I Went to The IndieWeb Summit 2018!

I keep talking about IndieWeb. Today, I attended the IndieWeb Summit of 2018 and left feeling super enamored to not continue working on my site and building tools for others to experiment with, but also to figure out how to better market and push for the migration of those on silos to transition off and into safer and more reliable environments. There was also a huge amount of other topics and things demonstrated today that really inspired me to keep pushing and building to bring the nature of the IndieWeb back to the people who need it the most and those who just enjoy it.

The Recap

I took to Mastodon on Are0h’s instance to live-toot my experience¹. I also syndicated it to Twitter for those interested².

Projects

A lot of interesting projects were launched over the last few days. Despite the event not having a heavy overarching theme, the most popular thing that came up was that of the IndieWeb reader.

Indie Readers

For those unfamiliar with the concept, here’s the except from the IndieWeb wiki describing it:

A reader (AKA indie reader or social reader) in the context of the IndieWeb is the portion/feature integrated into an IndieWeb site that provides a way to read content from other IndieWeb sites, possibly including posts from the current site, and respond (like, comment, repost, etc) inline in the reading [interface] itself.

The best example of this I could find was on Amber Case’s site with a screenshot below and more information in a longer blog post demonstrating their use of said platform.

IndiePaper

cleverdevil hacked together a solution that allows you to save articles to be read later using Micropub and Microsub systems. There’s a more in-depth explanation on the site itself so try it out if you have a chance.

IndieBookClub

As someone with over 1,300 books in my “to-read” and over a hundred read books in the last few years on my Goodreads list, moving this to a IndieWeb-friendly place is a priority for me. Gregor has introduced IndieBookClub for the purpose of posting updates to your MicroPub-compatible site about what you’ve read thus far! Learn more by checking out his blog post announcing it.

Tweaks to micro.blog

For those unfamiliar, micro.blog is a platform that evolved to support of IndieWeb-esque features for posting and syndication around one’s content. Manton announced an array of new features, namely that profiles can be IndieAuth providers, allowing people to sign in using the hosted domain names (like jacky.micro.blog) to other sites that request MicroPub-compatible site addresses.

So Much More Happened!

I mentioned things that were super notable to me (and that I was able to grab more blurb-y info for y’all) but thanks to everything being recorded and captured (notes and videos), you can check it all out on the Tuesday Schedule. Some sessions I attended were the ones around finding a list of libraries we can use to build IndieWeb-friendly tooling as well as getting some deeper understanding and extrapolation around what Vouch could be used for. If you have some feedback and/or updates for this post, please send me a WebMention or even reply to this so people can discover it below!