Today I learned about the “Indie Web”, a sort of web revival of the early internet days when everyone made personal websites and linked to each other rather than using the handful of big corporate sites.
People seem to be either self-hosting their websites or using a hosting service like “neocities”. The result appears pretty authentic to the late 90s/early 00s: a wide range of polish, very niche and specific interests, page visit counters, guest books, chat rooms, random little games, etc.
It’s tempting to get into. I figure that this might be something that would appeal to a lot of people on the fediverse too, so I thought I’d share. Here are some random pics of people’s websites:
@The_Picard_Maneuver I sometimes think that the next iteration of “The Indieweb” is “The Fediweb”', with all these sites hooking in to each other using ActivityPub.
WordPress and Ghost already do this, and I’m sure there are more, we just have to reach a critical mass.
What would that look like? Maybe some sort of system where you could assign your site tags (e.g. star trek, linux, cats) and people could navigate by a relevant topic?
Webrings
Yeah, I could imagine it being like a web ring that automatically populates via federation instead of having some central site for the web ring.
@The_Picard_Maneuver Just to give one, rather niche, example…
I haven’t used Lemmy in a long time, but I’m assuming you can search for tags.
Try doing a search for #egcc - this account here will pop up, but if you’re lucky, so will @mancavgeek .
Congratulations, youve found my small, Fediversified WordPress site.
I picked a tag that pretty much appears on every post there (it’s the 4 letter ICAO code for Manchester Airport, where I do most of my planespotting), but there are also tags that identify the subject matter (planespotting, photography, AvGeek, etc).
Ghost does something similar, as well as Plume (RIP), WriteFreely, and others.
This would take WebRings and guest books to a whole new level, allowing 2 way communication between sites across a decentralised W3C spec.
It should be fairly trivial for the people running NeoCities and other cones to setup Federation on the back end, potentially bringing all those sites into Fedi at once.
Does that sound interesting?
I’m not sure if I can search for tags. I just tried and nothing came up, but it’s also possible that the search function in the mobile app I’m using isn’t the full search.
Very cool idea though!