I looked around andros.dev and found no (real) feeds so I'll probably just forget the site in a week. If it had had a feed I'd have added it to my desktop native readers.
By the way, andros.dev has an RSS feed.
The great thing about hosting your own website is that you can decide for yourself what "standards" and "recommendations" actually make sense for you.
> By the way, andros.dev has an RSS feed.
You should add <link rel="alternate"> links to the RSS/Atom feed. The way people (or at least I) discover RSS feeds is to paste the blog/article URL into my feed reader - if that can't find the feed then I more than likely just give up and move on. All I can find on your site is a button in the side bar that doesn't even work.
Had to look at the page source to find it, since without JS, the bottom left button does nothing.
Second, for a modal, I should use a `<dialog>` that opens via a `<button>`, which it already does. JavaScript does the magic. Not a `<a>` as you suggested.
Finally, if it's a bug, which I find very strange because it's a very simple piece of code and no one has reported it, you're not posting it in the right place. An email or the contact form would have been more appropriate.
As unnecessarily snarky as this person is being with you, don't let a HackerNews comment stop you from being an great person.
If that's just the way you like things, sure, that's what personal sites are for. How you like it. I apologize for implying otherwise (it must come off that way since two different people took it that way). I just really dislike the web as 'executable application distribution layer' model and try to stick to websites that are HTML pages.
I believe that in my case, the use of JavaScript is justified because it's information that doesn't require a separate page; there are just a couple of configuration buttons. On the other hand, the page is rendered using HTML over WebSockets, and what you're experiencing is the vanilla SEO version... hut of course, that's just my opinion.
What is the advantage to me of maintaining an rss?
Is there some giant rss feed following community I’m missing?
Yes
That's like comparing old school Windows software updating where you "just have to go on the website and read the news" vs `apt update && apt upgrade`.
https://blog.chromium.org/2021/05/an-experiment-in-helping-u...
It seems they killed it in 2025, maybe to make space for the AI button.
Also, many people (apparently not you) are uncomfortable giving money to Google.
Google also ends up with some limited information about who is accessing your website.
Update: I see you've edited the comment. Regarding paying Google, I have no problem paying for their services. I don't know what the issue is. By the way, the domain is managed by Squarespace.
What they sold to squarespace was Google Domains, the user facing registrar from which you can buy domains from most TLDs. It doesn't get any special treatment wrt to .dev
A few things I would add:
- Make it a habit to share other blogs that you love. The IndieWeb relies on word of mouth and human curation. I love "what I enjoyed this month" posts.
- Be lavish in your praise and hearty in your approval. Email your appreciation, initiate conversations. Static sites without user tracking can feel like talking to yourself at times. Reader mail feels awesome.
- Have fun! Personal sites should be personal. Allow yourself to be incomplete, to be whimsical.
- Digital gardens are great. Not everything needs to be a chronological feed. This is your space. Arrange it as you please.
> If you don't update your social.org at least once a month, you will lose the domain and the nickname will be released
I usually don't post once a month. Nickname released, that's a security problem.
Looks as if: org-social.org is a single point of failure? Hmm
I wonder if there's ways to solve those problems. Maybe you'd end up w sth like AT Proto in the end
Having difficulty imagining this constraint.
For example, I use my iPhone’s Note app daily for personal notes. I don’t currently host a site, but if I did I might have content/write on no more than monthly cadence, or per-project.
Does this rule suggest that I should ‘publish’ more (ie. elevate private note content to public more frequently) or build something for my private notes to be hosted on my server? Or something else?
In the first instance we’re talking about that micro commentary you get with social media sites. Becomes something like Kottke’s site. A feed of interesting things.
In the second instance you’re using your server infrastructure more, and so it’s not a machine you interact with only infrequently.
Or am I totally missing the point?
Not sure if you’re responding to my confusion (“Having difficulty imagining this constraint”).
I’m not asking about implementation of a solution nor of capability, but how the maxim “use what you make” is envisaged by the authors as a mechanism of engagement, management and quality for the IndieWeb. Why is it a pilar?
Man was I bummed.
How do the developers not realise that this set of protocols is completely unworkable for 90% of users?
Please stop developing systems where the engineering is front and centre. If you want to put content UX first, you need to do exactly that, with a one-click solution that gets users up and running instantly.
If you users have to go anywhere near a command line, or Docker, or they have to hand-edit HTML or CSS, you're creating walls most users aren't going to scale.
At the moment this looks more like NerdNet than IndieWeb.
I think the IndieWeb is at this early stage. The adoption for a broader audience will come naturally (if this survives), but for now - let them cook
Second of all, how long is IndieWeb supposed to cook for before it's supposed to be ready for a broader audience? This is no shade on the IW folks if they like what they're building. But if what they're building is supposed to catch on somewhat, what's the path supposed to be? The project seems to be 15 years old already: https://indieweb.org/IndieWebCamps#
If something is important for me I can waste hours setting it up and running.
