benwerd

Hi! I started a startup, Known, that did exactly this in 2014, explicitly as part of the indieweb movement. The open source code is still around.

The trick is the economics here. A one-click solution is great, but right now the indieweb solves an ideological but not a hard _user_ problem. There isn't enough "there" there to either justify investment or get enough customers to cover the costs of a service.

The closest is micro.blog, which is a genuinely great service that bakes in this tech under the hood. But the tradeoff is that you can't run it on your own infra; it's a centralized service that is compatible with the protocols but isn't quite a genuinely indieweb tool.

I've wondered if there might be something around providing better tools for logging an agent's activities, or for publishing from a sensor / server / etc, but that's all speculation. Without a genuine hard user need, it's hard to imagine how this would work as a turnkey service.

Oof, this was a tough read for me.

For example, he mentions reading about genocide and not doing anything about it. In a democratic state the thing you do about it - aside from giving money to NGOs and other groups who are actually helping on the ground, protesting, sending letters to politicians and editors, boycotting businesses that align themselves with it - is to vote against the people who enable it. If you do nothing about genocide, you don't care about genocide. You always have levers to pull. Our role in a democracy is not to be a passive consumer; we have to use our votes, our voices, and apply pressure about the things we care about.

The idea that the news doesn't tell you about the historical context of a particular event is also an important tell. That's a pretty good indication that you're reading the wrong news, not that news as a whole is bad. There is plenty of really good, smart, long-form, deeply reported, contextually revealing journalism out there. I agree that there's a lot of news that doesn't fit that description. But it's out there.

But most importantly, this is a barometer of how people are actually feeling. The news industry is doing a terrible job of meeting people where they're actually at.

Part of the problem is that we are genuinely in a tough spot in history: rising authoritarianism, climate change, oligarchy, and many other factors are joining together to squeeze the most vulnerable communities. I don't know that looking away is the right thing to do, but the fire alarm analogy is almost good: it's true that if you're subjected to continuous peril you'll stop paying attention, but the peril is real and not akin to a broken alarm.

Perhaps what we need is a newsroom that only takes a step back and reports on the underlying trends, removing a dependence on the individual stories of today. For example, we should be worrying a lot more about the integrity of midterm elections here in the US, but the individual stories get lost in the mix.

I love it when this shows up from time to time. Everyone should own their own content! And the indieweb community and its underlying philosophy are worth celebrating.

If you haven't, you should try to get to a Homebrew Website Club. Go talk to people about making your own, weird spot on the web that truly represents you. It'll make you feel great about technology again, I promise.

There is: it's called websub. https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/

Here's a service that makes it simple: https://superfeedr.com/

I must say, it's delightful to see this on the front page of HN.

A lot of people have been following indieweb POSSE principles for almost 15 years: publishing on their own site and syndicating elsewhere. I built my own platform for it that I used for 11 years, but you can use just about anything.

What's superb about the indieweb principles is that they're as simple as the web itself. It's worth digging into microformats, webmention, micropub, and the other lightweight standards the community has nurtured. It's all really good work that will become even more useful as more people turn away from centralized social media and AI-saturated services towards human websites. The indieweb is a slow burn but a really vibrant, growing, human community.

ProPublica | Director of Product Engineering | Remote (US only) or NYC | Full-time

ProPublica is a non-profit newsroom that investigates abuses of trust in the public interest. Journalism we published last year shed light on the impact of DOGE and ICE, investigated right-wing militias, told stories about the US medical system, and more. Here were our most-read stories in 2025: https://www.propublica.org/article/propublica-most-read-stor...

I'm the Senior Director of Technology. I'm hiring a pragmatic, mission-driven Director of Product Engineering, who will report to me, in order to provide more support for our product engineers who work on our publishing and data products. (This is not a reporting position.) You'll directly lead and manage a small team of engineers and help us to create and maintain great engineering processes.

More about the role here, including a direct route to apply:

https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/propublica/jobs/4623874006?...

Or get in touch with me at ben.werdmuller [at] propublica.org if you'd like to have a conversation about it.

The expected salary range for this position is $170,000 to $180,000. We cannot sponsor visas and must hire in the US. The role is almost fully remote: we have two in-person week-long summits a year.

I mean, finally.

The point is to evaluate the values and culture of the team, which is examinable from the outset – the effects are, indeed, only evident later on.

I agree that it's tech leadership 101, but I think you'd be surprised how many teams don't do this! (And how many ICs aren't aligned with the principles.)

Notable that Anthropic also seems to be involved in x402: https://www.coinbase.com/developer-platform/discover/launche...

It feels like there's a particular ideology uniting the bloggers involved that isn't actually declared on the page, centering on Lesswrong and the kinds of conversations hosted there. I think that's fine for that community; I'd love to see a version of this for people who buy into a more humanist version of the present and future.

I mean, "interesting" but still autocratic. His old ideas were nonsense too; unworkable teenage thought experiments dressed up as serious proposals. His new work just happens to be internally inconsistent as well as bad in all the other ways it always was.

