I spent the last week scraping through a terabyte of GeoCities archives and collecting ALL THE #88x31 buttons! In the end, I gathered 29257 unique buttons (75k with duplicates). They are available at https://hellnet.work/8831/
A common refrain is that the web is turning into garbage because of LLMs.
But that's not really true. It's just that the garbage is drowning out everything else, especially in search engines that themselves have decided to go into the garbage generation business.
What can we do? We can promote the #IndieWeb right here. Highlight the good, perhaps obscure websites and blogs you come across, especially the ones that aren't loaded with ads & trackers.
Today I built a silly webpage by hand in a couple of hours. (I’m not going to tell you what it was, except that it was frivolous af.)
I started out by looking for a template, but everything I found was way too involved, so I ended up writing the HTML and CSS from scratch, throwing it in a cloud-hosted directory, and nudging the DNS settings to point there.
This turned out to be a ridiculously nostalgic experience. I built a lot of weird little websites like this when I was about eleven years old, saving the HTML of sites that I liked so that I could access them when the phone line was being used by someone else, and changing pieces around to figure out how it all fit together.
It struck me that:
a) by this measure I’ve been doing web dev for almost a quarter-century now 😳
b) there is nothing stopping me from making websites this way. I can still write HTML and yeet it out there if I want to, no matter what it’s for. Pages load quickly. It’s not fancy. It works. Underneath it all, the web is still there.
If you feel so inclined, I can highly recommend seizing an afternoon, taking a silly webpage idea, and having a play.
I just finally deployed something I've been working on for a few weeks now: a feed of my writing, posting, reading, and other various activity that lives on my website at https://www.mollywhite.net/feed!
I've admired the POSSE (https://indieweb.org/POSSE; "Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere") model for a long time, but only finally found the time and energy to put something together that I'm actually happy with.
“The simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.” — Jarrett Fuller
There’s about $5000 of budget ready for someone to help me build ActivityPub deeply into Known such that it can interoperate with Mastodon users. Email me at ben@benwerd.com if you’re interested.
I think we need more self-hosted personal publishing tools that aren't Wordpress and don't require use of a terminal to set up. A bit of a rant: https://gilest.org/indie-easy.html
As we slowly watch cryptocurrency and NFTs get replaced by the next big fad in venture capitalism, AI, I'd just like to thank everyone fighting for a free and open internet. #mastodon#fediverse#indieweb#FreeAndOpenInternet
Running your own services on the public internet can bring years—maybe even a lifetime—of joy, purpose, and connection. It also requires continuous attention and care, at least a little bit every day, even when you don't feel like it.
I believe in the #IndieWeb philosophy that encourages folks to explore the option of owning their own digital resources, but I wonder if we under-emphasize how it's more like adopting a puppy than like getting into woodworking. #mastoadmin
Betula is a federated self-hosted single-user bookmarking software. Organize your collection with tags. Write descriptions and quotes. #IndieWeb microformats and #Fediverse are supported.
This release brings #ActivityPub-backed following. Follow Betula from Mastodon and whatnot and receive all new bookmarks. A new design for bookmarks was also made.
Own Your Web is a newsletter for anyone who wants to design, build, create, and publish on the Web.
Whether you want to get started with your own personal website or level up as a designer, developer, or independent creator working with the ever-changing material of the Web, this little email is for you. 💚✊
"Open source, community-owned software [...] offers a remedy to the deep rooted issues of opaqueness and stakeholder imbalance in closed-source software, but it is not innately cozy. That is an added quality resulting from an intentional design towards that specific end."
Hello fediverse,
because it's common in this space, this is a little #introduction
I'm completely new to all this Social Media stuff and I was very skeptical about it in the past. Due to the evil nature of their corporations, I avoid Facebook and Twitter like the plague. But because ActivityPub is a free protocol and not bound to corporate interests it seems interesting. I'm not sure if I'll like it or post frequently - I'm just trying it out.
I'm an enthusiastic computer, GNU/Linux and *BSD hobbyist. I like to tinker around with hard- and software in my little homelab. I'm in no way a professional or expert of any kind in the IT field. Just doing things for fun.
Also interested in Gemini and the smolnet/indieweb. The way the internet is heading these days isn't very promising. When I discovered the gemini protocol in 2021 I was imediately intrigued. So I set up my own little capsule which I now regard as my private home in the online world (link in profile).
What happened to #Twitter and now #Reddit is an urgent reminder that we need to embrace #Indieweb principles if we want to preserve Internet communities and free flow of information.
🤔 What is it? A hosted version of Echo (https://echo.rknight.me/). No more fiddling with JSON configs and all that boring stuff.
👉 I've setup a newsletter so you can sign up to know when it's ready and maybe subscribers will get beta access 👀: https://buttondown.email/echofeed or you can follow me here because I'll definitely be posting about it