Has the IndieWeb Become Irrelevant?

Previous Posts on the Subject

I had read IndieWeb's 3 Body Problem by so1o back in May. I had refrained from writing a response because I had wanted to think it through and not just go off ranting on a wild hair. I never got around to it.

However, Simone Silvestroni reminded me of that post — most likely without realizing it — when he wrote Smaller. Likewise — and possibly without realizing it — he touched upon several flaws in the Fediverse that I had observed back in 2019 because Fediverse software imitates corporate social media.

Let's talk about what so1o has to say first:

As so1o themselves observed, they were having a lousy day when they wrote this. Anybody visiting their site can see that they don't give themselves nearly enough credit. I would suggest that anybody congratulating themselves because they've successfully followed the IndieWeb Camp's suggestions and implemented their formats and protocols isn't as smart as they think they are, and I will explain why in due course.

Now let's get Simone's take.

I suspect that he's referring to something I had posted on Mastodon, but I had also talked about RSS and Atom being enough in RE: Does a Blog Need to Integrate?. However, that was in reference to people suggesting that personal websites should interoperate with the Fediverse — AKA quasi-decentralized parasocial media — by implementing the ActivityPub protocol.

Never mind that many personal websites, mine included, can't actually do this because they're static websites with no server-side code. Many, mine also included, don't use JavaScript, either.

Likewise, these same personal, independent websites can't fully integrate with the IndieWeb for the same reasons. Why is this the case? My opinion is that the IndieWeb is not about websites at all.

More on this, as well, but first I'd like to acknowledge Lily Mara's take:

I agree with Lily here. It is still harder than it needs to be to have your own internet presence for a panoply of reasons that really ought to be discussed elsewhere, and perhaps by somebody who isn't a long-haired metalhead who codes for a living and suffers from delusions of erudition and literary talent.

For example, it is harder than it ought to be to run a website if you don't speak UNIX. For Crom's sake, you still need to understand files and directories if you want to build a website, and in the US we have public schools assuming that kids are computer-literate if they can cope with Google Docs or Office 365. No wonder these kids end up on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.

And I'm saying this as somebody who could — if I were enough of an asshole — indulge in the sort of technoelitist dick-waving Lily Mara is talking about. If I wanted to, I could do a full IndieWeb implementation of my own, with microformats, webmentions, all kinds of different post formats, RSVPs, the whole nine yards. I could do it with C# and .NET Core since I use that tech at my day job. I could brush up on PHP and do it with the data stored in SQLite, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL. Hell, I could probably do it with Django if I wanted a better excuse to learn Python than my day job has offered thus far. Or, I could go back to running WordPress, dealing with its Gutenberg interface — which was apparently built with React, which explains so much — and use plugins and themes to implement both IndieWeb and ActivityPub support.

You'd think that since I'm the sort who could get a monumental hard-on from building this website with a makefile and some shell scripts that use sed, awk, m4, and a bunch of other command-line utilities that the IndieWeb would be right up my alley. Well, you're gonna love this: I've come to think that the IndieWeb's very existence was a mistake.

WTF is the IndieWeb Anyway?

First, let's deal with what the IndieWeb isn't. It isn't personal websites on NeoCities, though you can incorporate some IndieWeb stuff there if you want. It isn't a developer blog you build with Hugo, Astro, or whatever new SSG is trending on Hacker News so you can build clout and get a job at some startup that will most likely go out with a whimper and leave you holding the bag.

Being part of the IndieWeb is about building a personal web application, not a personal website. It means having on your own website, all of the functionality one might expect from a corporate social network like Facebook. Apparently all of this functionality is necessary in order to integrate with corporate social media platforms using the POSSE approach: publish on your own website, and syndicate elsewhere.

This made sense back in 2011. And the DIY ethos that has driven IndieWeb is admirable. However, I think stuff like microformats and webmentions are over-engineered and over-complicated, and I'm not sure that anybody thought any of this through with sufficient rigor.

