Writing ·
The IndieWeb, plainly
The IndieWeb is a movement with terrible branding.
Webmentions. Micropub. h-card. POSSE. Every one of those words does a real thing. Every one of them sounds like a Tolkien footnote. If you have ever opened an IndieWeb wiki page and backed away slowly, this piece is for you.
Here is the whole idea in one sentence. Own the bit of internet where your stuff lives, and use the rest of the internet to get it read.
That is it. The rest is implementation.
Own your bit
Your bit is a domain. Your bit is a site. It doesn't have to be fancy. It can be a single HTML file. It can be a WordPress install. It can be Bear, Micro.blog, Ghost, Eleventy, Hugo, a hand-rolled Go binary, a Google Doc set to public. The IndieWeb doesn't care what you use. Only that it is yours.
"Yours" means two things. You own the URL. You can export the content and move it somewhere else tomorrow.
If both of those are true, you are already practising the IndieWeb. You don't need a wiki to confirm it.
POSSE, which is not a typo
POSSE stands for Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
You write a piece on your site. That is the canonical version. You then post a link or a shortened version to Mastodon, to LinkedIn, to Bluesky, to Threads, to whatever social platform people still read on. Those syndicated copies push readers back to your site. You borrow the platforms' reach without renting their housing.
POSSE works because social platforms churn. The copy on your site is the one that survives. The copies on the platforms are disposable. Losing a thousand Twitter posts hurts a lot less when all thousand of those posts lived on your blog first.
The /now page
A /now page is a page on your site that answers what you are doing these days.
Not what you did last year. Not what you will do in theory. What this season of your life is about. The current book. The current job. The current city. The thing you are making right now, even if nobody asked.
People update /now pages every few months. Derek Sivers started the convention. nownownow.com keeps a list. It is small. It is quiet. It is a tiny rebellion against the assumption that everything online is performance. A /now page is a note to a friend who hasn't seen you in a year.
The /uses page
Same idea, different scope. What hardware you use. What software you live in. The desk. The editor. The kettle.
Readers love these. Other bloggers love these. A /uses page is the closest thing the IndieWeb has to a trade show booth, and it has the advantage of being three paragraphs long instead of a convention centre. uses.tech keeps a list of them.
h-card and webmentions, briefly
An h-card is a tiny bit of structured HTML that says "this is me". Name, photo, location, URL. Machines can parse it. A feed reader can pick up your face. A webmention can route a reply back to the right person.
A webmention is a reply. Someone writes about you on their site. Their site pings your site. Your site shows the reply below the post, like a comment. Except the reply lives on its author's domain, not yours, so nothing you don't own sits in your database.
Both features are opt-in. Most IndieWeb sites don't bother. The ones that do tend to have the chattier corners of the web.
The habit, not the movement
The IndieWeb is not a Slack you have to join or a spec you have to implement. It is a habit.
The habit is this. Before you post something somewhere else, ask if it could live on your site first. Before you trust a platform with something that matters, ask what happens when the platform stops being nice to your use case.
Sometimes the answer is "the platform, because the reach matters". That is fine. Syndicate there. Keep the canonical on your site.
The habit, repeated over years, is the whole thing.
Where to start
Buy a domain. Point it at a host that serves HTML. Write one thing.
Everything else, the wiki page for h-card, the spec for webmentions, the directories and the rings and the aggregators, can wait until you have a reason to care. Most people never need any of it. Most people only need the habit.
When you have a blog at your own domain, submit it. It will be added. You do not need a webmention plugin to end up on the map.
If you want the catalogue of small pages a personal site can grow into, the field guide lists them in one place. /now, /uses, /colophon, /blogroll, and the rest of the little rituals, each explained in a few paragraphs.