Neat. I maintain a blog myself[1] and prefer reading content written by actual human beings, not corporate shills or spammers masquerading on Medium and Dev.to.
But I feel like the whole indie web thing hasn’t taken off because of discoverability issues. RSS and Atom are nice, but they aren’t mainstream enough. Also, adding support for them is difficult for non-technical or even semi-technical people.
My blog does support RSS, and I use a reader to keep tabs on people I find interesting. But personally, I’m not a great fan of the protocol itself. It’s old, written in XML. There is JSON RSS, but that’s not widely supported and is fragmented as hell. Also, most RSS readers are just firehose feeds and don’t offer much in terms of organization.
I’m yet to find a solution for this that I genuinely like.
Are we really abandoning established, stable protocols because we don't like the serialisation format they use? The practical difference here between XML and JSON is negligible, the value here comes from the ecosystem (which is extensive on the RSS/atom side, and non-existent on the other). As a user, you'll never interact with the XML. As a developer, if you're interacting with the XML rather than using one of the many, MANY, libraries, you're doing something wrong.
Not saying we need to abandon it, but I’m not a big fan of RSS itself.
Yes, there’s an ecosystem, but it’s neither extensive nor mainstream. Feed readers are hit or miss, and I haven’t found one I like. Subscribing to 50 people is enough to make the feed unusable since there’s little to no organization.
While this isn’t entirely the protocol’s fault, its poor state is largely due to its lack of mainstream adoption—too few people care about it. The protocol itself might also be part of the problem.
So discoverability is still a problem because not enough people care about the existing solutions.
It's only for Firefox though because I like my reader being integrated into my browser and Firefox was the only one that supported a sidebar at the time. Looks like Chrome supports sidebars to now. So mayhaps I'll update it.
> Subscribing to 50 people is enough to make the feed unusable since there’s little to no organization.
What kind of organization do you want? Every feed reader I've ever used let me categorize/organize feeds in whatever way I wanted, but it's a manual process.
Exactly this, but with some automatic content grouping. Also, the ability to read the whole content in the reader instead of having to go to the site. But that depends on how RSS/Atom exposes the content; this is why I am not a big fan of the protocol. Too much fragmentation: RSS, RSS2, Atom.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by 'automatic content grouping'. Are you talking about somehow automatically grouping the posts from disparate sites into buckets based on some criteria? Newsboat, for example, lets you do this with tags and queries: https://newsboat.org/releases/2.19/docs/newsboat.html#_query...
I'm also not sure what fragmentation has to do with anything. I don't think I've used a feed reader that didn't understand all current flavors of RSS and Atom, so it makes absolutely no difference what the webmaster decided to use, my news reader can figure it out.
It is a little bit annoying when the webmaster doesn't put the full text of the article in the news feed, and instead wants you to actually visit their site to read their stuff. I'd guess that they do that to make sure that you actually visit the site once in a while and might accidentally view an ad so they can make a few cents or they hope that you might see something else on their site you might be interested in or whatever. It also saves some bandwidth by not downloading the full text of an article if it turns out that I wasn't interested in it.
> I'd guess that they do that to make sure that you actually visit the site once in a while and might accidentally view an ad so they can make a few cents or they hope that you might see something else on their site you might be interested in or whatever.
I can't speak for others, but as someone who hand codes my HTML, it is a non-trivial amount of work to convert the entire text of a page into an RSS feed, whereas it is easy to add the headline, datetime, and summary.
I get that it is pretty cool to read stuff inside an RSS feed reader, but doesn't fit with my current workflow. My site has no ads, tracking, cookies (aside from the ones imported by the odd embedded youtube video).
> the ability to read the whole content in the reader instead of having to go to the site. But that depends on how RSS/Atom exposes the content;
It rather depends on the amount of content the RSS _author_ includes in the RSS feed. There's nothing in the RSS/Atom protocol that prevents you from reading the entire article, but some website creators decide to truncate the feed content.
My RSS reader of choice, InoReader, has the option to download the original website which solves the problem. However, I have over 200 feeds and it's rare to find one without the entire content being included.