First, there's IndieAuth. It's like OAuth, but for IndieWeb sites. It's not a terrible idea, and not even that hard to set up. Damned good thing, too, since indiewebify.me treats it as the second step after getting a domain name. You set it up by linking to a social media profile that links back to your website. Fair enough, but if you're not on any sort of social media, not even Mastodon, then you're going to have a hard time setting up IndieAuth. And I have no idea if you can use an alternate git forge like SourceHut or Codeberg instead of Github if you're a developer who isn't otherwise on social media.

Next, there's microformats. Yes, let's embed metadata about a webpage, a website, or its operator in HTML markup within every page's <body>. Never mind that there is already a place for such metadata in a webpage: <head> and an element as well: <meta>, though the IndieWeb people call this "invisible metadata" and consider it an "anti-pattern". Suppose they're right, and we should clutter <body> with metadata using microformats that viewers still won't necessarily see unless they use "view source". What could possibly go wrong?

Finally, there's webmentions. Because pingback and trackback weren't enough. To be fair, webmentions just use HTTP and x-www-urlencoded data instead of dicking around with XML remote procedure calls. Nevertheless, they can still be used for the same sort of spam you get using pingback and trackback. The only reason webmentions haven't become the spam vector they could be is that spammers don't give a damn about IndieWeb; it's more profitable to keep pounding WordPress sites since there are so damned many of them.

Admittedly, it isn't that hard to implement microformats, even in a static website. I currently do it, which like Simone Silvestroni I am reconsidering. Nor is it impossible to implement webmentions on a static website.

The question with which I struggle in both cases is, Why in Satan's holy name should I do this? Who benefits from my website providing carefully formatted metadata about my web pages, my website as a whole, or myself for convenient processing? Who benefits from my website automatically pinging your website to tell you that I had linked to something you had written and quoted it?

In the case of microformats, I think they provide greater value to Google and other commercial/corporate operators than they do to webmasters like me. As for webmentions: I would much rather get an email from a webmaster who has linked to something I've written and quoted it. It's more personal and more human. And I would much rather send an email if I really want somebody to know that I've linked to their website and quoted them.

I'm not sure we ever needed IndieWeb to build a social web. We don't need microformats for subscriptions like h-feed; RSS and Atom feeds are proven technologies still in widespread use. Likewise, people can communicate by email. All this technology predates IndieWeb.

If we put aside microformats and webmentions, I think the main draw of the IndieWeb project is the POSSE concept: publish on your own website and syndicate elsewhere. My understanding is that microformats were supposed to aid this, but I think this notion is arrant foolishness. The likes of Facebook, Twitter, and even the Fediverse don't care about your website. They don't care that you've implemented microformats to present your website's data for convenient consumption by these silos. They don't want to admit that there's an internet outside their walled gardens.

Integration is Not Your Problem

Webmasters need to stop taking the onus of interoperability upon their own shoulders. Does your website have a RSS or Atom feed? Do you provide a full-text feed as well as a headlines feed? Are you providing your full archive, even if only as headlines and summaries?

If so, then congratulations: you did your part. Go have a beer or hug a kitty or kiss somebody who wants to be kissed by you.

The onus of integration and interoperability properly belongs on the shoulders of platforms. If they seriously cared about syndication from websites and blogs, they would do a far better job of supporting RSS and Atom feeds. When you create an account on a social media platform — whether it's Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, or anything else — you should be able to provide your website's RSS feed. The platform should grab your feed, parse it, and treat every entry as a post. You should not have to write a bot that will read your feed and post on your behalf via a platform's API. The existence of a service like EchoFeed should not be necessary.

Fuck the Platforms

However, platforms don't want you to syndicate from your own website. They don't want you to have a website at all. They want you to spend all of your time on their platform, and not own your own.

But if you are going to insist on having your own website, they still want you to feed them "content". They just don't want to make it easy for you or convenient. And they certainly don't want to compensate you for the work you do to make your website suitable for commercial use. Is Google paying you to do SEO, or paying for the privilege of indexing your website so they can serve ads on search engine result pages? Do platforms like Twitter and Facebook pay you to set up Twitter Cards and Open Graph metadata so that they can provide link previews when they bother to show links to your website to other people in the first place? Does Reddit pay for the privilege of linking to your website so that it can show ads to its audience? Are any of these platforms paying you to deal with the abusive bozos they will inevitably send your way?

