An Introducing to IndieWeb
Session Topic: An Introduction to the INDIEWEB
Tuesday 2H
Convener: Ben Werdmuller
Notes-taker: Kevin Marks & Ben Werdmuller
Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:
Find notes from this session here: http://indiewebcamp.com/2014-05-06-iiw-intro-indieweb
Further Notes:
we talk a lot in #indieweb about "silos" - dropbox, facebook etc who make money by locking up our data
facebook is a fantastic proof of concept of a social network, but they take control away from you
- indieweb is about having your own space on the web - your own domain as your primary identity
the #indieweb goal is for you not to lose anything by not being in the silos, by connecting to them
I haven't posted directly to facebook or twitter for a year, I post to my site and share to them instead
the #indieweb community practices what we preach - we build for our own sites not making standards for other people
there are lots of small building blocks that we use to build the #indieweb - microformats are how we add meaning to web pages
another building block is webmentions http://indiewebcamp.com/webmention that tell sites when you have linked to them
by using these buliding blocks we can have likes, retweets, replies, and RSVPs on our own #indieweb sites
currently this is mostly about publicly visible data, but we add authentication with indieauth.com
we are not trying to establish a huge standards organisation, but instead a community of people who implement and discuss
how many people have their own websites? [most] how many post regularly [fewer]
does posting once a year count as regularly?
twitter can be almost to easy - you need an interface that is as easy to us as twitter for your own site
there is an opportunity for "twitter apps" for your own site - use other people's apps to post to your own #indieweb site
shows off noterlive, which is a way to post these kind of live tweets and keep them for posting on my own site
@aaronpk has posted a photo on his site - I can reply to that using idno's firefox plugin and it shows on my site
I can also reply to @kevinmarks's tweet using the Firefox plugin, and it posts on my site and shares it to twitter too
There's an event tomorrow night in SF called Homebrew Website Club - I can RSVP to that on my site + share to Facebook
creating the twitter and facebook integrations for idno too about an hour and a half each
I'd love to create a way to upload HTML5 games and post them to your site and send highscores by webmentions
it's an open community - there's an IRC channel: http://indiewebcamp.com/IRC and a wiki http://indiewebcamp.com- all are welcome
other sites could shut down apis, but at least you don't lose your own posts when that happens
with silo'd sites there is na ethnocentric design as they're all made here in SF - indieweb is less SV dominated
this is interesting from a hacker perspective, but how big can it go? this blogging will never catch on
there is a page on the wiki for wider adoption: http://indiewebcamp.com/generations (there's a page for everything)
we're more likely to get to mainstream by iterating on working code and consensus
I've run lots of my servers at home (and fax machines) -what happens when they're all botnets?
not necessarily hoem servers, can be in cloud, or even static sites that can be synced
there are ways that we can do this with a wholly static site and services that build the communication parts
the other way is to run an unhosted app that posts to a static server and have the data locally in the browser
one advantage of making this web-centric is that we don't have to impose any architecture on anyone else to communicate
how to get started? one list is at indiewebify.me
first get your own domain and put up a page that links to your existing profiles elsewhere, so you have your own space
also look at http://indiewebcamp.com/Getting_Started to see where to go
we're hoping by the end of the summer to have idno be a one-click install http://idno.co/
the idno code is all on github at https://github.com/idno/idno tomorrow it will be called "known"
we're going to switch to MySQL from mongo on idno to make it run where wordpress runs
we're not quite there yet to be able to deploy a dynamic site anywhere
do come to Homebrew Website Club meetings on wednesdays in SF, Portland, Chichago + sunnyvale http://indiewebcamp.com/events/2014-05-07-homebrew-website-club
Received from Ben Werdmuller:
Notes by Aaron Parecki
These are permanently hosted at: http://indiewebcamp.com/2014-05-06-iiw-intro-indieweb
the real promise of the web is that we can all connect and learn from each other and you're not giving up control of your data and identity selfdogfooding - get something up and running for yourself and live it. if you expect people to live by a standard or principle, live it yourself first
building blocks - make it easy to get started quickly
- microformats - encode machine-readable data into HTML, rather than trying to create huge backend system for things
- webmention - has become one of the key building blocks of the indieweb - people are using this today and forgetting about the technology and actually having real site-to-site conversations
Because each of the building blocks are so small, people can pick up one of them and experiment and build something that works in a day.
how many people have their own domain name? all but 2 raised their hand [nice! -t]
how many people post regularly? most - does annual count?
