#indieweb 2026-03-18
2026-03-18 UTC
[Michael_Kupiet], [KevinMarks], cotsuka, [artlung], thegreekgeek, yin and prismaflip joined the channel
# 
prismaflip https://ismile.neocities.org
# prismaflip this ones my favorite so far
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Loqi [indienews] New post: "Weeknote 2026-W08: A11y, WCAG & KeepAndroidOpen" https://burgeonlab.com/weeknotes/2026/w08/
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# [Michael_Kupiet] OMG @prismaflip++ I love your site, different egregious examples of design from each decade. Wonderful.
# [Michael_Kupiet] Oh, wait, is that not yours? Ok, great share anyway. That's very funny.
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# [quarter] Does the idea of indieweb have to be generalised to a post-geocities perspective? Although I do love the art direction of ADHD-inspired HTML I'm kinda wondering
# [quarter] I mean I've seen neocities, it's cool, but if we're promoting an idea of the internet that existed before social media, relying on retro ideas isn't like, forward-thinking. You can't recreate an older version of the internet any more than you can go back to times that were better. Cowboys had to adapt to a changing frontier and all, and now we got no cowboys
# [morgan] I think the more accurate question is what is the status of blogging right now not so much about any return to the past
# [quarter] yeah good point, what is the status of blogging
# [quarter] What's the internet for?
# [morgan] Blogging is still a thing, and has benefits, but it's not quite at heights culturally it used to be because of the centralization of websites for many people into social media apps or silos as we call em. I think a lot of people are trying to keep the lights on for civil society on the net and juggling a bunch of things like creative freedom, owning your own data etc
# [quarter] Totally, but when I started writing I was reading Cory Doctorow, whose whole deal was 'the main enemy is obscurity' in the internet, which is still as true now as it was idk over a decade ago. That's ultimately what we're dealing with. And now, we're not dealing with human readers, we're dealing with AI scrapers. I've published a whole book with this in mind. All writing content is going to go through Anthropic or ChatGPT before it gets to a
# [quarter] reader, so I'm at sort of a loss
# [quarter] but, on the upside, I/we don't have to bring people to our sites, we have to bring AI
# [quarter] I foresee the internet as sort of a layer that people don't have to interact with, which is bad for publicity
# [morgan] It's an ongoing discussion and living breathing project here by a bunch of people to have websites, that's just what I'll say, without commenting on layers or ai really.
# [quarter] No absolutely, totally agree, it's a living breathing project
# [quarter] It's either going to have to stand aside from the billions of people who use the internet so it's found by the people who want to find it, or find some way to adapt into a weird, new, unpredictable reality
# [quarter] either way I'm down so lmao
# [morgan] Ah well, great then :)
# [quarter] not really, I'm not expecting answers. I'm just like, an old-school writer/author type who's already seen things like Buzzfeed kill his dreams so, like, I'd like to actually see some backswing
# [morgan] I don't know if you will find what you seek necessarily, I don't quite follow, but my hope is you will own more of your data and learn at any of the events that happen around here and such
# [quarter] I'm talking at abstract levels that make sense to me. I don't necessarily know if I'm understood, as a writer that comes through editing. I don't get much opportunity for that in group chats
# [morgan] Ok. I don't really understand your current level of abstraction :). I welcome you to explain or continue as it's very on topic about the web and blogging
# [morgan] What do you mean by "back swing"
# [quarter] Oh backswing like uhh, a newton's mechanics sort of movement. The pendulum moving back.
# [morgan] what does that refer to about the Internet ?
# [quarter] Blogging used to be cooler than it is now. It used to be useful. Blogging is just people writing words on the internet. I don't blog, but I do write words on the internet. If there was a swing back towards human-written blogging I would be both surprised and pleased
# bearina. I feel like the indieweb is the kind of movement you’re looking for - you own your own data, write on your website instead of social media and control as well as that’s possible where it gets shared. I personally don’t think the internet will go back to the olden days before personalization unfortunately
# [quarter] but we're kinda dealing with a glut of meaningless words, we've had a decade of Fake News, and nobody knows what is truth
# [quarter] yeah exactly, but moving forward, the main issue bloggers face is nobody reading their words. AI scrapers will read words, but then what? yknow
# [quarter] I'm totally, 100% down with the indieweb, I just don't think it'll survive if it just tries to imitate Geocities
# [quarter] like should we actually just not do things like robots.txt?
# [quarter] do we want to keep the robots off our websites in 2026 if we can also use it to spike-inject an AI with our words?