No. They do not. They expect to be able to make commercial use of anything anybody publishes on the internet, even if they do so under a Creative Commons license that says "no commercial use". Don't even get me started on OpenAI and its competitors again.

Nor is the Fediverse any better, since Fediverse platforms are nothing but poor imitations of commercial social media platforms. Ideally, these platforms are run on a break-even basis, or a much more modest profit — just enough for the operator to not need a day job. But the Fediverse is not necessary. We had the technology to build a social internet long before the Fediverse was a bunch of GNU Social servers talking to each other using OStatus protocol, let alone a bunch of Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, Funkwhale, Lemmy, and Crom knows how many other different platforms talking to each over using ActivityPub.

You owe these platforms nothing. You are not obligated to integrate with them. You are not obligated to provide them with "content". You are not obligated to acknowledge their very existence.

Fuck the IndieWeb, Too

I have come to think that the core proposition of the IndieWeb movement is an attempt to have one's cake and eat it, too. They want you to own your work by pubishing on your own website, first. But they still want you to have the alleged benefits of social media and maintain contact with friends, acquaintances, and associates who still use social media and don't have their own websites.

This benefits social media platforms more than it befits you as a person or as a webmaster. It doesn't do the open web any good, either, if that sort of thing matters to you. It matters to me because I don't think we should be making it easier for corporations to make commercial use of personal websites. All they offer as payment is "exposure", and exposure isn't going to pay your web hosting bills, let alone your rent or mortgage.

I have come, therefore, to think of the IndieWeb movement as an example of how resistence to capitalism becomes commodified. By attempting to accommodate and cooperate with corporate social platforms, IndieWeb became an over-engineered and over-complicated mess. It did so by dismissing fundamental internet technologies as "not invented here" (NIH).

And for what? So that you could write a blog post and then paste a link into Twitter and have bullshit from Twitter's reply guys show up on your website? Is that really worth all of the effort it can take to implement IndieWeb tech on a personal website?

I don't think so. And I know I am oversimplifying what IndieWeb is about and what it does. All of the above is my opinion, informed by my understanding of the facts.

If you have your own opinions about this post, or about the IndieWeb, by all means express them on your own website. Or, you can just email me and tell me I'm a fucking dolt who ought to be sweeping floors and scrubbing toilets instead of working in tech. However, if you did the joke would be on you: if being a janitor paid as well as being a techie, I wouldn't be in this trade. Unlike programmers and sysadmins, janitors are smart enough to have a union.

If having a static website that's nothing but read-only HTML styled with CSS makes me an "internet peasant", then I'm OK with that. I don't need to impress anybody with my technical prowess. Even if I needed to impress people in order to get a better job than what I've already got, overengineering my personal website isn't gonna do it.

The IndieWeb, therefore, is mostly irrelevant to me aside from its monthly blogging carnival. I think that encouraging people to write and meet each other online is what the IndieWeb should be about, not catering to corporate parasocial media platforms or providing another venue for techies to engage in dick-measuring contests.

Update for 2024-08-29: "IndieWeb vs indie web"

I've gotten several emails from kind folks agreeing with me on the points I've made above. There has also been a post in response by fyr called IndieWeb vs indie web that I'd like to address here.

The IndieWeb, as it stands, is a bit... perhaps elitist is the wrong word. It's a club for those that can, and although part of the IndieWeb's broader message is about eschewing the commercial web and owning your stuff, unless you know at least a little bit about websites and how they work, you're gonna be relying on commercial organisations to get you going and keep you rolling in the IndieWeb.

The "club for those that can" part is the bit that irks me. I think that the reason people use corporate social media platforms is that running your own website is itself something that requires a certain degree of computer literacy that most people don't have and don't get in school.

As I had previously observed, you need to speak UNIX. You might not need to be a graybeard guru who is so familiar with ed(1) that he can email corrections to Michael W. Lucas, but if you've only ever used game consoles and smartphones or tablets, having to actually understand low-level concepts like files and directories instead of having all of that hidden behind an abstraction layer might be intimidating. One might reasonably ask, "Why must I understand all of this just so I can shitpost or share photos?"