A lot of services, (like Feedbin in my prior reply) and a lot of reader applications will permit different ways of viewing the data to get full content to appear even in truncated feeds. That said, non-full content feeds are pretty rare outside of corporate media.
I don't really know what you mean. There's a ton of feed readers, both from an application and server side. I don't really need a lot of organization, but I've never seen a reader without support for folders. If you need more than one layer of hierarchy at 50 blogs... I have no idea what you're doing. I follow like 250 blogs and have just two folders, maybe, and it's super maintainable.
Anyway, services like Feedbin have been going strong for a long time, have a rock solid syncing system with great tools for things like seeing frequency of posting and abandoned or moved feeds, folders, automatic filters, and broad support in the app ecosystem if you don't like their apps or web experience (which is very good).
RSS is absolutely extensive and has millions of users. It's at least as mainstream as Mastodon/ActivityPub, it's just not talked about as such, and that's _excluding_ Podcasts as a use case.
WE have been letting that ecosystem rot. Maybe it's time to fix it up. A lot of these old internet projects were developed by one person to scratch a personal itch. That doesn't seem to happen so much these days - we expect companies to do it for profit.
Not sure I fully understand what you mean by distribution here. What I meant is that the ratio of personal blogs supporting RSS to the total number of blogs is too low, indicating a lack of adoption.
I’ve emailed many technical writers whose work I liked, asking them to add feed support, and most didn’t bother. One possible reason could be the protocol itself and the fragmentation between RSS, Atom, JSON RSS, etc.—or it could be something else entirely.
I think the indie web hasn't taken off because it's...indie...and it's competing with businesses that spend lots of money on growth. This will always be the case. You have to jump into the melee if you want the eyeballs, or just be content on a free island. Personally I find plenty of actual human beings publishing on popular platforms.
I remember the Internet before Google, Facebook, YouTube, Myspace, etc. The whole thing was what is now being referred to as 'the indieweb' and it was the best incarnation of the Internet.
Consolidating most of the web into giant content silos is one of the worst things to happen to it
One of the things I noticed is the behavior of bloggers nowadays are different from the past. The "blogosphere" used to be ripe with links to other blogs they found interesting, which facilitated discoverability so much!
> Consolidating most of the web into giant content silos is one of the worst things to happen to it
I'm not sure that "giant content silos," alone, is the harm.
But as soon as you start adding "algorithmic feeds," and "supported by advertising," then all the dark "engagement hacks" start showing up, and it turns toxic in a heartbeat.
To use a specific example, I don't think LiveJournal, despite being a "giant content silo" back in the early 2000s, was particularly harmful. It was a chronological feed, with pagination - you had to decide, at the bottom of the page, to click next. You didn't have "endless scrolling." And because it was purely chronological, if you refreshed, and there was no new content, well, go do something else. Nobody has posted anything new. If it got too much to manage, there was the ever-popular "LJ Friends Cut" - trimming who you follow to people you actually get value out of.
It was a useful ecosystem, but didn't have any of the nasty dark corners of our modern content silos. But it was also not ad-funded - it was funded by premium memberships, and IIRC some merchandise sales, and in general, "funded by the people who got value out of it," so the goals of those funding it were generally aligned with the goals of those running and using it.
DreamWidth, today, is a fork of LJ that seems to be doing just fine with the same approach LJ had. It is a "moderate sized content silo," at least, and it doesn't have any of the dark patterns of modern ad-based platforms that I've seen.
Yes, and back then the way to go was to have a personal website with links to all your friends and some other cool sites around the web. If you wanted more discoverability, you'd join a webring (or try your shot at getting listed in a directory).
I'm still a fan of webrings, hosting a personal website is now easier and cheaper than ever, but it's not the norm anymore. Back then it was, as you had nowhere else to go, more people were browsing the directories, weblinks, links on personal pages, than now.
The reason the indi web hasn't taken off is because the masses don't care about that kind of content, and they never have. The people who are interested in home grown blogs are dwarfed by the masses that came online by way of billion dollar marketing budgets, driven by the business mechanics of dopamine farming. The indie web will always be relegated to nerds and eccentrics.