"i used to" - 'why did you stop?' - twitter, it's faster
benwerd: I get to choose to syndicate to twitter and other silos
aaronpk: one of the challenges is to have a user interface to post to your own site that is as easy as Twitter. Some folks have built user interfaces on their own sites as simple as Twitter.
aaronpk: not everyone wants to build their own user interface. micropub lets apps post to indieweb sites.
kevinmarks demonstrating noterlive
- put in a hashtag and speaker name
- posting to twitter, but also collecting HTML into the page
- when he finishes, copies the HTML to his site
- wants to add micropub to automatically post the HTML to his site instead of manual copy/pate
- this interface is *more useful* than twitter for tweeting
benwerd demoing his site
- showing aaron's photo of this session
- clicking reply button in firefox plugin for Known
- typing a reply, hit save
- posted it first as a comment on his own site
- automatically shows up at the bottom of my photo as a comment
- url: http://aaronparecki.com/notes/2014/05/06/4/iiw-indieweb
- http://werd.io/2014/great-to-see-so-many-people-here
- demoing RSVPing to tomorrow's homebrew website club indie event
- these plugins took about an hour to build each
would love to find a way to post HTML5 games so indie game developers could quickly host games. high scores could be received back with webmentions.
There's the IndieWebCamp wiki and IRC channel. Everyone is welcome.
There is no mailing list: http://indiewebcamp.com/FAQ#Is_there_an_IndieWeb_mailing_list
Q: can the "big guys" withdraw the APIs? A: of course! but it's not like they can disable an API key and the whole indieweb goes down. but it's also useful to note that we don't necessarily need them to have indieweb conversations. also they can't turn off their own HTML.
Q: if Google+ doesn't have an API, do they even really exist?
... Freedom box ... from Austria ... just got back from ouishare in Paris following indieweb on the sidelines ever since FSWS one of the powerful ideas of the indieweb is that it's loosely defined, so it's easy to get going and start using building blocks
Q: this is really interesting from a hacker perspective, but how mainstream can it go?
A: aaronpk, pretty much every question has an answer on the wiki. E.g. for this, see https://indiewebcamp.com/generations - right now we're mostly a hacker community. We saw the internet go from a hacker community and go completely mainstream. This is how it starts.
A: benwerd: 10 years ago, social web, people would say what? it's not mainstream. ... We're more likely to get there by iterating on working code.
KevinMarks: one of the arguments is, how much can you push statically? a bunch of us are doing this.
Aaronpk: when your website is a pile of HTML files and you can put it on any FTP server and still communicate with other sites? You end up with using a webmention service.
[12:37] <bretttt> its key to eventually get that service data INTO the html file itself. working on that now
KevinMarks: part of the point here is to NOT just build a monoculture. https://indiewebcamp.com/monoculture
because we started with 6 people writing their sites in 6 different programming languages, it made monoculture way less likely to happen
- buy a domain
- find space to host it
- put up a simple home page with an h-card with your name and links to other profiles
Known - currently PHP + MongoDB. going to be PHP+MySQL.
known / withknown.com (sp?)
benwerd: As Kevin said, monocultures are bad. This only going to work if there are a number of platforms out there. Idno is one. p3k is another. Interesting things with WordPress plugins. Taproot. See https://indiewebcamp.com/projects
If anyone is here in this area, or Portland, or Chicago, there's a Homebrew Website Club every two weeks.
SF one is 18:30 on Wednesday:
Portland one is usually hosted by ESRIPDX or MozPDX but not this week.
Chicago one is usually at Intelligentsia.
KevinMarks: Do we want a satellite one here in MV?
Benwerd: not looking forward to driving back in rush hour
KevinMarks: we can grab a table at the Firehouse and make that the MV HWC