# [morgan] You seem kind of invested in proving points about this - I'm happy to talk more about it, but everything you are saying is like documented a lot already with answers
# bearina. Yeah blogging was a big trend 10 years ago or so and today most people moved over to social media.
# bearina. I don’t really know how geocities worked, but I’ve seen a lot of NEOcities websites and, quite frankly, don’t get confused. These are not the IndieWeb. I love the creativity and some sites are surely part of it, but it’s only a small part of what the community is about
# [quarter] I understand
# [quarter] I don't exactly want to proselytise a point
# [quarter] I don't have a point, I just want people to succeed
# [quarter] We're in a tough situation, reacting to a modern world of media consumption (especially me, tryin to publish physical books) and I just want it to work out well
# [quarter] I made an AI web-scraping bot, so I know how they work. Bloggers are cooked if they don't outsmart the machine reading their work
# [morgan] Everyone's trying to figure this stuff out and how to exist online. You do seem to be advocating particular points - like why would they be "cooked" and how are they to "outsmart" a bot? There are wiki pages in the Indieweb wiki for learning about bot traffic
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# [morgan] Your writing tone seems to be suggesting these are new concepts but actually people have talked about them at incredible lengths including myself
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tantek.com This is a clever improvement in Swarm (photo location to find check in venue) and I wonder if anyone is contemplating something similar for their personal site to simplify checkin UI
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# DrCiRCUiT lo, ne1 here?
# tantek.com What is a chicken?
# Loqi 🐔 chicken is a type of post supported by idnoKnown, and were initially a proof of concept for post-type plugin development, but high levels of chicken interest in the community has driven further development https://indieweb.org/chicken
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# [quarter] Okay yeah that's fair Morgan, I do recognise I'm not like, bot-trained, but I am word-trained. I recognise that these aren't even new concepts. One thing I definitely want to learn about is how bot traffic works these days. I think everyone should. Nowadays I feel like I have an advantage, because I am good with words. My skills are hard to quantify.
# [quarter] Dealing with AI scrapers is going to be the next SEO, Personally, I want AI scrapers to read my work. I want to maximise the amount of AI scrapers that consume my work. I also want credit for it. For however the internet looks in 5-10 years, I don't want to be as obscure as I have been. Prompt injection is an idea, but surely there's an idea _past that_. I don't know what it is yet.
# [quarter] For whatever it's worth, bloggers these days are cooked if they're just following the same routes bloggers did in 2005. It just won't work. LLMs can do blogs for them, and do, en masse. I believe there are going to be fewer people browsing the internet, who instead rely on services to provide what the internet can do for them. I believe it's about convenience. Whatever independent creators have to do to be noticed has to exist in a realm of
# [quarter] convenience for the audience. That's not so easy these days
# [morgan] Your writing is just fine ! :) . The theory that fewer people will browse the Internet because of low quality slop and spam does appeal to me, but then for a niche or audience who knows how to find trustworthy material blogs will be like a rarer fruit or something with a different qualitative value
# [morgan] I think the assumption you are making is that everyone is trying to be a creator and compete for eyeballs, I'm perfectly happy my blog being read by 20 people who actually matter about its content
# [quarter] That appeals to me too
# [morgan] I have had my own freakouts about bots don't get me wrong, recently I had stuff not even bad stuff just stuff I didn't expect crawled into various results and had a little mini meltdown about my whole digital identity and whether I was writing for bots or humans
# [quarter] I am a man who strongly remembers 2005-2009 when I was finding new webcomics to read through uhhhh, linktree-type things
# [quarter] If I hadn't been told about other webcomics by the webcomics I was paying attention to, I never would've found them
# [tantek]3 [morgan] ++ having just a few people you care read your content is much more important than mass adoption / audience
# [tantek]3 What is mass adoption?
# Loqi 🚩 antipatterns are antithetical to a diverse and growing indieweb, often times the opposite, or at best a distraction from indieweb principles and building-blocks, yet persistently repeated despite their tendency to waste time and cause failures https://indieweb.org/mass_adoption