I think, what is meant though, the generic Web has shifted the balance away from what once was diffuse to what is now consolidated. That personal connections could and would be monetised was not a given, but has become the norm rather than the exception. That people are retreating from the networks that enable that is not surprising.
Exactly this. And this is a good thing. Small communities have good properties that just don't scale.
And the people that want big communities generally want things that federated networkscan't offer (ie, no ability to be authoritive, gather enough attention to make money, transfer money). And because of government interference in such things no non-incorporated network will ever be able to provide those things. Attempts to cater to the masses is a waste of time.
Webrings[0] are somewhat being used again. I keep a list of the blogs I follow[1] in OPML & HTML, so that you can either bulk-subscribe, or browse through blogs that you might find relevant; you can do the same!
On RSS readers/organization, I didn't need a solution, because "personal blogs" post rarely enough that
even following ~100 blogs, I see 3~5 updates per week.
I also maintain a rough list of people I follow on my own blog.
But I’ll be honest: I came to the game way later than most of the veterans here (circa 2018). I don’t understand how webrings work, what problem they solve, or how to add one to my Hugo-generated static site.
I created a GitHub repo where you write markdown files as blog posts. And it has a GitHub action that automatically publishes to GitHub pages. One can simply fork and make their own.
>hasn’t taken off because of discoverability issues
I just don't think of all of indie web as mass media. Blogs can be for friends and colleagues, they don't necessarily want to maximize 'reach'.
I hope part of this movement manages to reset the whole dynamic of social media. Imagine if instead of always writing for the panopticon, you were just writing to people you cared about. Maybe not even publicly available by default.
There was a period where blogging was seen as a great way to make easy money, so everyone ended up with ads and analytics on their sites, obsessing over maximizing reach, just like how YouTube is nowadays.
Perhaps most people just never went back to thinking of blogging as something you do for the sake of it instead of for some expectation of financial compensation in the future?
I think it is a change in proportion instead of a change in perspective. The people who write for the love of the process were doing it before it became mainstream and many kept doing it after too, or found a different venue, maybe even just writing on paper or a typewriter, as it wasn't about the income for them anyway.
In the early days when 90% of bloggers were doing it for passion it seemed like most blogs were good. There was an inflection point around the MySpace & LiveJournal days where it became very easy to be a blogger and some really good writers who otherwise wouldn't have set up a server were part of blogging.. but it went as you say, riding the commercialization train, until 90% of bloggers are doing it for income (or link-farming or whatever). But that doesn't mean all the passionate bloggers became commercially-biased, they are just harder to find.
That's my reading of it, though. I'm sure it's biased by nostalgia. And I'm sure there were people who got caught up in the commercialization and maybe it went as you say, that they never went back to doing it for non-commercial reasons. Like when a hobby becomes an occupation becomes a source of stress. But I've also seen quite a few old blogs that still don't run ads and still post occasionally.
I tried the whole "ads and reach" thing for a while, discovered I actually don't care about it for "beer money" levels of revenue, and went back to just blogging about that which I care about, for the intrinsic benefits of having to write my projects up.
- It forces me to finish things. I was, prior to having a blog, fairly prone to "90% done, I'll finish it later..." sort of stuff, which led to a lot of mental clutter from "having to keep track of what was still inflight."
- I can, after a project is done, confidently flush all details of it from my brain, because anything I found odd or notable that would be worth remembering is noted in my blog posts.
And often enough, I'll end up down a weird research rabbit hole I wouldn't have otherwise gone down, learning about new subjects, so I can write something up with what I feel is enough understanding to competently write about it.
This is just what I want to get to: write-ups as some form of personal accountability, and to reiterate my thought process and learning. My problem is that I rarely feel I'm competent enough to really contribute to the subject, so I just try to make it more of a workshop log than a resource for others.
Dev.to started out pretty well, tried to keep the algorithms to the minimum, but ended up being flooded with half-assed beginner content and promotion listicles.
It's almost like it's impossible to start a platform without algorithmic curation nowadays and not have it turn into a place of repetitive low-effort content.
