still the right one to follow.

The kingdom gets absorbed by another neighboring King that has no idea why people where there in the first place and starts changing the laws and everyone leaves. Example: Tumblr There are countless tales of this happening. EVERY SINGLE EXTERNAL KINGDOM will do this to you. No matter how “cool” or “hip” they are right now. They will let you down.

A brief-ish introduction to the idea of a webmention!

I know. You already have a social media account. But you should also have a personal website. Here's why.

Have a personal domain, put a CMS behind it, use that for publishing static pages, use subdomains of it for standalone services, and register new domains only when you need to. I think this kind of strategy is inherent in the idea of having “your own domain”, and a lot of people follow it to a greater or lesser degree, but I wanted to spell it out fully to make it clear to myself how I would deal with different circumstances.

In my last post, I spoke about the differences between the POSSE and PESOS blogging styles and why it’s important. Today, I’m going to show you how I actually implement this with my website.

The Twitter meltdown made me realize something important: I’m a seriously prolific content creator. And I’ve been giving away all that content free to a platform that not only profits from it but treats me like garbage unfairly when it comes to sharing said profits. Meaning, they don’t share a dime. When I downloaded my Twitter archive, it hit me like a ton of bricks that most of that content was not sitting in my website, so they could just disappear if a billionaire decides to cut me off from the platform.

Roaming the Web, as I do, I’ve started noticing more linkblogs of late.

Best known for puncturing blockchain/crypto hype with her Web3 Is Going Just Great project, writer/researcher Molly White believes a better web is possible. Launched two years ago, her Citation Needed newsletter covers “tech world without all the boosterism,” while her latest project tracks the crypto industry’s attempts to influence the 2024 elections.

PESOS is an acronym/abbreviation for Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site.

POSSE is an acronym/abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

PESETAS is an acronym/abbreviation for Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate Everything To A Silo.

Using databases for the primary storage of content on your personal site is considered by some in the community to be an antipattern.

Hey look, I've got a page on the IWC wiki now

Have you ever wanted to track your movements, sleep, what you eat, who you spend time with, and all sorts of other personal data? In this talk I'll describe the tools I've been able to successfully use to track aspects of my life.

Obliterating our own readership and page views may not be a bad thing, but let’s be sure we are making conscious choices.

Obliterating our own readership and page views may not be a bad thing, but let’s be sure we are making conscious choices.

In reality, all of these services make money from your content. Either they serve advertisements next door to your content or they are targeting advertisements towards you, specifically, depending on whatever it is that you are sounding off about on these services.

In reality, all of these services make money from your content. Either they serve advertisements next door to your content or they are targeting advertisements towards you, specifically, depending on whatever it is that you are sounding off about on these services.