If it is something new to me, if it doesn’t work out of the box I most likely will just move on.
This is essentially DNS, every single step of the way. Hosting wouldn't be hard if ISPs weren't so hostile with carrier-grade NATs, if HTTP/S wouldn't rely on DNS primarily, if legitimization were using actually mTLS instead... and all of the things usually break because of DNS and (lack of) proper standardization.
DNS in its current form is such a shitshow of RFCs overriding RFCs overriding RFCs...and not a single moment was spent on the configuration of DNS, or a protocol to request a domain, or a protocol to authenticate a domain, or a protocol to host something for a domain, ...
/nerdrage
The trick is the economics here. A one-click solution is great, but right now the indieweb solves an ideological but not a hard _user_ problem. There isn't enough "there" there to either justify investment or get enough customers to cover the costs of a service.
The closest is micro.blog, which is a genuinely great service that bakes in this tech under the hood. But the tradeoff is that you can't run it on your own infra; it's a centralized service that is compatible with the protocols but isn't quite a genuinely indieweb tool.
I've wondered if there might be something around providing better tools for logging an agent's activities, or for publishing from a sensor / server / etc, but that's all speculation. Without a genuine hard user need, it's hard to imagine how this would work as a turnkey service.
Part of the Indieweb philosophy, like Libre software, is to "scratch your own itch" - no one's paying you. You do the stuff that's interesting to you. It's not a business. The point is not to take over the market.
The planet needs fewer marketing pinheads, not more. I would like it if we passed various laws that killed off a lot of the marketing pinheads, basically eliminating their jobs one way or another, and encouraged more people to create the things they want, rather than submit to the things that are popular.
The pinheads rarely create much of substance and mostly just sit around strategizing all day on how to rent seek. They have a lot of free time and money they can use to lobby the government and make it worse. They dress this all up as capitalism though it isn't really. We should strike back.
there’s nothing wrong with building software for yourself. but if your stated goal is giving everyone ownership over their online identity, then usability stops being marketing and starts becoming part of the mission.
good ux isn’t selling out. it’s removing accidental complexity so more people can benefit from the ideas. otherwise you’re not building an alternative to big platforms, you’re building a club for people who enjoy configuring web servers.
What it isn't: a service working on perfection and maximizing consumption, as for example a commenter (Andrea Zanchetta) seems to expect. "What they built isn't suitable for me" simply isn't a relevant statement. You can build the thing you want, or have a nice day.
The point of these movements is that people are doing things for themselves, not for you, and not for the mass market. They are generally quite friendly to other people who create their own things. They are not doing it however to engage a consultant, a collective, a central authority, or pursue market share. They're just being themselves and making. Opinions that aren't backed by creating your own are just not really part of the picture and that's OK. We don't need to respond to the collective zeitgeist. We don't need to listen to all the opinions of other people online. We can just make and appreciate it as its own reward.
Occasionally these people get sponsored, and then you end up with miracles like the Linux kernel. Most times they don't and they just tinker and they're happy. It's all good.
No, you don't understand, it's bad because it does not provide ""value""
There are one-click-setup IndieWeb entry points. The most prominent is micro.blog which gives you a personal blog/site with all the latest IndieWeb goodness and costs $5/month.
But most people interested in the IndieWeb these days are devs, i.e. nerds, and want to roll things themselves, which is why IndieWeb-related blog posts can feel like tech soup.
This is something IW members would gladly see change! Adoption by non-nerds is something the IW cares about. David Shanske[2], for instance, has spent much time in the last decade on Wordpress plugins that gives you much of of the IW tools out of the box [3].
Finally, you don't need to use all of the tech to be "doing IndieWeb". Having your own domain is the first and most important step. Then maybe you[4] try making a few pages: raw HTML, generated from Markdown, Django, whatever. Then you can add Microformats. Then maybe add a script to send WebMentions, or use a free hosted service to do it for you. Then branch out in whatever direction you choose. At all of these stages, your site is still IndieWeb.
[1] I'm not as active in IW circles as I was a few years ago but still consider myself part of it: my personal site has microformats, I use Micropub to update it, etc.
[2] david.shanske.com
[3] https://profiles.wordpress.org/dshanske/#content-plugins
[4] Generic "you".
Because it's anti-platform and pro-ownership, content is secondary to the means of distribution. It's why it is bound to be a tech-heavy sub-culture and never a real alternative to big platforms.
I am sad about local groups and forums, but that is not something that IndieWeb is trying to solve.
The other problem is businesses that have retired to Instagram. which I find baffling.