Mine was http://typedrummer.com/ super fun but, if the developer of that site sees this, I was sad that typing "something!" didn't produce a "ba-dum ching" :)
I feel that many of the comments here that are claiming the IndieWeb hasn't "taken off" are either stating the obvious or, if that's not the intention, completely missing the point.
It's like saying that gardening hasn't taken off because most people buy their vegetables at the supermarket. It doesn't need to "take off" to be valuable to those who participate. Maintaining a personal website is about owning your digital presence, creative freedom, and self-expression! It's not about appealing to the masses!
I remember in the early 2000s how I used to spend my leisure time learning HTML and writing my website, one HTML tag at a time. Writing a few lines of code in a text editor and then watching the browser render that code into a vibrant web page full of colours and images felt like an art form. It was doubly fun to find other netizens who shared that same joy of maintaining and publishing their websites. The IndieWeb is about preserving that hacker culture where websites are crafted and hosted not for mass appeal but for the sheer joy of creation and sharing with like-minded individuals.
The IndieWeb doesn't need to go mainstream to be meaningful. It's a celebration of a more personal, decentralised, and creative world wide web. And for those of us who still care about these values, it is already meaningful.
No question here, but I just wanted to add: I subscribed to the "daily random posts" feed in April 2022. Because of that feed, I've subscribed to some blogs, and even reached out and become "internet friends" with some of their authors. As well as, you know, just generally being informed/entertained by the work that you're collating.
The second link is a duplicate that simply redirects to the first. If it is not too much trouble, would you be able to remove the second entry? Thanks for your time!
Neat, my site is on the list but don’t remember if I submitted it before. I made some notes on implementing IndieWeb WebMentions here [1]. It’s like a decentralised/psuedo-fediverse commenting system that features replies and likes etc.
Pretty cool. I re-discovered RSS last year after getting tired of the usual mdoern "smart" feeds. For me, the only problem with independent small blogs is the discovery stage: you need to somehow to find out about an interesting blog, which is even harder if you want go out of your usual info-bubble.
Discoverability remains the one great problem of online self-publishing. A history of how solutions have changed over the years would make for a fun history of the web.
Neat. I maintain a blog myself[1] and prefer reading content written by actual human beings, not corporate shills or spammers masquerading on Medium and Dev.to.
But I feel like the whole indie web thing hasn’t taken off because of discoverability issues. RSS and Atom are nice, but they aren’t mainstream enough. Also, adding support for them is difficult for non-technical or even semi-technical people.
My blog does support RSS, and I use a reader to keep tabs on people I find interesting. But personally, I’m not a great fan of the protocol itself. It’s old, written in XML. There is JSON RSS, but that’s not widely supported and is fragmented as hell. Also, most RSS readers are just firehose feeds and don’t offer much in terms of organization.
I’m yet to find a solution for this that I genuinely like.
[1]: https://rednafi.com/
Are we really abandoning established, stable protocols because we don't like the serialisation format they use? The practical difference here between XML and JSON is negligible, the value here comes from the ecosystem (which is extensive on the RSS/atom side, and non-existent on the other). As a user, you'll never interact with the XML. As a developer, if you're interacting with the XML rather than using one of the many, MANY, libraries, you're doing something wrong.
Not saying we need to abandon it, but I’m not a big fan of RSS itself.
Yes, there’s an ecosystem, but it’s neither extensive nor mainstream. Feed readers are hit or miss, and I haven’t found one I like. Subscribing to 50 people is enough to make the feed unusable since there’s little to no organization.
While this isn’t entirely the protocol’s fault, its poor state is largely due to its lack of mainstream adoption—too few people care about it. The protocol itself might also be part of the problem.
So discoverability is still a problem because not enough people care about the existing solutions.
Okay, I'll shill my feed reader since it's an example of one that lets you organize feeds and doesn't present a firehose: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re...
It's only for Firefox though because I like my reader being integrated into my browser and Firefox was the only one that supported a sidebar at the time. Looks like Chrome supports sidebars to now. So mayhaps I'll update it.
Shilling is welcome as long as it’s not corporate ;) Love FF, this looks promising.
