Continuing the discussion of how IndieWeb needs to evolve in order to see adoption.

Chris Aldrich responds to my question "What does a Model T assembly line look like for IndieWeb?" by first asserting that that’s what Twitter and Facebook already are.

So I guess I’ll need to explain what I meant by asking that. No, I don’t think "Model T Assembly Line" equals Facebook. And one large MicroBlog instance isn’t it, either.

How does an end user — I’ll call this person a tinkerer, because you’re going to at least need to copy and paste some tech instructions — deploy a site for just them, that works out of the box? And, where is the list of different "just works" solutions that they can choose from?

The answer to Boris is that the IndieWeb has been working on the scope problem first knowing that once the interoperable kinks between systems can be worked out to a reasonable level that scale will be the easy part of the problem. Obviously micro.blog has been able to productize IndieWeb principles (with several thousands of users) and still work relatively flawlessly with a huge number of other platforms. There have been tremendous strides towards shoehorning IndieWeb principles into major CMSes like WordPress (500+ active users currently) and Drupal (50+ active users) not to mention several dozens of others including Known, Perch, Craft CMS, Hugo, Kirby, etc., etc.

Plugins to existing systems are great! But: in many cases, the base system has a high technical complexity. I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable telling people to run their own WordPress or Drupal instances — you need hosting experience and security maintenance. So right away that’s a relatively high cost.

I’ve spent quite some time looking at this stuff, especially just recently. I just added a PR to Pelle Wessman @voxpelli’s webmentions server so that it can be one-click "Deployed to Heroku". Pelle wants to go further and have it work in "single user mode", but for now anyone can host their own webmentions server.

Known is the best of the bunch that Chris lists, in terms of being fully integrated and setup out of the box. Except I think you still need to setup Bridgy separately? Bridgy seems to do everything that people actually need in terms of communicating with today’s social media world, so I don’t understand why that functionality isn’t baked in to more systems? I originally got Known working on Heroku shortly after it launched (notice a theme?) and it’s on my list to set it up this way again.

This "Deploy to Heroku" modality (or Zeit or other serverless style) is a simpler, turn key model for both developers and end users. Especially for distributed systems, we can’t think in a mode of old school LAMP stack systems where the "user" is hand updating the operating system layer. Even Docker deploys just sort

I want to see distributed systems where users are hosting from mobile phones to Raspberry Pis, and every mode in between. IndieWeb has the right spirit for this, and absolutely needs to work on protocols and interoperability, but it also has an issue where a lot of this code is simply stale.

So: how do we encourage more Manton’s and Pelle’s to build Model-Ts that are one-click-deploy simple for both tinkerers and other developers?

Ansible IndieWeb§

Some kind of Ansible-scripted test best of IndieWeb sites, all spun up automatically and then tested interacting with each other.

Also! Would be fun to turn that Ansible IndieWeb test bed into some kind of weird experiment of sites automated interacting with each other. Just letting them go wild and see what happens.

How would you make a local-first IndieWeb?§

…and why would you want to?

[[Local-first software]] applied to [[IndieWeb]].

Would the inbox/outbox model in actor model work in a local-first indieweb context?

What’s the political philosophy of the IndieWeb?§

This is a really fun listen from Doug Belshaw. He discusses [[IndieWeb]] and the issues he sees with it.

Microcast #081 - Anarchy, Federation, and the IndieWeb - Doug Belshaw’s Thoug…

Doug has a preference for the Fediverse as an approach to an open web, and says the [[political philosophy]]of the IndieWeb is a type of right-libertarianism, because it lacks social equality, and without that it is just a focus on individual freedom.

My gut response is that I disagree and that it’s all a bit more nuanced than that. But it’s a good jumping off point for discussion!

IndieWeb and federation. Geeky, white and male.

Bit of a superficial summary of IndieWeb…

Likes the practical side of it.

Doug doesn’t think it will scale. More enthusiastic about federation.

Definition in opposition to a thing is not a good idea.

Political philosophy…

Anarchism.

Left-libertarianism. Individual freedom and social equality. Anti-authoritarianism, social anarchism.

Social equality aspect is missing. Collective ownership is missing. And therefore compatible with neoliberalism.

People have to be equipped for the journey. "Bring your own infrastructure" (mantra of Indieweb?) - individualist rather than collectivist.

Doug doesn’t like being a sysadmin.

He doesn’t mind it, but doesn’t think it is socially focussed.

When did you join the IndieWeb?§

I think I first heard of the [[IndieWeb]] movement in 2016 sometime. It’s a bit hazy now, but I’ve a memory that I stumbled on it through a trail of links starting on [[Wikity]].

I’ve tinkered with web sites in some form or another for a long time, and I have happy memories of various weird Geocities experiments, sadly lost to the sands of time it seems.

As far as independently hosting goes, I appear to have had a self-hosted blog since 2006 at my old domain noodlemaps.net - thanks Wayback Machine for that! My first self-hosted post is seemingly on the topic of data sonification and playing non-audio files through /dev/dsp on Linux. Excellent.

I’ve had a self-hosted blog up at doubleloop.net since around 2013 (thanks again Internet Archive). I went through a through static site generators. I actually really like how my old Hexo-based site looked. Better than my current site…

My first documented attendance of HWC London looks to be December 2016, hosted by Calum and Barry who were really welcoming. Around then, I fiddled about with various platforms before switching over to WordPress.

I’ve really enjoyed being part of the IndieWeb community. My active involvement (at events, on IRC, etc) has peaked and waned over the years, but I’ve still always felt part of the bigger whole. That’s another post, though.

How did you find out about the IndieWeb community?