How does having their own place away from the “unwashed masses” relate to overturning the big platforms?
- people with their own websites
- privacy activists and /or anti-capitalists
- almost everybody on the planet
I seriously doubt that people who clamor for the death of Facebook and the likes do it so that indie web is full of macha latte labubu car tastings and supplement and gambling shills.
It does keep indieweb for the few and not the many.
Or at least they won't enjoy it.
Physical activity is enjoyable for most people, whereas mental is painful.
They, if you're lucky, may have "davethepublumber.co.uk" and then "dave6969@gmail.com" printed on the side
use Cloudflare.
whatever critisism is just "IndieWeb decides not to do so".
not admiting own mistakes also goes hand-in-hand with it.
overall, recipe for disaster.
do you see difference between history of edits and internal documentation about the public website and public website itself? or sources to build website vs website itself? it is nuts not to see distinction of that.
github repo != public webpage. this is nuts.
Some examples of that exist for sure.
If it's turnkey it can't be "self". Even if you could buy a magic hosting box to put in your home network, you would be dependent on its support.
(which seems diametrically opposite of IndieWeb: no HTML - iOS/Android is the king, no browsers, no desktop, no terminal, no GitHub, gated App Stores, rich media, videos is the king)
>If you want to put content UX first, you need to do exactly that, with a one-click solution that gets users up and running instantly.
You clearly don't understand the IndieWeb movement, which consists of amateurs and professionals who are motivated to go the extra mile and learn this stuff. The reason the Internet is the way it is in 2026 is precisely because we’ve eliminated all friction and have cultivated the dumbest possible user.
Oh, no?
Mailinglists are great, because more and more people do no longer know how to use email or follow the instructions to sign up for a mailinglist, so many interesting people tend to gather around the lists.
Meanwhile there are also plenty of tech folks that have zero empathy or interest in quality that can easily get past any technical barrier you put in front of them, like the more talented folks at companies like Anthropic or Meta.
Making things difficult to set up tech wise doesn't select for intelligence or skill or creativity, it selects for people that work in tech as their day job.
Its not one click, but is massively simple and building up tooling around it to make it easier would also be super simple.
I find it all the more appealing with that barrier to entry because I miss the internet that this community is nostalgically trying to replicate and reproduce.
This seems different. It embraces the modern web and tries to fit in, while still giving the creator full control over their yard.
I might be overly optimistic, but I'm excited for this! I will try to make my myzopotamia.dev blog join the IndieWeb as soon as I find some time
RSS was invented just before the semantic-markup revolution (i.e. the end of table layouts). Bad timing.
Anyone can go right now to a DNS registry and set up a url with tld and as many redirects as needed and host locally or remote servers.
How much of these are archived by third party? If not it's huge loss to humanity...
Qbix Platform is based on PHP, and everything else (MySQL, NginX, Apache etc.) is optional. PHP can be used by itself to host your site, including turning it into a static site, and even manage HTTPS certificates for you.
But even beyond that, it can also enable personal mesh networks without the Internet. It's completely free and open source, and designed to work out of the box. Here is the overview of how it all works:
They have monthly and annual events; perhaps you can discover them for yourself! However, I recommend that you first understand and apply some of their philosophy!
The animation is the Gooey Navigation I designed myself. I'm glad you like the design.
However, for a lot of people, platforms like TikTok are more appealing than IndieWeb, but for some, it's fun to set up an OpenBSD VPS, a static web server, and learn to write better in text files using their favorite editor.
A self-determined workflow can be more important than being seen. However, one doesn't rule out the other, and the Author and IndieWeb offers some good tips.
Thanks for the post.
Thank you for your comment! It motivates me a lot.
It feels like walking into a brightly lit clothing store in a fancy mall and seeing the anarchy symbol on all items. Look closer and you'll see an almost four digit price tag.
Having a CV seems antithetical to the entire idea of indieness.
> Having a CV seems antithetical to the entire idea of indieness.
By that logic, Indie music artist can't sell their song.
Why is that so bad? My professional life is a part of who I am. One could call me an IndieWorker, in that I'm self employed....
A personal website is whatever you want it to be. Mine is getting more personal with every passing year because I don’t need a job. I want to geek out about stuff. However people’s websites are a product of the society they live in. Them bills gotta get paid.
Which isn't generally a problem that ever needed solving. Just like the previous onthologies, all this does is feed your adversaries while being useless to your human visitors.
Then I get my electricity bill
That dependency is because isn't feasible for me to own my own server. If I did, it would either be virtual, in amazon's or microsoft's cloud, or it would be real hardware but still in some corporate server farm. It just wouldn't be practical for me to own (and maintain) a physical server with an UPS and permanent uplink to the net.
This made me smile and I agree.