> Subscribing to 50 people is enough to make the feed unusable since there’s little to no organization.
What kind of organization do you want? Every feed reader I've ever used let me categorize/organize feeds in whatever way I wanted, but it's a manual process.
Exactly this, but with some automatic content grouping. Also, the ability to read the whole content in the reader instead of having to go to the site. But that depends on how RSS/Atom exposes the content; this is why I am not a big fan of the protocol. Too much fragmentation: RSS, RSS2, Atom.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by 'automatic content grouping'. Are you talking about somehow automatically grouping the posts from disparate sites into buckets based on some criteria? Newsboat, for example, lets you do this with tags and queries: https://newsboat.org/releases/2.19/docs/newsboat.html#_query...
I'm also not sure what fragmentation has to do with anything. I don't think I've used a feed reader that didn't understand all current flavors of RSS and Atom, so it makes absolutely no difference what the webmaster decided to use, my news reader can figure it out.
It is a little bit annoying when the webmaster doesn't put the full text of the article in the news feed, and instead wants you to actually visit their site to read their stuff. I'd guess that they do that to make sure that you actually visit the site once in a while and might accidentally view an ad so they can make a few cents or they hope that you might see something else on their site you might be interested in or whatever. It also saves some bandwidth by not downloading the full text of an article if it turns out that I wasn't interested in it.
> I'd guess that they do that to make sure that you actually visit the site once in a while and might accidentally view an ad so they can make a few cents or they hope that you might see something else on their site you might be interested in or whatever.
I can't speak for others, but as someone who hand codes my HTML, it is a non-trivial amount of work to convert the entire text of a page into an RSS feed, whereas it is easy to add the headline, datetime, and summary.
I get that it is pretty cool to read stuff inside an RSS feed reader, but doesn't fit with my current workflow. My site has no ads, tracking, cookies (aside from the ones imported by the odd embedded youtube video).
> the ability to read the whole content in the reader instead of having to go to the site. But that depends on how RSS/Atom exposes the content;
It rather depends on the amount of content the RSS _author_ includes in the RSS feed. There's nothing in the RSS/Atom protocol that prevents you from reading the entire article, but some website creators decide to truncate the feed content.
My RSS reader of choice, InoReader, has the option to download the original website which solves the problem. However, I have over 200 feeds and it's rare to find one without the entire content being included.
A lot of services, (like Feedbin in my prior reply) and a lot of reader applications will permit different ways of viewing the data to get full content to appear even in truncated feeds. That said, non-full content feeds are pretty rare outside of corporate media.
Honestly, I don't think it's a problem with RSS as a format. It's a problem with clients.
I don't really know what you mean. There's a ton of feed readers, both from an application and server side. I don't really need a lot of organization, but I've never seen a reader without support for folders. If you need more than one layer of hierarchy at 50 blogs... I have no idea what you're doing. I follow like 250 blogs and have just two folders, maybe, and it's super maintainable.
Anyway, services like Feedbin have been going strong for a long time, have a rock solid syncing system with great tools for things like seeing frequency of posting and abandoned or moved feeds, folders, automatic filters, and broad support in the app ecosystem if you don't like their apps or web experience (which is very good).
RSS is absolutely extensive and has millions of users. It's at least as mainstream as Mastodon/ActivityPub, it's just not talked about as such, and that's _excluding_ Podcasts as a use case.
WE have been letting that ecosystem rot. Maybe it's time to fix it up. A lot of these old internet projects were developed by one person to scratch a personal itch. That doesn't seem to happen so much these days - we expect companies to do it for profit.
[dead]
The comment read to me more about distribution that has some network effect. RSS/atom is fine.
Not sure I fully understand what you mean by distribution here. What I meant is that the ratio of personal blogs supporting RSS to the total number of blogs is too low, indicating a lack of adoption.
I’ve emailed many technical writers whose work I liked, asking them to add feed support, and most didn’t bother. One possible reason could be the protocol itself and the fragmentation between RSS, Atom, JSON RSS, etc.—or it could be something else entirely.
