The IndieWeb is like the good old Blogosphere

While refactoring my blog, I discovered the IndieWeb community. From the website:

We are a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.

I’ve always felt that publishing content on somebody else’s site is wrong, because it means giving up control over the content: being dependent on that other site’s decisions, reliability, policies, life-cycle, etc. is a risk, especially if you want to build up a body of work. This content might just vanish or be taken behind a paywall, or something else might happen to it that you don’t want.

IndieWeb instead is all about retaining ownership of your content!

This doesn’t mean you can’t publish elsewhere, too. POSSE stands for “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.” It means publishing your original article on your own site, then re-publishing or linking to it from any other site: social networks, other publishing platforms, discussion forums, etc.

I already started publishing articles here first, then linking to them from Bluesky. I’ll start linking from LinkedIn soon, however, I’m still thinking about how to properly reduce an article into something that fits the LinkedIn tone better. Maybe a summary or just some key points?

This blog now features RelMeAuth which works by placing rel="me" links to other sites that provide authentication (like GitHub, for example), and linking from those sites back. This creates a decentralized identity verification system - no need for a central authority to prove you are who you say you are. Now everybody can verify that this is indeed my blog!

I have also added microformats2 references to my personal data and articles on this blog. Think of it as adding invisible labels to your content that machines can understand - like saying ‘this is an article’ or ‘this is the author’s name.’ This makes it easier for search engines to extract structured data from it. Together with POSSE, search engines, web browsers and other sites can detect where my content comes from, and what it means.

These technologies work together to create a web where you control your identity and content while still being discoverable and connected. For bloggers, this means keeping the power over your own content while enjoying the benefits of backlinks. For readers, it means knowing where your favourite authors are and that they care about their content, updates, and providing as much value as possible.

Tools like IndieWebify.Me make it easy to verify these things, providing a checklist-like roadmap for your site to become more IndieWeb compatible.

As a next step, I’ll dive deeper into Webmention, a W3C standard for conversations and interactions across the web. It’s like @-mentioning people on social networks, but for websites. This enables cross-site discussions and conversations and lets others know how much I appreciate their content. Sharing is caring!

Much like Bluesky feels like the early days of good old Twitter, the IndieWeb feels like the good old days of blogging. There’s that same sense of community, of genuine sharing of cool stuff, and the grassroots-like “power to the people” vibe. I love it!