Some weeks ago, I quietly shipped a new content type on A Working Library, such that I am now writing short, social-shaped posts on my site and then sending them off to the various platforms. This is not a novel mode of publishing, but rather one borrowed and adapted from the POSSE model (“publish on your site, syndicate elsewhere”) developed by the IndieWeb community. While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context. Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.
Activity tagged "indieweb"
POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world
A simple technique offers the best of both worlds: total control over your own work, while still maintaining a presence on third-party platforms.
"An alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was like to build this site from scratch".
So now I have this space I built for me. A place I can feel proud of because I made it. A place that represents me and the way I want to present myself to the world. A place for my voice to shine through. A real home.
My wish is for the IndieWeb to enable and encourage connection between indie website publishers and readers, allowing conversations and other types of interaction. My vision is strengthening and broadening the IndieWeb community. I want the IndieWeb to be a viable alternative to social media, gradually widening the audience beyond tech-savvy folks by making the tools easier to use and more reliable.
I had such a great chat with Mike McCue on his Dot Social podcast, where we talked about the future of the web and why I'm a web optimist, why everyone should be a blogger, digital ownership, and decentralized social media.
The full episode is available here and on PeerTube/YouTube/the usual podcast feeds!
The very best thing to keep the web partly alive is to maintain some content yourself - start a blog, join a forum and contribute to the conversation, even podcast if that is your thing. But that takes a lot of time and not everyone has the energy or the knowhow to create like this. The second best thing to do is to show your support for pages you enjoy by being nice and making a slight effort.
We can have a different web
Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.
POSSE
I just finally deployed something I've been working on for a few weeks now: a feed of my writing, posting, reading, and other various activity that lives on my website at https://www.mollywhite.net/feed!
I've admired the POSSE ("Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere") model for a long time, but only finally found the time and energy to put something together that I'm actually happy with.
The feed is built on top of the reading list software I've been running for a few years, and it ingests posts from Citation Needed.
I can also write posts in the microblog and automatically crosspost them to Twitter/Mastodon/Bluesky, while keeping the original post on my site. Like this!
It's still super alpha, and I'm sure it will require a lot of bugfixes and future dev, but it's been really fun to work on some web software and move further in the indieweb direction.
anyone have any good suggestions for lightweight local testing when implementing ActivityPub? would be nice to test signature verification and simulate various activities without spinning up a whole local Mastodon server or prematurely deploying my super alpha software