A good half-hour presentation by Stephen Rushe on the building blocks of the indie web. You can watch the video or look through the slides.
I’ve recently been exploring the world of the IndieWeb, and owning my own content rather than being reliant on the continued existence of “silos” to maintain it. This has led me to discover the varied eco-system of IndieWeb, such as IndieAuth, Microformats, Micropub, Webmentions, Microsub, POSSE, and PESOS.
This is a great description by Chris of the problems that webmentions aim to solve.
If you use Twitter, your friend Alice only uses Facebook, your friend Bob only uses his blog on WordPress, and your pal Chuck is over on Medium, it’s impossible for any one of you to @mention another. You’re all on different and competing platforms, none of which interoperate to send these mentions or notifications of them. The only way to communicate in this way is if you all join the same social media platforms, resulting in the average person being signed up to multiple services just to stay in touch with all their friends and acquaintances.
Given the issues of privacy and identity protection, different use cases, the burden of additional usernames and passwords, and the time involved, many people don’t want to do this. Possibly worst of all, your personal identity on the internet can end up fragmented like a Horcrux across multiple websites over which you have little, if any, control.
Alex Kearney looks back on two years of owning her own data.
With a fully functional site up and running, I focused on my own needs and developed features to support how I wanted to use my site. In hind-sight, that’s probably the most indie thing I could’ve done, and how I should’ve started my indieweb adventure.
This really resonates with me.
One of the motivating features for joining the indieweb was the ability to keep and curate the content I create over time.
Terrific post!
Here’s to two more years.
Drew has been adding webmention support not just to his own site, but any site using Perch. This account of his process is a really good overview of webmentions.
Richard MacManus begins to document the process of making his website part of the indie web.
Chris gives a step-by-step walkthrough of enabling webmentions on a Wordpress site.
A plug-in for Craft CMS for receiving webmentions. I’ll have to tell Charlotte about this (she’s using Craft for her site).
or: how I learnt to stop worrying and love the blog.
This is a really nice introduction to the basics of the Indie Web …with nice illustrations too.