When Hossein Derakshan came back on-line after a 6 year absence in 2015, he was shocked to find how the once free flowing web ended up in walled gardens and silo’s. Musing about what he presented at State of the Net earlier this month, I came across Frank Meeuwsen’s posting about the IndieWeb Summit starting today in Portland (livestream on YT). That send me off on a short trip around the IndieWeb and related topics.

I came across this 2014 video of Tantek Celik. (he, Chris Messina and Andy Smith organised the first ever BarCamp in 2005, followed by a second one in Amsterdam where I met the latter two and many other fellow bloggers/techies)

In his talk he looks back at how the web got silo’d, and talks from a pure techie perspective about much the same things Hoder wrote about in 2015 and talked about this month. He places ‘peak open web’ in 2003, just before the web 2.0 silos came along. Those first silo’s (like Flickr, delicious etc) were ‘friendly silo’s’. We knew the people who built them, and we trusted their values, assumed the open web was how it was, is and would remain.

The friendly silos got sold, other less friendly silos emerged.
The silos have three things that make them hugely attractive. One ‘dark pattern’ which is adding functionality that feeds your dopamine cravings, such as like and heart buttons. The other two are where the open web is severely lacking: The seamless integration into one user interface of both reading and writing, making it very easy to respond to others that way, or add to the river of content. And the ability to find people and walk the social graph, by jumping from a friend to their list of friends and so on. The open web never got there. We had things like Qumana that tried to combine reading and writing, but it never really took off. We had FOAF but it never became easy.

So, Tantek and others set out in 2011 to promote the open web, IndieWeb, starting from those notions. Owning your data and content, and federating to participate. In his slides he briefly touches upon many small things he did, some of which I realised I could quickly adopt or do.
So I

• added IndieAuth to my site (using the IndieAuth WP plugin), so that I can use my own website to authenticate on other services such as my user profile at IndieWeb wiki (a bit like Facebook Connect, but then from my own server).
• added new sharing buttons to this site that don’t track you simply by being displayed (using the GDPR compliant Sharrif plugin), which includes Diaspora and Mastodon sharing buttons
• followed Tantek’s notion of staying in control of the URLs you share, e.g. by using your own URLs such as zylstra.eu/source/apple-evernote-wordpress to redirect to my GitHub project of that name (so should GitHub be eaten alive after Microsofts take-over, you can run your own Gitnode or migrate, while the URLs stay valid).
• decided to go to IndieWeb Camp in Nuremburg in October, together with Frank Meeuwsen

My stroll on the IndieWeb this morning leaves me with two things:

• I really need to more deeply explore how to build loops between various services and my site, so that for all kinds of interactions my site is the actual repository of content. This likely also means making posting much easier for myself. The remaining challenge is my need to more fluidly cater to different circles of social distance / trust, layers that aren’t public but open to friends
• The IndieWeb concept is more or less the same as what I think any technology or method should be to create networked agency: within control of the group that deploys it, useful on its own, more useful federated, and easy enough to use so my neighbours can adopt it.