Feeling Inspired by the Indie Web

by: Hans Jorgensen

August 10th, 2024

This last month and a half has been very busy for me. Not long after my previous blog post, I applied for and got accepted for a job with FUTO, and have spent the last few weeks completely uprooting my life to move down to Austin, TX. It's a big change, but an exciting one - I'm a big fan of FUTO's mission, and the job itself is with the FUBS programming platform, which means I'm working primarily with embedded devices and bare metal.

I've also had the opportunity to get inspired. Over the past month or so, I've been reading a lot about what is variously called the indie Web, the small Web, the old Web, or whatever else you want to call it - the basic principle is that data is primarily managed and controlled by owning your own domain and hosting your own content on it, in order to revive the best parts of what made the Internet so fun in the 90s (before it got taken over by the same few big platforms we have today).

It started with finding this video in my YouTube feed, "You Should Check Out the Indie Web" by You've Got Kat:

In it, the author summarizes various "indie" websites and the technologies they use to make themselves discoverable and keep in touch - hosting services such as Neocities, groups such as web rings, and alternate search engines such as Marginalia Search that focus on independent, non-commercial content. She makes a rather nascent comparison of these technologies to the sort of things proposed by Web3, pointing out that most if not all of the benefits provided by it (primarily, "owning your data") are solved by simply maintaining control of a personal domain name (i.e. using Web1 technology), and invites the viewer to make their own personal website. (Personally, I don't think Web1 goes all the way there, in that we do need a way to host web content independent of a specific web server, but Web1 really does seem to get most of the way there).

This was, of course, immediately relevant to me - I already have a personal website, and I've been maintaining it for 2 years. However, it hasn't really been anything more than a professional blog/portfolio - with some of the ideas brought up here, I could spruce things up and really make it more of my own personal site - perhaps a personal blog where I post about other topics as well, while still maintaining a professional view should I need one. I devled into the rabbit hole provided by Marginalia Search's random website feature and explored the indie web ecosystem, not only finding a great variety of websites to be inspired by, but also learning about other technologies and standards these sites use, such as how to set up RSS feeds or how to write distributed comments via Webmention.

So, over the next few weeks or months, you're going to see some changes to this website as I make it more of my own personal space:

• The first one will already be live by the time you read this: a site-wide RSS feed. All of my posts, apps, and games will be made available in a feed that you can download and use with a feed reader, which will periodically poll it and notify you of new posts. Check out that feed here, as well as filtered feeds for Apps and Games and Posts.
• A better internal publishing flow. Right now, I have to manually sign in to Amazon AWS SSO in order to update my website and update everything - by changing this to something I can run on $ git push with little to no user intervention, I should be able to write a whole lot more often.
• Post categorization on both the front page and in RSS feeds - rather than seeing all of my blog posts in a single list, you can see them in one of several categories. In particular, there will be a quick portfolio view that will show my best technical and software work.
• Support for the Webmention standard, which allows pages hosted on sovereign domains to easily respond to each other as if they were social media comments. This will include both:
  • Sending Webmentions whenever I make new posts. Whenever I publish a new version of any page, I will automatically send Webmentions out to the pages I link to that support the Webmention protocol.
  • Setting up receiving Webmentions. This will include both a manual Webmention submission form and an automatic Webmention endpoint, including setting up a Web server that will asynchronously verify Webmentions. Webmentions will likely be included in my web pages manually as part of the publish process, though I may end up making the list of Webmentions themselves available publicly as a JSON REST API. When this site starts supporting Webmentions, I will post a blog entry explaining the site's submission and verification process.
• A renewed committment to hosting on IPFS - while I do currently pin my website to IPFS, I don't currently keep an IPFS node online, which puts IPFS users out of luck. I'm going to instead keep an IPFS node in the cloud that pins the site and also serves it on thehans255.com, as I outline in my article about hosting a backwards-compatible IPFS site. That way, others can still access and link to my static content even if my web server can't serve it to them.

And of course, as I implement these changes, I will document them as I go, discussing my process in a way that others can implement and apply to their own website. (And I may even open-source this website soon!)