[HN Gopher] Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time
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Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time
Author : vinhnx
Score : 190 points
Date : 2025-02-22 15:42 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (indieblog.page)
(TXT) w3m dump (indieblog.page)
| computerthings wrote:
| for anyone who also wanted to know how that super neat list was
| made: https://www.tabulator.info/
| splitbrain wrote:
| Creator here. Feel free to ask me anything.
| 101008 wrote:
| I started a blogging platforming recently, any chance you can
| include all its blog automatically?
| splitbrain wrote:
| 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.
| rednafi wrote:
| I'm curious about two things:
|
| - the stack
|
| - the source of your collection (seeing my write up there is
| flattering)
| splitbrain wrote:
| both are answered on the faq page in detail:
| https://indieblog.page/faq
|
| quick answer: php+sqlite and a hackernews thread. nowadays
| mostly submissions.
| tjwds wrote:
| 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!
| ZachSaucier wrote:
| If you were to die, is there a way for someone to continue with
| the project?
| splitbrain wrote:
| sources are on github, blog URLs can be downloaded.
| susam wrote:
| 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!
| righthand wrote:
| Stumbleupon is indeed missing in the modern algorithmic curation
| world.
| jhunter1016 wrote:
| Someone built this which is similar but it grabs websites from
| blockchain pointers. https://orbz.fun
| KomoD wrote:
| That someone is you or? You also made "orbiter"
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| The same concept, but for funny web gems (with a strong skew
| towards little WebGL art toys): https://sharkle.com
| LostMyLogin wrote:
| This is fun. The first page it brought me to:
| https://trashloop.com
| rednafi wrote:
| 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/
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| The comment read to me more about distribution that has some
| network effect. RSS/atom is fine.
| rednafi wrote:
| 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.
| rednafi wrote:
| 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.
| netghost wrote:
| 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.
| rednafi wrote:
| Shilling is welcome as long as it's not corporate ;) Love
| FF, this looks promising.
| basscomm wrote:
| > 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.
| rednafi wrote:
| 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.
| jasonpbecker wrote:
| 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.
| netghost wrote:
| Honestly, I don't think it's a problem with RSS as a
| format. It's a problem with clients.
| basscomm wrote:
| 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.
| darekkay wrote:
| > 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.
| jasonpbecker wrote:
| 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.
| jrowen wrote:
| 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.
| basscomm wrote:
| 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
| trinix912 wrote:
| 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.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _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.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Is there a MotherJones of indie RSS?
| MortyWaves wrote:
| Medium and dev.to are possibly the worst sites in the industry.
| rednafi wrote:
| Along with Hashnode. They all started with the promise of
| democratizing blogging, only to adopt all the dark patterns
| within a few years.
| trinix912 wrote:
| 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.
| earth2mars wrote:
| 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
| rednafi wrote:
| 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/
| deivid wrote:
| > 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
| rednafi wrote:
| 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.
| 1shooner wrote:
| >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.
| rednafi wrote:
| 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.
| trinix912 wrote:
| 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?
| kevindamm wrote:
| 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.
| Syonyk wrote:
| 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.
| 1shooner wrote:
| 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.
| root_axis wrote:
| 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.
| regularjack wrote:
| The indieweb cannot, by definition, go mainstream.
| dleeftink wrote:
| 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.
| superkuh wrote:
| 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.
| dSebastien wrote:
| I'm still fond of old school blogs and RSS feeds
|
| Mine https://dsebastien.net
| james_pm wrote:
| In a similar vein: https://kagi.com/smallweb
| arjie wrote:
| I like your daily random feed concept! I am going to subscribe.
| Here's my blog https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/
| k0tan32 wrote:
| 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.
| MortyWaves wrote:
| 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/
| Sincere6066 wrote:
| And the very first blog I get is "written for generative AI."
| Great. Grand. Awesome.
| netfortius wrote:
| Hmmm....[1]
|
| [1] https://ibb.co/ZpCYDgN8
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Show HN: Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31002171 - April 2022 (68
| comments)
| idlewords wrote:
| 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.
| ej1 wrote:
| This is a great article!
| susam wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2025-02-22 23:00 UTC)