The Indie Web movement (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The Indie Web movement (2013)

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The protocols that drive the Indie Web movement are actually open standards published by the W3C Social Web Working Group [1]. This year, some of these standards became W3C Recommendations. Webmentions is the successor to pingbacks and it can also be used for comments and replies in blog posts. IndieAuth is an authentication system based on OAuth that can be used for publishing content into your site using applications via Micropub. Microformats adds metadata to web documents so that applications can also scrap information from blog posts (in a similar fashion to OpenGraph).

One of the most interesting concepts about the Indie Web movement that I like is POSSE [2]: you should own your content, but it's OK to then syndicate your content into silos such as Twitter or Instagram as long as there are links that trace back to your site so that your site is always seen as the canonical place where your content lives.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/Social/WG [2]: https://indieweb.org/POSSE

The heroes the web needs. Really.

An example of the kinds of things the IndieWeb folks think about: POSSE, "Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere", where twitter and co are used as secondary platforms referring back to the non-silo-controlled site.

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

I hadn't heard of this before this thread.

This is actually almost tit-for-tat the MO of digital media corps publication and delivery roadmaps (well, the outward facing side). I've heard plenty of this in the media world, and no reference to the Indie Web group.

In hindsight the general design of said system is obvious, but I wonder if their plans originated with IW, or developed beside it.

The Indie Web movement is a very interesting one, I personally support some of their goals, however, the protocols they design seem a bit... too uncomplicated at times (Microformats2 is impossible to properly parse in JSON form and you need that for their Micropub protocol. And Micropub has a few stinks of it's own)

I'm not familiar with the protocols. Can you expand on this? Or are there articles that explore these concerns?

I've written a bit of a rant on a sibling comment but the TL;DR is that the IndieWeb movement has spawned some protocols which feel more like "what we happened to use is standard" instead of developing a sane standard.

My favorite nitpick is that it's rather difficult to tell if a Micropub POST request is an create, read, update or delete operation. They could have used POST, PUT, DELETE HTTP methods but apparently that's too complicated.

That makes no sense. Microformats 2 defines how to parse html into json form, and there are multiple implementations in different programming languages.

http://microformats.org/wiki/microformats-2-parsing

If you have problems with micropub, file issues with the spec.

https://github.com/w3c/Micropub/issues

When you write a Micropub implementation the primary spec involves an unholy JSON format.

About 80% of the code I wrote was just dedicated to finding out whether or not I'm updating an article, creating a new one, deleting the article entirely and which attributes need updating.

The JSON format has an immense amount of issues relating to irregularity, some fields have html and text sub-attributes but this doesn't seem documented properly anywhere, not even the MF2 page, everything is an array even where it makes 0 sense to do so and as an implementer I'm somehow expected to then process and store this mess as a coherent article.

Part of the spec validation involves storing a publication which contains almost no text and some user defined elements for some reason. And I'm expected to understand and properly update these custom elements if requested.

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