Going IndieWeb

I recently moved this blog and its big dutch brother to my own site. I did this because I wanted to be in control of my content (and more importantly, its URL) and because I like to do hard stuff I guess. This blog is now hosted as a git repository over on GitHub, which means I can use version control. I can also host it using GitHub pages and deploy it using GitHub actions, which is pretty neat.

This was the first step in indiewebifying my website. I also set up IndieAuth, h-card, I marked my posts up using microformats2 and I started sending webmentions.

So, what is this IndieWeb? Well, technically it is just a collection of APIs, guidelines, and principles to allow websites to interact with each other. It is about owning your online identity and content. Instead of being reliant on silos like Facebook, Blogger, Instagram, or Twitter you self-host all of your content and optionally syndicate it to other platforms.

For example, if I wanted to tweet something¹ I would publish the tweet on my own site and then syndicate it to Twitter using Brid.gy². When people then reply to me on Twitter, those replies would get sent to my website using webmentions, so that I can show those comments on my site.

But it gets even better than just replies from Twitter. I can send webmentions to other IndieWeb sites, where they then show up under their posts, and when other sites send me webmentions I can display them below my posts.

I can now also sign in using my domain name (on websites that support IndieAuth³) instead of creating an account or using “Sign in with Google/Facebook”. My profile data, like profile picture, bio and name are saved on my website using an h-card. It’s like Gravatar, but better.

When I publish a post on this blog now, it gets scanned by webmention.app and webmentions will be sent to all URLs in this post, telling them I mentioned them. When people respond to this post I’ll get a webmention and I can then render the reply below my posts.

But it gets even better. I have also moved my notes from this blog to a separate microblog running neopub, a blogging software with a micropub endpoint that I built, and I moved my Inoreader subscriptions to aperture. I can now comment on articles in my RSS reader and those comments will be published on my site, after which I can then send webmentions to the article. Pretty cool right?

This was also posted to /en/indieweb.