busybee

Over the past several years, you’ve probably heard me or other web geeks talk about the IndieWeb, but just hearing about it doesn’t necessarily tell you what it actually is, exactly. The reality is that it’s both sort of complicated but also, at its core, really simple! If you do anything online with other people it’s definitely worth understanding and knowing more about.

At its core, the idea of the IndieWeb is that rather than participating in the public web on sites owned and operated by others, you do it on your own website, managed using whatever mechanisms you are most comfortable with, with some fairly-simple protocols for sites to then communicate with one another.

It’s not really any one specific thing, so much as a set of ethics and standards to follow to give people control over their own experience online. It’s people driving practices, which inform protocols. There is no one specific piece of IndieWeb software that you must run in order to participate; instead it’s a set of loose agreements about how to participate, with some simple, mostly-optional protocols to make it work better.

But I know that’s extremely vague and unhelpful, so here’s my attempt at writing a practical guide for what the IndieWeb is and how you can participate in it!

In the aftermath of the issues with the major social media platforms, there have been a number of initiatives to reclaim social networking in a way that makes sense for people, with safety and personal control being at the forefront of a lot of peoples' minds.

However, many of these initiatives which have often showed up out of the blue have a bunch of red flags, and somehow people aren’t noticing them when they decide to commit wholeheartedly to a new platform. I think it’s worth sharing some of those warning signs, as someone who’s been around the block a few times.

Today was my last day using Twitter, unless something changes entirely. I have done the following, and suggest others do the same:

• Went through all of my connected applications to make sure that everything that I was using Twitter to log into now has a username/password login; the only two things I couldn’t fix on my own were Webtoon (which I don’t care about) and Imgur (which I hardly ever use), so hopefully I can get their respective support folks to help me out
• Disabled my ifttt Twitter autopost stuff, so this blog entry will not show up there
• Disabled my Mastodon-Twitter Crossposter connection
• Folded my indieweb.social account into my actual Mastodon account, since there were a bunch of people following me on one but not the other, and the only reason I had the indieweb.social one was for Twitter-crossposting purposes
• Discovered I had literally hundreds of pending follow requests from mastodon.social, mostly spammers or thrown-away “just checking out Mastodon” posts from a year or two ago, gah
• Posted a transitional post to my #novembeat thread which moves my remaining posts over there; however I’m not sure if this will actually work, because of how Mastodon threads work, and I might have to just start a new thread or something

This tweet has been making the rounds in IndieWeb spaces, and reflects a thing I’ve been thinking about on and off lately for obvious reasons:

I was building a decentralized, WebMention-based social network (way before Mastodon/ActivityPub), and if anyone had cared back then, it would be a nazi darling today and that just sucks. https://t.co/jXaZTsUNz8

— Hendrik Mans (@hmans) January 12, 2021

I’ve seen several other related sentiments lately; with a certain prominent politician being deplatformed from all of the mainstream social media platforms, and all of the platforms that accept him being in turn shut down or otherwise made ineffective, people have been (quite reasonably!) wondering what happens if he ends up starting up his own IndieWeb site, and causes a resurgence in self-hosted or otherwise privately-run, single-author blogs.