# [tantek]3 What is LLM traffic?
# Loqi Large language model traffic is (AKA LLM crawling or AI scraping) the phenomenon of web requests made by LLM operators to ingest data for use in training AI models, or to answer user queries in “search” mode (like ChatGPT Search), which tend to ignore robots directives and overwhelm personal blogs, community sites, and other smaller websites https://indieweb.org/LLM_traffic
# [tantek]3 quarter, take a look at those two wiki pages
# [quarter] already on it, thanks
# [tantek]3 Also there's no need to feel like being an update to or replacement for geocities.
# [quarter] Nah just like, a progression. We can't live in geocities. I've done a lot of local, real-world promotion (my profile picture is a sticker I made up) and that gets be fine around town
# [quarter] gets me* fine
# [quarter] I sure didn't get into writing for the money
# [quarter] but I got writing goals
# [tantek]3 What is why?
# Loqi ❓ There are many reasons why you should use the IndieWeb, from controlling your experience on the web (instead of corporate algorithms), to deciding where and when to post your content and where it goes https://indieweb.org/why
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# [tantek]3 We do have a bunch of folks here who write about writing and post that on their personal sites. Some of those posts have been quite inspiring
# [tantek]3 What is writing
# Loqi ⌨️✍🏻 Writing is the act of creating, expanding, editing, and updating primarily text posts such as notes and articles https://indieweb.org/writing
# [quarter] This is why: https://akickintheteeth.com/blog/2025/06/27/wells-rest-available-now/
# [quarter] cuz I love my books and I want many people to read them
# [tantek]3 Nice
# [tantek]3 Also resonates with this page I believe
# [tantek]3 What is the void
# Loqi The void describes the destination for writing site-owners. We muse on why we write and create on our sites and wonder whether anyone is reading our sites and feeds. Joy helps https://indieweb.org/void
# [quarter] yeah dude 100%
# [quarter] chuck stuff into the void and laugh, if anything laughs back yr doin a good job
# [quarter] I wish my site admin would reboot the site so the updates came through, it's currently broken on mobile -_-
# [morgan] If it means anything I think a lot of people are a mixture of feelings about the topics you pointed on- ai, mass adoption, why? Etc. everyone is kind of on a journey about this stuff and some have experienced or experimented things differently. I'm trying to save my energy for criticizing like multi billion ventures and theft of the cultural commons rather than anyone who tried the products being pushed at us everywhere
# [quarter] Yea dude. I made an LLM-driven web browser (yeah it's a bit janky) before OpenAI could do it. I feel like I hit a mark there. Fuck OpenAI and Sam Altman - I doubt it's even his real name.
# [quarter] I quit my shitty job and got back into this shit the day I heard about the 127mil books stolen
# [quarter] 127k? idk
# [morgan] I had forgot some people use an openai browser, definitely don't like that, I could rant a lot. As for you, your just a person experimenting and I don't have any rants. Good luck with the writing!
# [quarter] Yeah lol, the idea of an AI browser is cooked, and it's the fundamentals of the service that are most concerning. These things run without browser windows all the time. I'm more than experimenting, I'm usually quite targeted in my approach. But thanks lmao, I'm subversive
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# [morgan] What is Atlas
# Loqi Atlas is a set of APIs for looking up information about locations, including a timezone lookup, finding the name of a city given a latitude/longitude, finding the current weather at a location, and generating static maps https://indieweb.org/Atlas
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# [morgan] Not sure it needs an article/disambiguation, but the browsers name is atlas and in terms of owning your own data and privacy and various other things it would not be good but maybe worth documenting. Also there were a bunch of accessibility issues at least in the designed way it would interact with aria labels and descriptions
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# [morgan] Correction- missed it right in front of me there is already a link
# [tantek]3 If it already has a Wikipedia page it likely doesn't need one here unless there's some specific IndieWeb connection
# [morgan] Yeah even just the disambiguation there is good ! Didn't want to confuse anyone about the harmless apis
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[capjamesg] I have written a short page to encourage visitors to my website to make their own websites: https://jamesg.blog/make-a-website
# [capjamesg] I wanted to keep the resource as short as possible so as not to be overwhelming. Ideally, I want to encourage people to feel like starting a website is something they can do, and point to other resources to get started.
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# [tantek]3 capjamesg++ that's a beautiful friendly encouragement!
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# v1sta Thanks [Jo]
# v1sta Checkout these modern style design 88x31 buttons collections (designed by [@v1sta]), now upload on IndieWeb.org wiki at https://indieweb.org/buttons#88x31 , welcome use!
