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How to stop depending on social media, and what the IndieWeb is
When I read that Meta is testing a new way to charge for organic posts that link outside its platform, it confirms how right I was to become steadily less dependent on the big platforms and on social media.
It does not mean I have left them completely. It means that whether or not I stay in touch with my readers depends on them less and less, and today almost not at all.
I like freedom, I like having my own things under my own control, and that is why I started this blog ten years ago.
Over the past few years I have been adding more ways to stay in touch with me on my own site: a newsletter I send on the first Sunday of every month, and an RSS feed any reader can add to their feed reader so that no new article passes them by.
All of that is fairly easy to understand and a great many blogs use it.
But then I found out that a creator can go deeper still. And that it takes real effort to understand what that deeper layer is about and which of its options make sense for you in particular.
In short, there is a community of creators that builds and maintains the tools and standards that let personal websites talk to each other directly, with no platform in between. One creator publishes something on their own site and mentions another creator, that second creator gets an email about it, and if they have enabled it on their own site, they can display those responses from other creators automatically.
Put another way, outside the big platforms there is a real social network on the internet that most people never see, one that connects independent websites and the people who write on them. There is a genuinely independent web here, and it is called the IndieWeb.
It has one problem: for most people this layer of the internet is hidden, hard to understand and far too technical.
And I agree with them. I have a technical background, and even so, working out what all the options the IndieWeb offers are actually for was not easy for me.
For someone without that background it must feel several times harder. What would have helped me at the start was for somebody to explain the whole idea in plain language.
What is the IndieWeb? In plain language
Your domain is your identity. You are not a row in a database on a platform that sells your attention to other companies. You have your own address on the internet, and the accounts you hold elsewhere point back to it. When somebody else's platform shuts down, your address stays.
You publish on your own site first. Anything you publish away from your own address is a copy. The original lives on your site.
Websites can talk to each other directly. When one site mentions another, it can send it a notification, and the receiving site can display it. It is a way of communicating that needs no middleman.
How I use IndieWeb standards and tools on my own blog
For each of the points above, I will show what I actually run on my site.
Your domain as your identity
rel="me"
Proof across the internet that you are really you. It works like this: my site links to one of my profiles elsewhere, and that profile links back to my site. Only somebody with access to both places can create a pair of links like that. That is why it counts as proof. So that machines can tell those links apart from ordinary ones, they carry the marker rel="me", which means: this is not a link to somebody else's page, this is me again. That is how my Mastodon account, my GitHub account and my email address are tied to this domain. On Bluesky it is solved differently and even more directly: my username there is not @richard.bsky.social but richardgolian.com, and a file placed on the domain itself proves the domain is mine.
IndieAuth
Almost everyone knows the "sign in with Google" button. Convenient, but it means Google holds the key to your identity.
I run my own sign-in server on my site, and it is called IndieAuth. Instead of an account I enter richardgolian.com and the service verifies that I am really me. No further password is created that somebody could steal from me.
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Summary
Common questions on this article's topic
What is the IndieWeb?
What is a Webmention?
Why is the IndieWeb hard to understand?
Do I have to leave social media to use the IndieWeb?
How is Meta charging for links outside the platform?
If you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback, feel free to drop me a message at mail@richardgolian.com.
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