On the IndieWeb
The IndieWeb is a loose movement to build online presence around individual websites again, instead of on social media sites run by companies that don't necessarily have our interests at heart.
I've had a personal website since my college days, later moving from the student web space to Hyperborea.org. I've never stopped blogging there, so in a sense my site's been IndieWeb in spirit forever, but I finally got around to setting up an actual IndieWeb identity at KVibber.com.
Contents
So Far
- Adapted one of my blogs, Re-Reading Les Mis, to include the requisite metadata. It's built in Eleventy, and it was surprisingly easy to add the tags to my templates.
- Set up my main, self-hosted WordPress blog, K-Squared Ramblings (which I've been POSSEing to various extents since before I knew there was a term for it), to use the IndieWeb plugin and theme support, though I need to get back to improving some of the metadata.
- Inspired by the garden and stream metaphor, I've been building collections of troubleshooting posts and reviews, consolidating not just my blog entries but app store reviews, stackexchange answers, etc. I'm building both minisites with microformats and ATOM feeds, and using IFTTT to automatically POSSE new articles to Mastodon and Tumblr.
- Released an early version of Indie's Eleven, a super-light (but responsive!) starting template for Eleventy that includes Microformats2 along with other metadata types, based on what I learned building new sections of my site and rebuilding existing ones. I've re-based both the tech and review minisites on this code.
- Written a tool to combine all the feeds into one, and add all the new posts from every section on my home page(s).
- Moved my main Fediverse profile to a self-hosted GoToSocial instance.
- Moved several sections from my old website to KVibber.com.
To Do
- Refine that 11ty template!
- Update my website's old hand-coded photo gallery so I can make it responsive, interconnected, and expandable.
- Import more silo archives (selectively!) to my website/blog.
- Decide how to handle feedback on static pages. Webmentions seem to be a lot of overhead considering how few comments I get.
- Finish moving stuff from Hyperborea.org to Kvibber.com.
Someday
- Host my own copies of my FOSS projects. Maybe a Gitea instance, maybe just static pages with zips of the source.
- Self-hosted photo gallery, including Flickr and the good photos from Instagram/Pixelfed (most of which are also on Flickr anyway).
Tabled/Abandoned
- Self-hosted gallery of publicly-shared photos from "social" platforms like Instagram, Pixelfed, Twitter, etc.
Why? I've gone back and forth between wanting to preserve ALL THE THINGS! and letting the ephemeral be ephemeral, and I've finally come down on the side of preserving what I think is worth preserving, and letting the rest, if not expire, at least be expendable.
Instead, I'm going to step up what I've been doing occasionally anyway: Take the more interesting posts from silos and either cross-post or expand them on my website. Sort of a curated PESOS strategy.
As for photos, the "good" photos are already getting cross-posted to Flickr, so the "interesting" ones can go to my blog (where they would have been in the pre-Twitter days anyway!).
Silo Status
- Currently active: Flickr. Also GoToSocial/Mastodon and BookWyrm (if you can call them silos). Occasionally checking in on Bluesky.
- Inactive: Tumblr (2019), Pixelfed (2024)
- Left/Deleted: Twitter (2022/2024), Reddit (2023), Instagram (2020/2024), Facebook (2018/2024)