#indieweb 2026-01-30

2026-01-30 UTC
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WinnerWind one thing i don't get: do i HAVE to have to setup things like webmentions and stuff in order to be part of the "indie web"? I don't have any of that setup and I don't plan to either, but almost every resource i read on the matter seem to insist that to "join" the indie web, you need to set up all of this
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[0x3b0b] Nope. That's something there's...ongoing effort on. The general consensus as I understand it is that if you have your own website at your own domain, you're part of the indieweb. Everything beyond that essentially has to do with how little or how much you want to use your website to _interact_ with other indieweb folks.
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WinnerWind what do you mean by ongioing effort? the webmentions thing seems feature complete enough to me
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[0x3b0b] Sorry, that was unclear. Although as far as developing new stuff goes, the community never really _stops_. But what I meant is there is a slow but ongoing effort to discourage the notion that you need stuff like webmentions to "count" as indieweb, because you're right, there is a lot of emphasis on that kind of thing.
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WinnerWind i see, yeah it feels odd that there is so much talk on things like web mentions: i'm not really a fan of the idea and i'd rather people email me instead of sending some web mention thing or write in a public guestbook (which could be exploited)
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[0x3b0b] I think part of that is because "own your domain, post your stuff there" is a really short explanation. Doing the complex optional stuff attracts people like me who get excited and geek out over it, and people who get even more excited and develop and write, and all that excitement and writing gives it an impression of importance by sheer volume.
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[0x3b0b] There was a round of lots of people writing about comments and webmentions and whether they'd prefer to get email (or to send email) back in August that you might be interested in tracking down and reading. You're definitely not alone in your sentiment.
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WinnerWind i guess that's true. i kind of nerded out and figured out how to show the online states of my personal devices on my home page, something I thought looks really cool even if the implementation and overall presentation is utter garbage. in a way that's what makes the indieweb nice: you acn do basically everything.
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WinnerWind were those comments on this IRC? if so I don't have history that old. Is it a public forum?
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[0x3b0b] I'm not sure offhand what the best way to track down more of it would be. https://nkantar.com/blog/2025/08/blaugust-2025-no-comments/ (which is very simply the first post on it I found in my browser history that had several links to what others had written) is at least an entry point.
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WinnerWind thanks for the link! i'm going to take a read. by the way, what's your personal indieweb site?
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[0x3b0b] I'm kind of on the opposite side from you, I guess. I treat e-mail as the means of communication to use after (almost) everything else has failed - and I consider using email to mean communication is still failing. :D
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[0x3b0b] My site is bw3.dev
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WinnerWind i get that, my contacts site has a few ways to get in touch with me, including by SMS. (https://winnerwind.in/contact) Yes, someone actually did SMS me a while ago.
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[0x3b0b] SMS is one of the three things I like less than email. The other two are actual phone calls (with anyone outside a group of about a dozen people, half of whom are family) and postal mail. I probably check my mailbox less than once a month on average.
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WinnerWind [0x3b0b]: cool as hell site! solarized IS my favourite colour theme, even if i grew out of it a long time ago.
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WinnerWind yeah I hate SMS too. i mainly kept it because i'm lazy and i also link potential employers to my resume page and i didnt feel like writing two sets of contact pages. i hate getting calls but thankfully no one ever calls me except my family, and if i dont recognise the number, i dont pick up. we dont even get postal mail, but one time I did: it was from the government and it scared the life out of me
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[0x3b0b] Thanks! I can't take much credit for the design. I did very little customization of the default Microblogpub appearance, beyond solarizing it.
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WinnerWind making minor modifications still makes it yours in a way, my site's theme was forked from an old obsidian theme named Gummy, which went defunct because the theme developer just dissapeared one day. I decided to make it my own and i renamed it to Gummy Revived, and it's become MY theme ever since, making minor modifications to make it truly in line with my identity.
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[0x3b0b] That's a good point, but I still don't like to take much credit...the layout is more important _to me_ than the color scheme, and I think I did literally nothing to the layout that you can see without being logged in as me. (Not because I couldn't, but because I'm happy with it.) And I went with mainly the Solarized Dark colors partly because I can't trust my own color judgement. My first website had lavender text on a dark blue background until...
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[0x3b0b] ... someone explained to me that to _most_ people that contrast was illegible.
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[0x3b0b] Anyhow, I really should have been in bed an hour ago, so I'm gonna call it a night. See you around.
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WinnerWind see you! take care.
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osteophage Re: the webmentions conversation, I think any time you get enough hobbyists of any kind together in one place you're at risk of the water subreddit phenomenon. https://youtu.be/4ZK8Z8hulFg
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osteophage Anyway, seconding the answer that you definitely do not need to set up things like webmentions if you don't want.
