I have been fascinated by the IndieWeb community for years. I have participated on and off as well, using this URL even. But my website has gone through so many iterations over the years that I've long since lost all that content.

This iteration of my blog is designed to be the start of my IndieWeb comeback story. It's a project, which always seems to help keep me engaged. Like all software, it will never be "done", and thus will always give me something to work on when I have time to work on something fun.

Foundations

I gave it away in the title but the point of this post is to talk about some of the things I've been doing to give myself a solid foundation to build from. The basics that I hope will let me keep building and joining more in the IndieWeb space.

Micropub

Micropub is an open web standard (W3C Recommendation) and API for creating, editing, and deleting posts on websites, like on your own domain, supported by numerous third-party clients, CMSs, and social readers.

The most recent thing I've added to this blog is a Micropub endpoint. This endpoint allows me to create posts from a Micropub client. I do have a decent post editing interface on this blog (thanks to the Django admin), but a Micropub endpoint allows me to use a Microsub client to read posts from other blogs I'm subscribed to and send them "likes" or replies by posting them to my own website. You can see an (poorly styled) example of a "like" I sent to Aaron Parecki here: https://crowdersoup.com/blog/post/page/.

Webmention

Webmention is an open web standard (W3C Recommendation) for conversations and interactions across the web, a powerful building block used for a growing distributed network of peer-to-peer comments, likes, reposts, and other responses across the web.

Webmentions are how I actually "send" a reply or "like" of a post on someone else's website. The Micropub endpoint accepts a post (which can be a like, reply, article, note, or photo), and if it's a like or reply it sends a "Webmention" to the other persons website / blog.

It's also how I recieve interactions from others. If someone sends my site a webmention it's saved and can then be displayed as interactions on my post. Right now I'm simply saving them. Eventually though, you'll be able to look at my posts and see the various webmentions they've recieved.

IndieAuth

IndieAuth is a federated login protocol for Web sign-in, enabling users to use their own domain to sign in to other sites and services. IndieAuth can be used to implement OAuth2 login AKA OAuth-based login.

I'm using the IndieAuth service IndieAuth.com right now. I plan to implement IndieAuth with my own token endpoint on this site later. For now though, using IndieAuth.com will work. This is how Micropub and Microsub servers authenticate me with my website, and my website validates the token it recieves from them against the IndieAuth.com token endpoint.

The Future

My ideal future for this website is that it becomes the hub of my digital life. That's the whole ideal behind IndieWeb. I won't stop posting on silos (Twitter/X, Instagram, etc.) but I will stop posting there first. Eventually I will implement syndication to silos from here so that things I post here will automatically be posted in those places.

Until then? I suppose you'll just have to keep following to find out!