# [capjamesg] v1sta++
# [capjamesg] So cool!
# v1sta Thank you very much~
# v1sta And then... How to set my avatar image photo in this chatroom? Maybe must I'll talk with IRC or Slack or Discord?
# [capjamesg] I think you need to add your username to the https://indieweb.org/chat-names list.
# v1sta Thanks @capjamesg, I'll try it.
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# [capjamesg] I finally got around to making my For You page: https://jamesg.blog/for-you
# Loqi It looks like we don't have a page for "for you" yet. Would you like to create it? (Or just say "for you is ____", a sentence describing the term)
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[jeremycherfas] [quarter] I don’t know, but reading a statement like “I want AI scrapers to read my work. I want to maximise the amount of AI scrapers that consume my work. I also want credit for it.” seems to me like that old thing about any two of three. I quite agree that if the purpose of writing is to get people to part with money to read your words, then things do look grim. But as [tantek] pointed out, there are many reasons why.
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[KevinMarks] the challenge is finding places where people do actually care about writing, or even reading.
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gRegor capjamesg, hah, I was expecting something like a https://indieweb.org/algorithmic_feed before I clicked through :)
# [KevinMarks] There's now an atproto tumblr-alike https://pckt.blog/b/kevinmarks/returning-to-blogs-h9ket4e
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# [KevinMarks] that's a solid point, and is right there in Publics and Counterpublics, quoting Orwell's 1984 https://www.george-orwell.org/1984/0.html#:~:text=For%20whom%2C%20it%20suddenly%20occurred%20to%20him%20to%20wonder%2C%20was%20he%20writing%20this%20diary%3F
# [capjamesg] gRegor I prefer my page to an algorithm 🙂
# [KevinMarks] previously, another Orwell point https://epeus.blogspot.com/2004/01/categorising-blogs.html
# [KevinMarks] more alive link for the essay https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/why-i-write/
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# Loqi Homebrew Website Club Europe/London is starting soon! Join us! https://events.indieweb.org/0EMPkdPMzZKX
# [capjamesg] We’re starting now ^^
# [capjamesg] Yay! We’re live now!
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# hi no
# hi Sciencer
# hi how do i chang my username
# hi xXSciencerXx
# hi Ok
# hi that did not work
# rgbivvv did you type "/nick xXSciencerXx" ?
# xXSciencerXx yea
# xXSciencerXx oh
# xXSciencerXx worked now
# xXSciencerXx THX
# rgbivvv nice!
# xXSciencerXx nice monunity
# xXSciencerXx Community *
to2ds, gordinator, gordinator_ and xXSciencerXx1 joined the channel
# xXSciencerXx1 hi
# xXSciencerXx1 anyone wnat to make a website w/ me
# xXSciencerXx1 it will be about physarum polycephalum
# xXSciencerXx1 common name Slime mold
# xXSciencerXx1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physarum_polycephalum for refference
# xXSciencerXx1 im good with js but not html and css
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# [capjamesg] You might appreciate https://htmlforpeople.com/
# xXSciencerXx1 thx, but i was kinda wooking for a partner
# xXSciencerXx1 looking*
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# [Michael_Kupiet] Wow. This conversation prompted me to look up the website of an old friend, Mark Irons aka "Half", who was fascinated by slime molds. Regrettably Mark passed away nearly 15 years ago, but I am delighted to now discover that someone has been maintaining his website this whole time. Mark's thoughts, interests, and design esthetic would have fit in perfectly with the IndieWeb community. http://www.rdrop.com/~half/
# [Michael_Kupiet] Mark was in incredible guy, cerebral but very warm, creative, incredibly intelligent, loving—the kind of person people loved enough that someone would care enough to still be preserving his legacy 15 years later. If you check the dates, this means his website has been continuously live for 31 years.
# [Michael_Kupiet] Here is his page of slime mold photos: http://www.rdrop.com/~half/General/nature/leocarpus.fragilis.html
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# [morgan] He seemed like a very vibrant character! Slime mold reminds me of punk music
# [Michael_Kupiet] "Vibrant"! Yes, that'd be a word for him. I really regret he's not around to join the community here, he'd have enjoyed it. I really need to do an in memoriam page and tell all the stories. There are a lot of them.
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# [morgan] I'm looking forward to HWC Pacific tonight at 6pm Pacific time, I plan to go, I encourage anyone interested to attend, I plan to talk about two websites I've been working on a little at some point
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