IndieWeb doesn't have any answers for that. That's not their focus. It's by developers, for developers. The people behind IndieWeb are the technical equivalent of a "writer's writer". I had observed in an email to Lily Mara that the core IndieWeb devs are the sort of developers Joel Spolsky called "architecture astronauts" back in 2001. Perhaps that was uncharitable of me.

Another quote from fyr is in order, I think:

The IndieWeb chat/discord highlights this, with several prominent rooms/channels being developer oriented, but their website says it best: ... a community of independent and personal websites connected by open standards .... Emphasis mine. But it's right there - "Connected by open standards." To build an independent website that connects to other independent websites via open standards literally requires programming knowledge. Sure, there are Wordpress plugins you can install and libraries you can import... You could argue, are sites that use wordpress, or plugins, or third party libraries, truly independent if they rely on these third party resources? The elitism is kinda the point. The IndieWeb is for developers, aspiring or experienced, to build something and connect with others.

This too is something I've observed, but perhaps not adequately expressed. And this is where I think IndieWeb goes wrong. It's why I sometimes talk about techies mistaking means for ends.

Suppose my website can talk to yours. Suppose, for example, your website can talk to mine and fetch a list of the albums I've played in the past 7 days as JSON that your website can parse it for display as "Matthew's Rotation" on your own website. You could already do this by fetching data for my account on last.fm, incidentally.

What good is this? It's not necessarily going to tell you if I enjoyed what I was listening to. Perhaps my player is simply picking albums at random. Perhaps I was trying a new band and found they didn't do it for me.

However, there's a way to get that sort of information, if you want it. You could email me and say something like, "Hey, I noticed you're a metalhead; have you heard any good albums lately?" At that point I might either reply directly by email, or use your email as a prompt to share opinions on something I've listened to on my website and then reply to you with a link to the review.

In my opinion, having a website is a means to an end. It is a way for me to express myself, to say, "Here I am. This is what I'm into. It's here if you want it, but if not that's fine, too." It's a conversation starter, not the conversation itself. It is not an end in itself, but a means to other ends.

One last quote from fyr because it touches on one of my menagerie of pet peeves:

"IndieWeb" however, has become the term to describe... well, the non-corporate or non-commercial web. This is sorta unfortunate in my opinion. There are other aspects to the non-commerical web that aren't IndieWeb™, this particular flavour of it just happens to have become one of the more widely known and consciously adopted words to describe this kind of thing.

There are other phrases, and in fact whilst doing a little research for this post I have come to find that there are loads of other words and phrases that describe portions of the non-commercial web and in fact align with the anti-commercial web. You've got The Slow Web which decries the instant, live-happening-now, syncronous web where reactions are immediate and the doomscroll never ends, like! subscribe! swipe left! ...and instead thrives in a slower paced world where things can wait a while and be ingested by humans at a leisurely human-healthy pace, and The Small Web & The Smol Web, where huge files and staggeringly complex and convoluted dependency chains are swapped out for standards-compliant, small, efficient and fast websites that do just enough and no more. Each of these examples encourage doing things your way, which isn't really possible on post-myspace social media. There are many more phrases, each dealing with more and more niche areas, some of which can be found on diagram.website (which I think you should check out.)

I don't particularly like the fact that we seem to need so many names for what I think ought to be the default. In my opinion, sites like this one, fyr.io, and even Neocities and omg.lol are the World Wide Web. Sites like Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter are the corporate Web. They're parasitic abberations, walled gardens gentrifying the internet, and an attempt by business people to turn the internet into cable TV with a comments section. We should not accept the premise that they are what the web is or should be.

And since IndieWeb doesn't seem to be helping with that, or helping ordinary people (who don't speak UNIX and aren't programmers) create their own places on the internet or the Web, I think they're irrelevant.

It isn't necessarily a bad thing to be irrelevant. I'm irrelevant as fuck. But I'm also not claiming that I or this website are anything other than what they are: I'm an opinionated asshole with delusions of erudition and literary talent, and this is my soapbox. I doubt that the people behind the IndieWeb — or the Fediverse — would appreciate being seen as irrelevant. But what they do about it is their decision; I'm neither qualified or getting paid to advise them. Nevertheless, I think Adam Newbold is doing more to help ordinary folks claim their own space on the internet than the IndieWeb movement, and the latter might learn from his example.

