I plan to dedicate some learning time in the coming 12 weeks to better understand the protocols that drive the independent web, or IndieWeb. During our STM18 birthday unconference Frank Meeuwsen presented his experiences on the IndieWeb. Frank, Peter and I have formed an impromptu triade to explore the IndieWeb in the past months. In one of his slides Frank conveniently listed the relevant protocols. I’ll plan for 24 hours to explore 6 protocols. Some of them I already understand better than others, so I’ll start with the ones I feel less knowledgeable about.
The ones I want to explore in more detail, in planned order, are:
- ActivityPub / OStatus, a decentralized networking protocol (as this ties into my Mastodon experiments as well, this comes first)
- Micropub, publish on your own domain with 3rd party tools
- Microsub, own your feed-subscriptions (although I already run my own TinyTinyRss instance)
- Microformats, markup for data, text, people, events (already used on my blog, but curious to see how I can extend that to more types of data)
- Indieauth, federated login protocol to sign in with your own domain on other services (already active on my blog, but interested in where else I could use it)
- Webmentions, respond to a blogpost through your own site (already active on my site, but strongly wish to better format and style it on my site)
When we were in Sweden last month we learned of the Swedish tradition of the “study circle,” where groups of people with a common interest in learning about something come together as an ad hoc group, possibly with some public funding, to teach themselves.
In this spirit, perhaps I will join you in your learnings, albeit virtually and more in parallel lines than in a circle 😉
I am interested in this too, but still lagging behind – I don’t even publish my own blog at the moment! So I will probably join at some point and play catch-up with you!