jayeless | Micro.blog and the IndieWeb

Hello, Dreamwidth – long time no see! I thought I'd put together a quick post about a new blogging platform I've discovered and the train of thought that led me to it, in particular the concept of the IndieWeb.

I've written before on here about some of the issues I have with modern social media, in particular the addictiveness of intermittent rewards (good posts) being hidden among the dreck, how I feel divided across half a dozen different platforms, mostly just a passive observer on any of them, and how can you make a site financially sustainable without monetising users' data. In the back of my mind, I've still really been missing the era of personal websites and blogs, even if I've struggled to use Dreamwidth consistently. Anyway, a couple of days ago I re-stumbled across the concept of the IndieWeb, and this time I was intrigued enough to actually look into it properly, and what do you know: a ton of this philosophy really resonates with me.

The core of it is "POSSE": Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Essentially, establish your own site as a primary, canonical home for all your content, so as to preserve control over it and maintain some independence from unscrupulous social media companies. But then, because staying in touch with the people you care about is more important than preserving some kind of social media purism, you syndicate your content back to the sites where your friends and family actually are. In a perfect world, you could even backfeed interactions from those other sites back to the original site, but some platforms (Twitter) make this much easier than others (Facebook, Instagram – which is sad for me because FB and Instagram are where all my friends and family are). At any rate, the idea is to strike a middle ground between getting away from the frustrations of modern social media and still managing to keep in touch with people.

As you'll see if you check out the IndieWeb site, there are a number of different platforms people are using to try to maintain this kind of presence, but the one I've eventually gone with is Micro.blog. The main reason that that was my choice is that the technical barrier to entry was very low, and I thought I'd be more likely to stick with something that didn't take much active maintenance on my part (and not much of a learning curve to get started). What I'd mainly like to do with it is use it as an old-school personal blog, where I can post about anything of interest to me: cooking, books, games, cat photos, pretty scenery I saw on outings photos (now that those are allowed again…), stuff on languages, society, really whatever. If you want to check it out, you'll find that new personal blog right here! But I also want to be a bit more diligent about crossposting content (or linking to it) where it makes sense – photos to Instagram, book reviews to Goodreads and LibraryThing, "this is what I've been getting up to"-type posts to FB, a bit of everything to Mastodon, and probably more of the wordy, thoughtful posts to here. It'll probably take me a bit of figuring out, especially because I can only really automate crossposting to Mastodon and Twitter (and, you know, Twitter is kinda a cesspool), but I love the idea of having a coherent "online presence" instead of (or in addition to, technically) all these watered-down compartmentalised things on different sites. Almost like having my own online home.

So anyway, that's where I'm at! I hope you guys on DW are doing as well as can be managed in these times.

Micro.blog and the IndieWeb

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