Update for 2024-08-30: "Has the IndieWeb Become Discourse Again?"

Marty McGuire thinks I'm mad at the IndieWeb. He doesn't know me any better than I know him (this being the first I've heard of or from him), but if he did he'd know I'm at most mildly annoyed at the IndieWeb, and mainly on behalf of non-developers who feel "less than" because they can't implement everything they see on the wiki. When I actually get mad at techies, I write rants like Techies Who Don't Read Fiction (on the next Oprah).

I'm currently in low dudgeon right now. If I get to Shakespearean wrath or Homeric rage, you'll know. It'll be obvious because the melodrama and hyperbole will go to 11.

If I'm at all miffed about this post, it's because Marty may have assumed that I'd hear it about via webmentions. I heard about it first via an email from Simone Silvestroni. In fairness to Marty, it did show up in the Atom feed that webmention.io provides when I skimmed my feeds in the crapper this morning.

If anything, I'd suspect that he's mad at me, but I don't blame him. He's done a lot of work related to IndieWeb, and is no doubt emotionally invested in the project. One might even suggest that he's passionate about the IndieWeb. So perhaps he takes (not necessarily constructive) criticism of the IndieWeb, or the suggestion that it has nothing to offer to people who just want to put up a personal website, a bit personally.

But let's try addressing the major points of his response. First, micro.blog. Apparently I was supposed to mention it. Well, now I have.

I didn't mention it earlier because it wasn't relevant to the points I was trying to make. If you're building your own website, a lot of the stuff the IndieWeb people suggest is a pain in the ass to implement and doesn't do all that much for you to justify the effort. However, Marty is right about micro.blog being a solid turnkey solution for people who don't want to do everything themselves. I used to use micro.blog, but mainly to syndicate posts from my website via RSS. That functionality never worked to my satisfaction, and I wasn't interested in posting directly on micro.blog or following people who do, so I'm no longer a customer. I am, instead, an omg.lol customer.

When I discovered indieweb.org (in maybe 2015?) I was intrigued and nearly instantly overwhelemed. Trying to absorb all the concepts there would be nearly impossible. Understanding and implementing all the techniques there is actually impossible.

That’s because indieweb.org is not a presciption or a cookbook or an exercise plan. It doesn’t tell you how to “be IndieWeb”. It’s a collective memory of experiments, some successful and some not, from a group of experimenters that has changed greatly over time.

Fair enough, and furthermore, the wiki itself points out that all you need is your own domain name and your own website located at the domain name you've leased. Everything else, says the wiki, is "optional awesomeness".

However, it says that on the "Getting Started" page. If I was comfortable editing other people's wikis I'd ensure that the homepage said, before anything else, that if you're renting a domain and hosting a site on that domain, you're already part of the IndieWeb.

Automatic POSSE, syndicating posts from your own site out to your profiles on social silos, only ever barely (and briefly) worked for Instagram, was turned off for Facebook a few years ago, and was all but destroyed for Twitter shortly after its last acquisition. backfeed — pulling comments and likes from these platforms to display on your own site — has similarly been blocked by technical measures.

These were experiments that worked for a time. People used them for a time. That time has passed and the people have moved on.

The people may have moved on, but I'm not convinced the wiki has. Experiments should be clearly marked as such. Stuff that no longer works should also be marked, or archived.

If the wiki is to be the first thing people see when they go to IndieWeb.org, then it should be given greater care to avoid confusing newbies. Marty himself admitted to being confused and overwhelmed by the wealth of material in the wiki back in 2015. I daresay it's only gotten worse since then.

Again, in fairness to Marty, I could take the following as him conceding some of my points:

I freely admit that the community has fallen into some serious prescriptive traps over time. Like with tools like indiewebify.me that offer a checklist of implementation details, without accompanying reasons why you might want these features.