I think the indie web hasn't taken off because it's...indie...and it's competing with businesses that spend lots of money on growth. This will always be the case. You have to jump into the melee if you want the eyeballs, or just be content on a free island. Personally I find plenty of actual human beings publishing on popular platforms.
I remember the Internet before Google, Facebook, YouTube, Myspace, etc. The whole thing was what is now being referred to as 'the indieweb' and it was the best incarnation of the Internet.
Consolidating most of the web into giant content silos is one of the worst things to happen to it
One of the things I noticed is the behavior of bloggers nowadays are different from the past. The "blogosphere" used to be ripe with links to other blogs they found interesting, which facilitated discoverability so much!
> Consolidating most of the web into giant content silos is one of the worst things to happen to it
I'm not sure that "giant content silos," alone, is the harm.
But as soon as you start adding "algorithmic feeds," and "supported by advertising," then all the dark "engagement hacks" start showing up, and it turns toxic in a heartbeat.
To use a specific example, I don't think LiveJournal, despite being a "giant content silo" back in the early 2000s, was particularly harmful. It was a chronological feed, with pagination - you had to decide, at the bottom of the page, to click next. You didn't have "endless scrolling." And because it was purely chronological, if you refreshed, and there was no new content, well, go do something else. Nobody has posted anything new. If it got too much to manage, there was the ever-popular "LJ Friends Cut" - trimming who you follow to people you actually get value out of.
It was a useful ecosystem, but didn't have any of the nasty dark corners of our modern content silos. But it was also not ad-funded - it was funded by premium memberships, and IIRC some merchandise sales, and in general, "funded by the people who got value out of it," so the goals of those funding it were generally aligned with the goals of those running and using it.
DreamWidth, today, is a fork of LJ that seems to be doing just fine with the same approach LJ had. It is a "moderate sized content silo," at least, and it doesn't have any of the dark patterns of modern ad-based platforms that I've seen.
Yes, and back then the way to go was to have a personal website with links to all your friends and some other cool sites around the web. If you wanted more discoverability, you'd join a webring (or try your shot at getting listed in a directory).
I'm still a fan of webrings, hosting a personal website is now easier and cheaper than ever, but it's not the norm anymore. Back then it was, as you had nowhere else to go, more people were browsing the directories, weblinks, links on personal pages, than now.
The reason the indi web hasn't taken off is because the masses don't care about that kind of content, and they never have. The people who are interested in home grown blogs are dwarfed by the masses that came online by way of billion dollar marketing budgets, driven by the business mechanics of dopamine farming. The indie web will always be relegated to nerds and eccentrics.
The indieweb cannot, by definition, go mainstream.
I think, what is meant though, the generic Web has shifted the balance away from what once was diffuse to what is now consolidated. That personal connections could and would be monetised was not a given, but has become the norm rather than the exception. That people are retreating from the networks that enable that is not surprising.
Exactly this. And this is a good thing. Small communities have good properties that just don't scale.
And the people that want big communities generally want things that federated networkscan't offer (ie, no ability to be authoritive, gather enough attention to make money, transfer money). And because of government interference in such things no non-incorporated network will ever be able to provide those things. Attempts to cater to the masses is a waste of time.
> discoverability issues
Webrings[0] are somewhat being used again. I keep a list of the blogs I follow[1] in OPML & HTML, so that you can either bulk-subscribe, or browse through blogs that you might find relevant; you can do the same!
On RSS readers/organization, I didn't need a solution, because "personal blogs" post rarely enough that even following ~100 blogs, I see 3~5 updates per week.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
[1]: https://blog.davidv.dev/blogs-i-follow.html
I also maintain a rough list of people I follow on my own blog.
But I’ll be honest: I came to the game way later than most of the veterans here (circa 2018). I don’t understand how webrings work, what problem they solve, or how to add one to my Hugo-generated static site.
Another good resource is https://searchmysite.net
It is great for searching the indieweb with your interests as the keywords
I created a GitHub repo where you write markdown files as blog posts. And it has a GitHub action that automatically publishes to GitHub pages. One can simply fork and make their own.
