The IndieWeb movement is a community-driven push to center the web around people, rather than corporate entities. This is something that the web has been missing for over a decade. I’d reckon it started with Web 2.0, when individuals migrated from personal websites to walled gardens. It’s not their fault – social networking sites and user content driven sites like YouTube make it much easier to skip all the configuration and customization and go straight to uploading your content and making your presence known to those you care about.
IndieWeb is trying to take the web back to its roots, which is admirable. From my initial foray into this movement, my impression is that the main ways this is happening is using tools that I most associate with the semantic web. The initial steps involved in converting your personal website to be compatible with the IndieWeb standards is to add some class names and some other properties to existing HTML tags in your website.
I have already been following the idea of POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, so the IndieWeb isn’t that big of a shift for my blog writing workflow. I write it here and then manually syndicate to Medium, which gives me the option to cross-post to Twitter. I’ve also set up my micro.blog to subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed.
One difficulty I faced is the assumption that your landing page is supposed to have links to your presence on other places on the web. I don’t know if that’s going to apply to anyone, especially if having invisible tags is an anti-pattern in the IndieWeb world.
Nonetheless, it’s fun to tinker with my website and get it to conform to the IndieWeb standards. I’m going to spend a little more time on it and dive a little deeper into how I can help with this movement.