I am, nevertheless, a little annoyed by the exhortation to "talk with us". What does it look like I'm doing over here, anyway? Oh, no, it's not good enough to post one's opinion on the web. I'm supposed to use one of the IndieWeb's chats, either IRC, Slack, or Discord.

It looks like the main chat happens on IRC, but they also mention Slack and Discord. Are there bridges between IRC, Slack, and Discord? If not, then isn't the chat fragmented? At least IRC is an open standard, but I would only use Slack if my day job required it. I won't even use Discord for my Final Fantasy XIV clan; I certainly won't use it to talk IndieWeb.

Then again, I am already talking with you. I'm doing it here, on my own website for all to see, in the best IndieWeb tradition. And you are talking to me if you quote me on your own website or email me. IRC is nice if you want something closer to real-time text communication, but it shouldn't be necessary.

To answer Marty's no doubt rhetorical question, the IndieWeb has not become discourse. The IndieWeb has always been discourse and always will be, because people are allowed to have opinions and express them, and those opinions are not subject to anybody else's approval. More importantly, people are allowed to dislike things, as I dislike the more recondite technical aspects of the IndieWeb that I've previously discussed. Most importantly, Marty should be grateful that people are talking about the IndieWeb, even if he doesn't like what they're saying. You aren't truly dead until your very name is forgotten, never to be spoken again.

I dislike these aspects — IndieAuth, microformats, and Webmentions — because they remind me of the Web 2.0 hype around APIs, XML-RPC, and AJAX. All of that tech was beneficial to the commercial web, but I never found it useful for a personal website. I continue to maintain that all that is necessary for participation in the social web is a publicly accessible email address and — if you're blogging — a discoverable RSS or Atom feed so that readers can subscribe if they want to. Anybody who wants to participate in the Web should be able to do so by putting together a static website — just a few HTML pages, some CSS, and maybe a little JavaScript as a treat — and upload it to a host. Anything more complicated than that should be optional. Again, even the IndieWeb's wiki admits this (though you need to dig a bit to find it).

Maybe what I'm talking about is appropriate technology. Somebody who just wants to put up a homepage and perhaps a shrine to their favorite fandom should not have to deal with WordPress and the LAMP stack. micro.blog is not the answer, either, since its design places limits on individual creativity. The appropriate technology for this situation is, in my opinion, a host like Neocities or Nekoweb or a shared hosting account on a provider like Nearly Free Speech since you can't count on your ISP to provide email or hosting for small websites any longer, let alone expect your ISP to let you self-host on a residential connection.

What's suitable for the enterprise isn't necessarily suitable for the individual. Why else does Linux dominate everything but the desktop? Granted, I'm using desktop Linux but I'm an outlier in that regard.

To answer my own rhetorical question, the IndieWeb project didn't become irrelevant. It was always irrelevant, unless you chose to care. Like they themselves say: if you've got your own website on a domain you've rented (because you can't actually own a domain name unless you're ICANN), you're already there. Nothing else matters.

Update for 2024-09-01: Ownership, connection, and control — IndieWeb stuff

Jason makes it plain in Ownership, connection, and control— IndieWeb stuff that the IndieWeb is plainly not for me.

You may think, “everything that’s wrong with the internet are the interaction paradigms of social web applications.” Great! IndieWeb is less for you. The ownership and control ideas apply and appeal, but connection does not — at least as a newer technology.

This is basically me. While I have a Mastodon account that I haven't yet nuked, maintaining it is one of my many bad habits. I honestly think I'd be better off without it. I sometimes think I'd be better off not participating in the few forums I frequent, either.

Hell, sometimes I imagine a retirement where I only connect to the internet when I go to the public library to return the media I've borrowed, borrow some more, and connect via their network to upload updates to my website, send email, and fetch new mail. If this happens, you'll know I've outlived both Catherine and my mortgage, because Cat would have kittens if I cut off our residential internet connection.

If IndieWeb is about cooperating with social media and making personal websites more like social media so that people habituated to social media are more comfortable interacting with personal websites, then it is certainly not for me. I have fond memories of interactions on web forums; it was how I met my wife. I have fond memories of interactions on Google+; it was how I was able to commercially publish my fiction. There are some good people on Mastodon, too, and I'd rather get email from them.

