from Hacker News

Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time

by vinhnx on 2/22/25, 3:42 PM with 84 comments

  • by rednafi on 2/22/25, 4:50 PM

    Neat. I maintain a blog myself[1] and prefer reading content written by actual human beings, not corporate shills or spammers masquerading on Medium and Dev.to.

    But I feel like the whole indie web thing hasn’t taken off because of discoverability issues. RSS and Atom are nice, but they aren’t mainstream enough. Also, adding support for them is difficult for non-technical or even semi-technical people.

    My blog does support RSS, and I use a reader to keep tabs on people I find interesting. But personally, I’m not a great fan of the protocol itself. It’s old, written in XML. There is JSON RSS, but that’s not widely supported and is fragmented as hell. Also, most RSS readers are just firehose feeds and don’t offer much in terms of organization.

    I’m yet to find a solution for this that I genuinely like.

    [1]: https://rednafi.com/

  • by lovegrenoble on 2/22/25, 4:46 PM

    The same concept, but for funny web gems (with a strong skew towards little WebGL art toys): https://sharkle.com

  • by james_pm on 2/22/25, 5:11 PM

    In a similar vein: https://kagi.com/smallweb

  • by susam on 2/22/25, 10:03 PM

    I feel that many of the comments here that are claiming the IndieWeb hasn't "taken off" are either stating the obvious or, if that's not the intention, completely missing the point.

    It's like saying that gardening hasn't taken off because most people buy their vegetables at the supermarket. It doesn't need to "take off" to be valuable to those who participate. Maintaining a personal website is about owning your digital presence, creative freedom, and self-expression! It's not about appealing to the masses!

    I remember in the early 2000s how I used to spend my leisure time learning HTML and writing my website, one HTML tag at a time. Writing a few lines of code in a text editor and then watching the browser render that code into a vibrant web page full of colours and images felt like an art form. It was doubly fun to find other netizens who shared that same joy of maintaining and publishing their websites. The IndieWeb is about preserving that hacker culture where websites are crafted and hosted not for mass appeal but for the sheer joy of creation and sharing with like-minded individuals.

    The IndieWeb doesn't need to go mainstream to be meaningful. It's a celebration of a more personal, decentralised, and creative world wide web. And for those of us who still care about these values, it is already meaningful.

  • by splitbrain on 2/22/25, 4:24 PM

    Creator here. Feel free to ask me anything.

  • by righthand on 2/22/25, 4:25 PM

    Stumbleupon is indeed missing in the modern algorithmic curation world.

  • by dailydetour123 on 2/23/25, 7:50 PM

    I really like this! I created a month or so back - https://www.thedailydetour.co.uk/, inspired by what seems like a similar ambition! I wanted a way to get interesting/fun/amusing things sent to me as a nice break from work and figured others would too so I built it. Thanks for making the internet a bit of a better place!

  • by MortyWaves on 2/22/25, 5:24 PM

    Neat, my site is on the list but don’t remember if I submitted it before. I made some notes on implementing IndieWeb WebMentions here [1]. It’s like a decentralised/psuedo-fediverse commenting system that features replies and likes etc.

    [1]: https://www.lloydatkinson.net/notes/19/

  • by kevincox on 2/23/25, 1:08 PM

    I used to enjoy the weekly feed with 1 random post. I would use my feed reader's "full text" functionality to pull in the content. It was a good way to drip-feed new authors into my feed and I could subscribe to the ones I liked.

    Unfortunately they fixed the set of allowed parameters, the lowest-volume option is 5 per week. Probably good for some people but more than I was looking for.

  • by k0tan32 on 2/22/25, 5:15 PM

    Pretty cool. I re-discovered RSS last year after getting tired of the usual mdoern "smart" feeds. For me, the only problem with independent small blogs is the discovery stage: you need to somehow to find out about an interesting blog, which is even harder if you want go out of your usual info-bubble.

  • by dang on 2/22/25, 7:26 PM

    Related:

    Show HN: Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31002171 - April 2022 (68 comments)

  • by MK2k on 2/23/25, 12:16 AM

    The first random blog post that I got served was this one:

    https://nutcroft.com/blog/goodbye/

    > [...] And now this blog goes too. So, goodbye!

    Oh well

  • by arjie on 2/22/25, 5:12 PM

    I like your daily random feed concept! I am going to subscribe. Here’s my blog https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/

  • by dSebastien on 2/22/25, 5:03 PM

    I'm still fond of old school blogs and RSS feeds

    Mine https://dsebastien.net

  • by netfortius on 2/22/25, 7:07 PM

  • by dmitshur on 2/23/25, 12:52 AM

    > JSON Feed is not supported.

    That is unfortunate. :(

  • by ej1 on 2/22/25, 7:52 PM

    This is a great article!

  • by Sincere6066 on 2/22/25, 6:09 PM

    And the very first blog I get is "written for generative AI." Great. Grand. Awesome.

  • by idlewords on 2/22/25, 7:30 PM

    Great, now who is going to bring back web rings?

    Discoverability remains the one great problem of online self-publishing. A history of how solutions have changed over the years would make for a fun history of the web.

  • by computerthings on 2/22/25, 4:20 PM

    for anyone who also wanted to know how that super neat list was made: https://www.tabulator.info/