Here is the blog that I wrote about how I created that repo (so meta) https://blog.tldrversion.com/posts/vibe-coding
And this the GitHub repo for that https://github.com/veeragoni/blog
My blog works similarly [1]. Everything is written in Markdown, then Hugo builds the site, and GitHub Actions publishes it to Pages.
While my blog gets around 20k monthly views, discoverability is still a problem.
[1]: https://rednafi.com/misc/behind_the_blog/
>hasn’t taken off because of discoverability issues
I just don't think of all of indie web as mass media. Blogs can be for friends and colleagues, they don't necessarily want to maximize 'reach'.
I hope part of this movement manages to reset the whole dynamic of social media. Imagine if instead of always writing for the panopticon, you were just writing to people you cared about. Maybe not even publicly available by default.
There was a period where blogging was seen as a great way to make easy money, so everyone ended up with ads and analytics on their sites, obsessing over maximizing reach, just like how YouTube is nowadays.
Perhaps most people just never went back to thinking of blogging as something you do for the sake of it instead of for some expectation of financial compensation in the future?
I think it is a change in proportion instead of a change in perspective. The people who write for the love of the process were doing it before it became mainstream and many kept doing it after too, or found a different venue, maybe even just writing on paper or a typewriter, as it wasn't about the income for them anyway.
In the early days when 90% of bloggers were doing it for passion it seemed like most blogs were good. There was an inflection point around the MySpace & LiveJournal days where it became very easy to be a blogger and some really good writers who otherwise wouldn't have set up a server were part of blogging.. but it went as you say, riding the commercialization train, until 90% of bloggers are doing it for income (or link-farming or whatever). But that doesn't mean all the passionate bloggers became commercially-biased, they are just harder to find.
That's my reading of it, though. I'm sure it's biased by nostalgia. And I'm sure there were people who got caught up in the commercialization and maybe it went as you say, that they never went back to doing it for non-commercial reasons. Like when a hobby becomes an occupation becomes a source of stress. But I've also seen quite a few old blogs that still don't run ads and still post occasionally.
I tried the whole "ads and reach" thing for a while, discovered I actually don't care about it for "beer money" levels of revenue, and went back to just blogging about that which I care about, for the intrinsic benefits of having to write my projects up.
- It forces me to finish things. I was, prior to having a blog, fairly prone to "90% done, I'll finish it later..." sort of stuff, which led to a lot of mental clutter from "having to keep track of what was still inflight."
- I can, after a project is done, confidently flush all details of it from my brain, because anything I found odd or notable that would be worth remembering is noted in my blog posts.
And often enough, I'll end up down a weird research rabbit hole I wouldn't have otherwise gone down, learning about new subjects, so I can write something up with what I feel is enough understanding to competently write about it.
This is just what I want to get to: write-ups as some form of personal accountability, and to reiterate my thought process and learning. My problem is that I rarely feel I'm competent enough to really contribute to the subject, so I just try to make it more of a workshop log than a resource for others.
One reason to abandon analytics scripts and obsess over the stats. Fell into this trap when a few of my posts surfaced on the front page here.
> RSS and Atom are nice, but they aren’t mainstream enough.
That's a feature, not a bug. "Mainstream" is where the corporate shills and spammers you want to avoid are.
Medium and dev.to are possibly the worst sites in the industry.
Dev.to started out pretty well, tried to keep the algorithms to the minimum, but ended up being flooded with half-assed beginner content and promotion listicles.
It's almost like it's impossible to start a platform without algorithmic curation nowadays and not have it turn into a place of repetitive low-effort content.
Along with Hashnode. They all started with the promise of democratizing blogging, only to adopt all the dark patterns within a few years.
Yes that one too. All three are trash tier shit content.
AT protocol blogging, or wouldn't that get into the AT search index? https://github.com/rwietter/atproto-blog
Is there a MotherJones of indie RSS?
The same concept, but for funny web gems (with a strong skew towards little WebGL art toys): https://sharkle.com
This is fun. The first page it brought me to: https://trashloop.com
Mine was http://typedrummer.com/ super fun but, if the developer of that site sees this, I was sad that typing "something!" didn't produce a "ba-dum ching" :)
In a similar vein: https://kagi.com/smallweb
Reminds me of the old days of StumbleUpon.