This is broadly a good thing: it will lead to more competition and a more vibrant, diverse internet with a wider array of choices. It does, of course, suck for the companies that are used to being near-monopolies.

Which is not to say that the tariffs are a good thing at all, of course. But if it encourages international communities to build their own stacks and add them to the marketplace, that's a really strong silver lining in my mind.

A little context for those who weren't aware: tooth-stealing ferrets are an ongoing, serious problem in Britain.

WebSub is your friend here: https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/

This adds a nice publish-subscribe model to RSS. Ping the WebSub server when there are changes; subscribing services are easily notified; nobody has to worry about excessive polling. Hooray.

The actual term for a "discovery writer" is a "pantster" - i.e., you're writing by the seat of your pants - and I think that's a reasonable term to adopt here too.

Confession: I'm a pantster in writing both code and prose. In both cases, coming back and writing a spec (an eng spec in the case of code, a synopsis in the case of prose) is a reasonable thing to do. Structure is good, but the point is that it shouldn't get in the way of actually getting started and making some progress.

"Even if so, this isn’t Twitter, and it may not work." Is this person under the impression somehow that what Elon did to Twitter _did_ work?

ProPublica | Senior Engineer, Web and Publishing Products | Remote (US only) | Full-time

ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.

We're looking for a full-stack senior product engineer to lead work on our publishing systems and core website. The right candidate will believe in our mission and thrive in a multifaceted role, contributing both to the long-term product road map and to hands-on development. Our CMS is PHP-based but we extensively use Python and Typescript across our internal systems.

Also, you'll be helping to speak against abuses of power and potentially protecting our democracy. Feeling good about that is a prerequisite to taking the position.

More details and application: https://boards.greenhouse.io/propublica/jobs/4403685006

Co-signed. Evan is very, very good people.

You absolutely do need a CLA.

I've built two open source startups, totaling a decade of my life. Take it from me: the only way to do this sustainably is open core.

That means you make the core software open, but you sell the features that businesses will pay for or that allow other people to make money. Think of it as two distinct products for two distinct userbases.

In effect, the open source software becomes lead gen; the closed software is your actual business. They're both integral, and obviously feed into each other, but most of your open source users will never, ever be customers.

We all have foreign policies. For example, in the US, our government is heavily involved in Gaza and Ukraine. It's far away, but it's also highly relevant to how our representatives work on our behalf.

Should we give aid to other countries? How should we think about global society? Those things are all relevant, too.

This is a pretty bad take.

For example, multiple studies have shown that in communities that aren't addressed by a robust local news outlet, local corruption goes up. Having a good newsroom _does_ improve an understanding of what your representatives are up to, and a lack of information _does_ allow them to get up to more behind our backs.

I think the biggest failure of this piece is to make all news equivalent. Yes, cable news is junk; yes, many of the corporate newsrooms that churn out hundreds of articles a day are junk. They use engagement as a metric for success rather than finding ways to align themselves with impact and creating an informed, empowered electorate. That last thing - an informed, empowered electorate - is what it's all about.

Real journalism that is diligently undertaken in the public interest does make a real difference. (Should we know whether Clarence Thomas was taking corrupt bribes? Yes. Should we know how climate change is progressing? Yes. Should we know if the police are killing innocent people? Yes. Should we know that the police at the Uvalde school shooting hung around for over an hour doing nothing? Yes.) Telling people not to pay attention to the world around them results in an electorate who cannot meaningfully vote on real issues.

For those of us who build software, we need to know the factors that impact the lives of the people we're serving. We need to know the trends in the marketplaces and communities where we show up. The news is good for that, too.

Turn off cable news; pay more attention to non-profit news; go for long-form written journalism. Stay informed.

It's absolutely true that we take a psychic hit for doing so. I'd say that's more to do with the world than it is the media overall. Perhaps we should spend more time trying to make it better?

Honestly delighted that this still exists. Like others, I used to leave my computer running overnight to render. Dating myself, but it was a big deal in the BBS scene in the UK in the early nineties - so many files and techniques being swapped.

Yes, but it's a kludge: 404 has specific, secret RSS feeds for subscribers that contain full-text copy. With ActivityPub each recipient can have personalized content through the same link, and even for free subscribers, the publisher has a better view on who is actually subscribing.

In addition to what's already described, ActivityPub allows for access control. It's completely possible to have feeds for paid readers, personalized feeds, etc, in a way that RSS doesn't really support.

I love this. Such a big deal for both the open web and for journalism. I'm really excited to see where they take it.

If you look at the history of American city design, you'll find that it's not free market demand that has brought us to this point, but pretty heavy lobbying and more from the automotive industry (which also has seeded this idea that public transit is inherently inferior). Elon Musk is also guilty of this by seeding the hyperloop idea in order to try and stop efforts around high speed rail. Public transit really works when it's done well, and benefits everybody. If we actually design and invest in it well, it will be used.

TFW a quick, jokey post you make on your website hits the HN front page ...

(It was genuinely scary though!)

It's this: https://github.com/Elgg/Elgg

It's pretty long in the tooth now - it's pretty old! But there's an amazing community and new core team that still keeps it up to date.