Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time

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• 1 year ago

If you were to die, is there a way for someone to continue with the project?

splitbrain5• 1 year ago

sources are on github, blog URLs can be downloaded.

susam3• 1 year ago

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!

splitbrain5• 1 year ago

done

cowboylowrez• 1 year ago

the big list was cool, I saw something about "discipline" while scrolling it but then couldn't search for the page with that keyword. not a big deal, downloading the json sorted that out but thought I'd mention it. really cool page!

righthand• 1 year ago

Stumbleupon is indeed missing in the modern algorithmic curation world.

jhunter10162• 1 year ago

Someone built this which is similar but it grabs websites from blockchain pointers. https://orbz.fun

KomoD• 1 year ago

That someone is you or? You also made "orbiter"

nosrepa• 1 year ago

I sorely miss del.icio.us

lovegrenoble• 1 year ago

The same concept, but for funny web gems (with a strong skew towards little WebGL art toys): https://sharkle.com

LostMyLogin• 1 year ago

This is fun. The first page it brought me to: https://trashloop.com

kgwxd• 1 year ago

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" :)

rednafi10• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

The comment read to me more about distribution that has some network effect. RSS/atom is fine.

rednafi10• 1 year ago

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.

jrowen2• 1 year ago

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.

basscomm4• 1 year ago

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

browningstreet• 1 year ago

Is there a MotherJones of indie RSS?

MortyWaves3• 1 year ago

Medium and dev.to are possibly the worst sites in the industry.

rednafi10• 1 year ago

Along with Hashnode. They all started with the promise of democratizing blogging, only to adopt all the dark patterns within a few years.

trinix9123• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

rednafi10• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

rednafi10• 1 year ago

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.

mac-attack• 1 year ago

Another good resource is https://searchmysite.net

It is great for searching the indieweb with your interests as the keywords

1shooner2• 1 year ago

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.

rednafi10• 1 year ago

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.

trinix9123• 1 year ago

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?

root_axis• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

The indieweb cannot, by definition, go mainstream.

superkuh• 1 year ago

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.

fsiefken• 1 year ago

AT protocol blogging, or wouldn't that get into the AT search index? https://github.com/rwietter/atproto-blog

Gormo2• 1 year ago

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.

dSebastien• 1 year ago

I'm still fond of old school blogs and RSS feeds

Mine https://dsebastien.net

james_pm• 1 year ago

In a similar vein: https://kagi.com/smallweb

Gormo2• 1 year ago

Reminds me of the old days of StumbleUpon.

sricks3• 1 year ago

I've been using the "surprise me..." feature on https://wiby.org as a sort of small-web/indie-web StumbleUpon lately.

asicsp• 1 year ago

https://marginalia-search.com/explore/random is another cool option - plus, you can get results similar to a site you like.

arjie• 1 year ago

I like your daily random feed concept! I am going to subscribe. Here’s my blog https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/

k0tan32• 1 year ago

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.

MortyWaves3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

And the very first blog I get is "written for generative AI." Great. Grand. Awesome.

netfortius• 1 year ago

Hmmm....[1]

[1] https://ibb.co/ZpCYDgN8

dang• 1 year ago

Show HN: Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31002171 - April 2022 (68 comments)

idlewords• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

This is a great article!

susam3• 1 year ago

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.

MK2k• 1 year ago

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

dmitshur• 1 year ago

JSON Feed is not supported.

That is unfortunate. :(

kevincox• 1 year ago

I used to enjoy the weekly feed with 1 random post. I would use my feed reader's "full text" functionality to pull in the content. It was a good way to drip-feed new authors into my feed and I could subscribe to the ones I liked.

Unfortunately they fixed the set of allowed parameters, the lowest-volume option is 5 per week. Probably good for some people but more than I was looking for.

dailydetour123• 1 year ago

I really like this! I created a month or so back - https://www.thedailydetour.co.uk/, inspired by what seems like a similar ambition! I wanted a way to get interesting/fun/amusing things sent to me as a nice break from work and figured others would too so I built it. Thanks for making the internet a bit of a better place!

Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time

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