I've been using the "surprise me..." feature on https://wiby.org as a sort of small-web/indie-web StumbleUpon lately.
https://marginalia-search.com/explore/random is another cool option - plus, you can get results similar to a site you like.
I feel that many of the comments here that are claiming the IndieWeb hasn't "taken off" are either stating the obvious or, if that's not the intention, completely missing the point.
It's like saying that gardening hasn't taken off because most people buy their vegetables at the supermarket. It doesn't need to "take off" to be valuable to those who participate. Maintaining a personal website is about owning your digital presence, creative freedom, and self-expression! It's not about appealing to the masses!
I remember in the early 2000s how I used to spend my leisure time learning HTML and writing my website, one HTML tag at a time. Writing a few lines of code in a text editor and then watching the browser render that code into a vibrant web page full of colours and images felt like an art form. It was doubly fun to find other netizens who shared that same joy of maintaining and publishing their websites. The IndieWeb is about preserving that hacker culture where websites are crafted and hosted not for mass appeal but for the sheer joy of creation and sharing with like-minded individuals.
The IndieWeb doesn't need to go mainstream to be meaningful. It's a celebration of a more personal, decentralised, and creative world wide web. And for those of us who still care about these values, it is already meaningful.
Creator here. Feel free to ask me anything.
No question here, but I just wanted to add: I subscribed to the "daily random posts" feed in April 2022. Because of that feed, I've subscribed to some blogs, and even reached out and become "internet friends" with some of their authors. As well as, you know, just generally being informed/entertained by the work that you're collating.
So thanks!
Thank you for creating this project. I was delighted to find my blog in the list! However, my blog appears twice in your list:
1) https://susam.net/feed.xml
2) https://susam.net/blog/feed.xml
The second link is a duplicate that simply redirects to the first. If it is not too much trouble, would you be able to remove the second entry? Thanks for your time!
I started a blogging platforming recently, any chance you can include all its blog automatically?
I wouldn't want to overwhelm the results with a single platform. also I do check each submission manually so I want to keep it manageable.
I’m curious about two things:
- the stack
- the source of your collection (seeing my write up there is flattering)
both are answered on the faq page in detail: https://indieblog.page/faq
quick answer: php+sqlite and a hackernews thread. nowadays mostly submissions.
If you were to die, is there a way for someone to continue with the project?
sources are on github, blog URLs can be downloaded.
Stumbleupon is indeed missing in the modern algorithmic curation world.
I sorely miss del.icio.us
Someone built this which is similar but it grabs websites from blockchain pointers. https://orbz.fun
That someone is you or? You also made "orbiter"
Neat, my site is on the list but don’t remember if I submitted it before. I made some notes on implementing IndieWeb WebMentions here [1]. It’s like a decentralised/psuedo-fediverse commenting system that features replies and likes etc.
[1]: https://www.lloydatkinson.net/notes/19/
The first random blog post that I got served was this one:
https://nutcroft.com/blog/goodbye/
> [...] And now this blog goes too. So, goodbye!
Oh well
Pretty cool. I re-discovered RSS last year after getting tired of the usual mdoern "smart" feeds. For me, the only problem with independent small blogs is the discovery stage: you need to somehow to find out about an interesting blog, which is even harder if you want go out of your usual info-bubble.
Related:
Show HN: Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31002171 - April 2022 (68 comments)
I like your daily random feed concept! I am going to subscribe. Here’s my blog https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/
I'm still fond of old school blogs and RSS feeds
Mine https://dsebastien.net
Hmmm....[1]
[1] https://ibb.co/ZpCYDgN8
> JSON Feed is not supported.
That is unfortunate. :(
This is a great article!
And the very first blog I get is "written for generative AI." Great. Grand. Awesome.
Great, now who is going to bring back web rings?
Discoverability remains the one great problem of online self-publishing. A history of how solutions have changed over the years would make for a fun history of the web.
for anyone who also wanted to know how that super neat list was made: https://www.tabulator.info/