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Comment by aaronpk | Hacker News Reader

I am a member of the W3C Social Web Working Group (https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg), and have been organizing IndieWebCamp (https://indieweb.org/) conferences in this space for the last 7 years. We've been making a lot of progress:

* https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ - cross-site commenting

* https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ - API for apps to create posts on various servers

* https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ - realtime subscriptions to feeds

* More: https://indieweb.org/specs

We focus on making sure there are a plurality of implementations and approaches rather than trying to build a single software solution to solve everything.

Try commenting on my copy of this post on my website by sending me a webmention! https://aaronparecki.com/2017/06/08/9/indieweb

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I had no idea these standards were in any phase of existence and I'm really excited about them.

Existing is one thing. Adoption is something else entirely.

More important I think is this misunderstanding that this is a technical problem to solve.

The technology is insufficient but necessary. Users want features. Open standards that allow implementation of those features are a (small) but necessary part of the solution.

> Users want features.

They want more than just features, they want to get them for "free."

We've had equivalent standards in the late 90's and early 2000's (RSS, ATOM, XML-RPC pingbacks, etc.), had open/free code for that (MovableType and WordPress) and yet personal blogging mostly died because it was easier to just post on Facebook and there was a bigger audience there.

Facebook from that perspective is "free," as in no software to install, no updates to do and no servers to pay for. Running your own install of some blogging software entails paying for it, having a lower audience and having to handle software updates (and database upgrades, plugin upgrades, templates, etc.).

These services could all still be provided for "free" and still follow open standards. Just like email is an open standard yet we all still use "free" Gmail.

The success of Facebook is that they offered these services in a very user friendly manner and for "free". The tragedy of Facebook is that their implementations are a proprietary walled garden, and now pretty much a monopoly.

Gmail, and other big email providers, are exactly what we don't want these open/free social media protocols to become. Gmail reads your emails regurgitates them as AdSense.

Personally, I think we need to be encouraging people to pay small fees for services. A dollar a month to use Twitter? Sure! $20 a year to use Gmail minus the data mining? No problem.

There are certainly adopters, some (who even leverage plugins such as via wordpress) may not even know that they're adopters. If you're interested, i encourage you to follow along in the discussion (through various means - e.g. irc, matrix, etc.): https://indieweb.org/discuss

Who is implementing these? I saw there was an Apache project as a reference implementation a while ago but it was now abandoned. Is there a new reference implementation or are there plans for creating one?

Micropub clients: https://indieweb.org/Micropub/Clients

Micropub servers: https://indieweb.org/Micropub/Servers

Webmention implementations: https://indieweb.org/Webmention

More details: https://indieweb.org/indieweb_network

Thank you.

This looks like a good start for a personal blog site: https://github.com/barryf/transformative

I found this on the Webmention Implementation Report [1].

1. https://webmention.net/implementation-reports/summary/

This looks like an interesting list. I'm giving myself homework: Read the above. Now, Attempting a Webmention right now.

looks awesome.

Is there way I can be notified about different such projects being done at W3C?

Hi Aaron. I didn't know you were part of that committee. Cool!

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