/indieweb

How I am participating in the IndieWeb.

• Sharing links to web pages that I find interesting.
• Submitting webmentions to notify the sites that I have linked to them.
• Following #indieweb hashtags on Mastodon and Bluesky.
• Being supportive by letting people know I like their site or page or post.
• Joined the IndieWeb slack, though I am mostly just lurking. I do find it difficult to join in existing conversations.

Still learning here. The only way to learn is to do.

Tech Stack

• Ruby my preferred programming language
• Middleman static website generator
• Task automation via rake for things like fetching webmentions, submitting webmentions, and my PESOS implementation.
• Webmention.io a webmention service

Guardrails and guiding principles for my website:

• I don’t care for javascript and I don’t want to add too much of it to the site. The site should work without it.
• No tracking or analytics as I just do not need them.
• Need to store the webmentions in a format I can use as a data source for Middleman.
• Use Ruby.
• Build the tools I need and host them myself.

Webmentions.

Webmentions are the glue of the social indie web.

Webmention is an open web standard (W3C Recommendation) for conversations and interactions across the web, a powerful building block used for a growing distributed network of peer-to-peer comments, likes, reposts, and other responses across the web.

Said another way it allows website operators to communicate with each other on the web, like if you were to reply on a social network or comment on a blog post.

Check out the excellent webmention service, Webmention.io. And also check out the page on Indieweb for more information about Webmentions.

Webmentions consist of two parts: a fetch and a submit.

Fetching webmentions finds all webmentions that have been submitted to my domain.

Submitting webmentions sends a webmention to the target URL of a post or page on this site.

I use the ruby gem webmention to fetch and submit webmentions. The results of both operations are stored in yaml files that then become data sources for Middleman. Part of building the site is running a task that first fetches new webmentions, then discovers new webmentions in blog posts and notes and submits them.

PESOS, Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site.

Ideally, you would publish your content to your own site first, then syndicate to various content silos, but believe it or not that is actually difficult to do. A first step towards that ideal is to publish on those content silos and then fetch the content to display on your site. On the Indieweb this is called PESOS.

The first baby step I have taken is to fetch my content feeds from Mastodon and Bluesky and if any of the content references a url on this site, then I show a link on the post to those content silos. While not exactly 100% PESOS, it is a start.

POSSE, Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere

To fully own your content, you publish first to your site, then syndicate to the various content silos.

POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content.