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[jeremycherfas] Have people seen the poll on Mastodon asking whetther people who have a personal website are also paid to develop software? https://social.lol/@bw/115976109808909729 I find the results a bit disappointing,
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WinnerWind what's dissapointing about it?
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WinnerWind shouldn't it be a good thing that people are getting paid to make software?
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aspizu what comment section provider do u guys yse
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aspizu [edit] what comment section provider do u guys use
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[Murray] what are comments
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Loqi Comments are displayed in the context of an original post, and may be a mix of syndicated reply posts from other sites received via Webmention, as well as locally created comments https://indieweb.org/comments
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[Murray] @aspizu there's some discussion and examples on that page ^ and also on the linked local comments: https://indieweb.org/local_comments
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[Murray] Personally, I no longer have them enabled (though I'm considering re-enabling at some point), but I typically use a web form connected to my CMS, rather than a dedicated service
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[jeremycherfas] @WinnerWind People who are not being paid to write software should have personal websites. No wonder some people find IndieWeb too geeky.
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MD87 that’s a far better ratio than I expected, given it’s a poll posted on mastodon by a programmer
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[jeremycherfas] One reason I wanted to boost it.
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osteophage I was about to say, posting it on Mastodon does seem like it'd end up skewing the results on a question like that. I can't vote without a fediverse account but if I could, I'd vote no, not a software dev.
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osteophage aspizu[d]: Re: comment sections, I've been crossposting to Dreamwidth as my solution for that.
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[tantek]1 Results were about 50/50 right? That seems pretty good for a Mastodon poll. Also reinforces the need to keep this channel relatively free of jargon
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[jeremycherfas] No, when I voted results were more like 70 20 with quite a few I don’t have a website.
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[jeremycherfas] Currently 54:33:14 with N=632
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[tantek]1 Right the last one being "I should" IMO means the people who don't care are not answering
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[tantek]1 54/46 is the rough 50/50 I mean. I’m including the don't but should crowd as indieweb-interested
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[jeremycherfas] I’m not sure I agree, but I’m not going to argue. It would be an interesting follow-up to ask those in the Should cqategory in six months whether they did.
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[snarfed] also the respondents to that poll are going to be extremely self-selecting. I wouldn't take that as anything remotely representative of the true answer to "how many people with personal web sites are software engineers?"
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[tantek]1 [jeremycherfas] I don't disagree with your skepticism. I’m more looking at the potential upside, that's all
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[artlung] I would be interested to see a thoughtfully designed IndieWeb Census. Understanding who it is we think we're advocating for and empowering seems an obvious sort of thing we'd do. If not us, who?
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[tantek]1 Right. The original /Geneations concept and page was mostly a hypothesis mixed with some anecdotes and despite criticisms no one has come up with a better replacement. Better data could help inform a good update
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[artlung] I don't love the big JavaScript and CSS surveys that come out every year but they do seem to cast a wide net and capture something in the way of trends over time. IndieWeb Census would be an ambitious goal, but worth considering. If anyone interested in going at it, sorting out how it might be done could be interesting.
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[tantek]1 One big challenge I see is how much folks would want to get a picture of the existing indieweb vs a picture of the potential indieweb (interest) because depending on that the data will steer you toward maintenance or growth
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[tantek]1 Part of the goal of the /Generations page was to look beyond the status quo into how to actually effect larger changes, which often requires thinking and leaps beyond being purely data-driven
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[artlung] getting it right, or even taking a big swing at all -- would be difficult. And no matter the results it would likely be criticized widely.
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[artlung] but shining a light on what makes the personal web the personal web would be ... illuminating.
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Loqi [indienews] New post: "Digital Longevity Through the Dutch Royal Library" https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/01/digital-longevity-through-the-dutch-royal-library/ (from https://artlung.com/indienews/05de55083e6d92d43ff131358d47b949)
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[snarfed] https://indiemap.org/ was one angle on an indieweb census, but only really the technical part
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Loqi [preview] Indie Map is a public IndieWeb social graph and dataset. 2300 sites, 5.7M pages, 380GB HTML with microformats2. Social graph API and interac...
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[artlung] I really enjoy Daniel's AVIF files from HWC DUS. https://danielpietzsch.com/notes/hwc-nov-2025
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[Al_Abut] [jeremycherfas] I can see it being disappointing if you're looking at the percentages. It's also inspiring if you just look at the absolute numbers and see how many non-devs came out of the woodwork to raise hand.
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[Al_Abut] So both perspectives are true!
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[morgan] I guess Im not surprised that many people active in working on web stuff are the ones with websites. But also what work people do on the web is very varied in content and impacts. Some kind of indie attempt at a community survey would likewise capture a share of the skills guild like theme
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[morgan] to me this place is more like a skills guild, there are lots of people out there on the web not currently ironing out their skills and praxis, a wide expanse of experiences out there 🙂
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