A few days ago I found out about something called the IndieWeb. It is, I would say, a loosely connected internet movement built on a social web. Not a social platform, but a network of websites that are able to communicate with each other.

This is nothing new. It is actually something that has existed for a while. In mid-2014 the W3C started The Social Web Working Group that grew ideas into standards such as ActivityPub, which is used in the Fediverse and Mastodon, and Webmention, to mention a few. The latter being a cornerstone for the IndieWeb’s take on the Social Web. Sometimes I’m just late to the party. You may also have heard about the Pingback protocol that was popular when blogging was hot; webmentions is an improvement on that.

There are a few quite interesting principles that are the foundation of this movement: own a domain that will be your online identity, publish content there first and, if applicable, on other sites afterwards — you own your content.

I have for many years felt that by posting on various different platforms I dilute my online presence. Because of this, I created a website that was pulling in postings from various sites and displaying them as summaries and links back to the different sources. It was mainly a proof of concept that I hacked together using Node-RED and Hugo. It kind of worked, but not well enough for me to continue working on it. Too many moving parts. Too brittle.

The IndieWeb doesn’t completely solve this problem — but at least it makes some strides in that direction. In the end, commercial platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and the likes have nothing to gain from enabling a social web — they want to keep users on their platform to be able to sell ads. The IndieWeb endorses that content is spread on the web instead. However, there are bridging software to post content from your blog into these platforms with a link back to the source. This way, you keep your content in one place. I have not explored these softwares more than reading about them.

My own journey on the IndieWeb has just started. I have implemented the bare minimum for webmentions — I will receive a notification if someone mentions my blog or interacts with it — if they send webmentions. My website will also ping other blogs, sending webmentions as I post new content.

There is nothing that will show to you, the reader, that it has happened. At least not yet. There are a couple of challenges to make this work in a good way for my site. I use a static page generator (Hugo) to generate my website, and that means that I would need to create files in the git repository and deploy my site every time there is an interaction. That is something I do not want to do since there is a cost connected to every build. The other alternative is to load activities using JavaScript on page load — but that would expose visitor information to third-party services. This is something I want to avoid as far as I can.

I will potentially update my Hugo site so that I can submit interactions such as likes, comments, and replies to other sites using the webmentions protocol. But I have to consider this further since I think there are some potential problems with the general webmentions flow. But I haven’t landed my thoughts here completely. Maybe there will be a follow-up post about that in the future. I also want to keep this type of content out of my general feed since it is not interesting out of context — e.g. the site interacted with.

For me, the IndieWeb sends a fresh wave of nostalgia from the times before all social interactions happened on social media. In a time where the blogosphere thrived, people were creative and created great things just because they found it fun. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, or maybe it is a backlash from the current way of interacting and doomscrolling to get a cheap dopamine kick. Perhaps the slower and more friendly blog world is coming back. I have hope!