If social media is what the world looks like after it's moved on, then the world is welcome to move on without me. I am content to not be part of the social web as Manuel Moreale has come to understand it. I do not believe that I am "better connected", I do not want stuff on my website distributed to commercial platforms without informed consent and compensation, and I do not want anything from such services showing up on my site.

Jason also has this to say, which I'd like to address.

There’s this beautiful world where Integration is Not Your Problem, but we don’t live in that world. Not only are RSS/Atom feeds not generally supported by other systems, there’s little to know reason to ever expect them to be. Even API entry points are largely dead and a struggle right now. But I don’t agree this makes it not my problem.

I'm curious as to what Jason means by 'we' here. He might not live in that world, but I certainly do. I understand that other platforms don't support RSS and Atom. Nor do I expect them to do so. I assert that platforms refusing to interoperate with personal websites is not my problem because it is outside my control.

We expect those with power or authority to accept responsibility. Yet we also expect people to accept responsibility without giving them the power or authority to affect the outcomes for which they're responsible. How does that work?

I'm not convinced it does. So, beyond providing RSS feeds, I have decided that whatever falls outside the locus of my control is beyond the ambit of my responsibility. Or, if you like: not my circus, not my monkeys. If a commercial platform can't or won't consume my RSS feed, but for some reason wants to import posts from my website: they can damn well pay me.

One last word about POSSE. I'll let Jason have his say first.

I’ve written about this before, but POSSE is a profoundly egalitarian idea. I am never going to get all of the people I’m connected to online to go back to using RSS. And I’m not going to get them to bookmark my webpage and visit it multiple times a day. They have places they consistently read feeds. I’m having a lot more fun writing on my blog because people do reply to my posts, or comment in various ways, wherever they are.

I think this is where control and responsibility come in again. Whether former RSS users are going to go back to using RSS is beyond my control. Likewise whether people choose to bookmark my website and visit it periodically. I see no point in trying to persuade people; they will do as they please regardless of any argument I might make, and that is fine.

Jason thinks POSSE is egalitarian because he's willing to do additional, unpaid, and most likely unappreciated work to make what he writes available on other people's platforms. For my part: if I wanted to work for free and not even get a word of thanks for my pains, I could work overtime at my day job.

The extent to which I'm willing to implement IndieWeb's big concept — POSSE — is continuing to use Mastodon instead of leaving social media entirely. (Hopefully for good, this time, but I have an easier time quitting vi.) I've mentioned Robb Knight's EchoFeed service before. It does a solid job of taking my website's JSON feed and both submitting posts to Mastodon and sending Webmentions. I suppose I could also use a newsletter service like Buttondown, which claims to have RSS import capability, and also send a newsletter. However, I am reluctant to do this because I think too many people get too much impersonal email already and I don't want to help make it worse.

The following sentiment is one I find admirable, however.

I like to make it easy for people who opt in to read what I write. I think it is important, or at least valuable, to put in some work to make it so that people who read have to do less work. POSSE, and the tech that supports it, is what makes this possible.

This is why I provide feeds. This is why I try to improve my website's typography and accessibility. That much I can do. But if making my writing more accessible to other people means manually posting links on commercial platforms, then be damned to them.

The Last Word, I Hope

It's plain that I've been mistaken about who and what IndieWeb is for. I'm OK with that. I don't mind being wrong. I'm used to it. I've been married almost 20 years, and you don't stay married that long if you can't bear to ever be wrong.

What I do mind is that some IndieWeb advocates aren't content to explain why I'm wrong, but seem to imply that because I was mistaken, my feelings and opinions about the IndieWeb based on the knowledge I had gleaned from the wiki on my own are somehow invalid. Of course, I could be wrong about this, too, but I not only don't mind being wrong, I don't care if I am wrong.

I don't need IndieWeb. I never did. Not when I had my own little Geocities-style site in the 1990s and my first domain in 2000. People were making personal websites in the 1990s without the integration IndieWeb is trying to develop and encourage. Just build a site and rent a domain. Provide feeds if you blog, or don't. It's your website, and it's your choice. You've got this.