Over the last few weeks, while working on OpenTechEvents, I ended up pulling a thread I had only touched lightly before: the IndieWeb.
And, honestly, it makes a lot of sense that I got there from a project about open tech events.
An idea that is not new
The funny thing is that the IndieWeb is not new at all. The movement started around 2010, but some of its ideas feel even more relevant now than they probably did back then.
OpenTechEvents is making me think again about how we publish information on the web, how we connect communities, and how we make things discoverable without depending on a single platform.
Some IndieWeb ideas resonate a lot with me: owning your identity, publishing on your own domain, making content more interoperable, and letting websites talk to each other again.
I still have a lot to learn, but I have already started taking my first steps.
First steps
I added more semantic data to this website using JSON-LD and Microformats2, so my homepage describes me a bit better as a person, not just as a collection of HTML elements. I also updated my links page so it can act as a clearer identity hub, with rel="me" links and better compatibility with IndieLogin.
POSSE and owning what I share
One concept that especially resonates with me is POSSE: publish on your own site, then syndicate elsewhere. In a way, it is similar to what I already do with Buffer: publishing from one place and distributing to different platforms. The important difference is that, with POSSE, my own website becomes the source of truth, and the rest of the platforms become copies or distribution channels. Understanding it properly can get technical quite quickly, but the idea is very attractive to me: use my own domain as the canonical place for my content and activity, and then distribute copies to the platforms where most people already are.
That does not mean leaving social platforms entirely. If I want to interact with most people, I still need to be present where most people are. But I do like the idea of finding ways to keep using them while adopting more IndieWeb principles, without adding too much friction.
In essence, I like the idea of not being completely tied to platforms that may close, start charging, restrict APIs, or change the rules. I have already seen versions of that story with Meetup.com, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Flickr, and other services.
There is another angle that bothers me too: when I write a review to help people looking for geolocated information on Google Maps, or upload a photo of a menu so other people can make better decisions, Google locks those data behind a paid API and I cannot say that I want my contribution to be freely available for anyone to use.
That example comes to mind often, but it applies to many other platforms too. We should be the owners of what we share, even if we still participate in other people's platforms.
Aaron Parecki as a reference
If you have never heard of Aaron Parecki, he is one of the people behind IndieWebCamp. He is also a geogeek: he co-founded Geoloqi, a location platform acquired by Esri, where he later worked from 2012 to 2016 according to his LinkedIn experience. Beyond his IndieWeb work, I have learned a lot about OAuth from his courses and material, which I credited in my 2023 Commit Conf talk, OAuth, OpenID Connect and JWT para dummies.
If someone wants to understand what joining the IndieWeb can look like in practice, Aaron's website is a living example of what it means to own your content on your own domain.
Webmentions
And now I have also enabled Webmentions.
I think the first time I saw a reference to this concept was while reading something by swyx, probably his post about learning in public. At the time it sounded interesting, but I did not really get my hands dirty enough to understand how it worked.
While testing this, I also realized that receiving a Webmention is only a small piece of the IndieWeb. If I want other tools to understand the context properly, my posts need to include useful metadata too. So I started marking articles with Microformats2 values such as h-entry, p-name, dt-published, p-author, u-url, and e-content, so services can extract the title, author, date, canonical URL, and the actual content mentioning another page. I still need to extend this more consistently across the rest of the site, including my digital brain.
That means that, at least in theory, if someone writes a post linking to one of my articles, that mention can be discovered and shown here. It feels small, but I like the direction: instead of conversations being trapped only inside social networks, a personal website can receive signals from the rest of the web.
I'm not pretending this is a finished migration to the IndieWeb. It is more like opening a door and putting one foot inside.
Pending pieces
There is also one important piece I have not solved yet: automating the outgoing Webmentions. For now, when I link to a site that supports Webmentions, I still have to send the notification manually, usually with a small curl command. Not ideal, but good enough for a first experiment.
For example, this very article links to my links landing page, links.rauljimenez.info. After publishing it, I can manually send a Webmention like this:
curl -i -X POST https://webmention.io/links.rauljimenez.info/webmention \
-H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" \
--data-urlencode "source=https://www.rauljimenez.info/blog/first-steps-into-the-indieweb" \
--data-urlencode "target=https://links.rauljimenez.info/"
And with that, a mention appears in the footer of links.rauljimenez.info. Right now it feels a bit tedious, but I understand that with other tools, such as Micropub, this kind of flow can become much less manual.
I also want to find time to experiment with other pieces of the IndieWeb ecosystem, such as Micropub and Microsub.
And, related but different, I also want to finally understand the Fediverse properly. The IndieWeb and the Fediverse are not the same thing, although both are part of a broader movement towards a more decentralized internet and more control over our own data. I see them as sibling ecosystems, with very similar philosophies, but different technologies and approaches. I had never gone deep enough into the Fediverse, but this has definitely woken up that curiosity again, and I like what both represent.
Towards a digital twin
Since 2023 I have treated this site as my digital brain. Maybe, little by little, it can also become a kind of digital twin of my online presence: a more faithful representation of what I publish, when I write a review, mark something as a favorite, save something, RSVP to an event, or share things across the web.
Let's see where this path leads 😅.
Update: Micropub is live
Well, this moved faster than expected. Since writing this post, I have already set up Micropub for real, with a private Indiekit server, helped a lot by AI along the way. In this new flow, publishing no longer depends on manual curl commands, although this integration is not connected to Docusaurus yet.
The flow now stores notes, bookmarks, likes, and replies in a public GitHub repository, hhkaos/posts.rauljimenez.info. From there, a GitHub Action renders the public feed at posts.rauljimenez.info, showing only the items marked as visible.
For now, I am treating this as an explicitly public space: I only plan to publish things I actually want to share in the open, fully aware of what that means. In practice, I do not expect to share anything here that I would not already be publishing in other silos today.
And this is no longer just theoretical: I have already sent a real outgoing Webmention to swyx's learn in public post, as a reply. It was verified by webmention.io and is visible there, which felt like a very satisfying first end-to-end test.
There are still several pieces pending: receiving Webmentions properly, experimenting with Microsub, and deciding whether this new public feed should appear in the main navigation of this site. But the foundations are now much more real than they were when I started writing this post.
Continued in Second steps into the IndieWeb.