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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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?
Mine was http://typedrummer.com/ super fun but, if the developer of that site sees this, I was sad that typing "something!" didn't produce a "ba-dum ching" :)
I feel that many of the comments here that are claiming the IndieWeb hasn't "taken 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. It doesn't need to "take off" to be valuable to those who participate. Maintaining a personal website is about owning your digital presence, creative freedom, and self-expression! It's not about appealing to the masses!
I remember in the early 2000s how I used to spend my leisure time learning HTML and writing my website, one HTML tag at a time. Writing a few lines of code in a text editor and then watching the browser render that code into a vibrant web page full of colours and images felt like an art form. It was doubly fun to find other netizens who shared that same joy of maintaining and publishing their websites. The IndieWeb is about preserving that hacker culture where websites are crafted and hosted not for mass appeal but for the sheer joy of creation and sharing with like-minded individuals.
The IndieWeb doesn't need to go mainstream to be meaningful. It's a celebration of a more personal, decentralised, and creative world wide web. And for those of us who still care about these values, it is already meaningful.
No question here, but I just wanted to add: I subscribed to the "daily random posts" feed in April 2022. Because of that feed, I've subscribed to some blogs, and even reached out and become "internet friends" with some of their authors. As well as, you know, just generally being informed/entertained by the work that you're collating.
The second link is a duplicate that simply redirects to the first. If it is not too much trouble, would you be able to remove the second entry? Thanks for your time!
the big list was cool, I saw something about "discipline" while scrolling it but then couldn't search for the page with that keyword. not a big deal, downloading the json sorted that out but thought I'd mention it. really cool page!
I really like this! I created a month or so back - https://www.thedailydetour.co.uk/, inspired by what seems like a similar ambition! I wanted a way to get interesting/fun/amusing things sent to me as a nice break from work and figured others would too so I built it. Thanks for making the internet a bit of a better place!
Neat, my site is on the list but don’t remember if I submitted it before. I made some notes on implementing IndieWeb WebMentions here [1]. It’s like a decentralised/psuedo-fediverse commenting system that features replies and likes etc.
Readit News
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/
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.
Consolidating most of the web into giant content silos is one of the worst things to happen to it
Here is the blog that I wrote about how I created that repo (so meta) https://blog.tldrversion.com/posts/vibe-coding
And this the GitHub repo for that https://github.com/veeragoni/blog
While my blog gets around 20k monthly views, discoverability is still a problem.
[1]: https://rednafi.com/misc/behind_the_blog/
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.
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
[1]: https://blog.davidv.dev/blogs-i-follow.html
It is great for searching the indieweb with your interests as the keywords
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.
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.
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.
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?
That's a feature, not a bug. "Mainstream" is where the corporate shills and spammers you want to avoid are.
It's like saying that gardening hasn't taken off because most people buy their vegetables at the supermarket. It doesn't need to "take off" to be valuable to those who participate. Maintaining a personal website is about owning your digital presence, creative freedom, and self-expression! It's not about appealing to the masses!
I remember in the early 2000s how I used to spend my leisure time learning HTML and writing my website, one HTML tag at a time. Writing a few lines of code in a text editor and then watching the browser render that code into a vibrant web page full of colours and images felt like an art form. It was doubly fun to find other netizens who shared that same joy of maintaining and publishing their websites. The IndieWeb is about preserving that hacker culture where websites are crafted and hosted not for mass appeal but for the sheer joy of creation and sharing with like-minded individuals.
The IndieWeb doesn't need to go mainstream to be meaningful. It's a celebration of a more personal, decentralised, and creative world wide web. And for those of us who still care about these values, it is already meaningful.
So thanks!
1) https://susam.net/feed.xml
2) https://susam.net/blog/feed.xml
The second link is a duplicate that simply redirects to the first. If it is not too much trouble, would you be able to remove the second entry? Thanks for your time!
- the stack
- the source of your collection (seeing my write up there is flattering)
quick answer: php+sqlite and a hackernews thread. nowadays mostly submissions.
[1]: https://www.lloydatkinson.net/notes/19/