Now that we have IndieWeb how are others to find it?

19 June 2024

How do people who don’t know about IndieWeb, but would like to escape the web-scape funk they’re beholden to, find out about IndieWeb, asks Delyo Dobrev. This is the million dollar question.

Everyone and their grandma and their dog is talking about social media’s bad influence. But do they do anything about it, or do they boomerpost comic strips about more and more kids staring at their phone and waiting for likes?

Blogrolls/links-pages, web directories, and web rings, are among ways to promote the work of other IndieWeb adherents. But you need to be within the IndieWeb realm in the first place, to go on the journey these aggregators will take you. They’re great for their members, but, unfortunately, overwhelming for newcomers, as a Hacker News member pointed out:

How do people make use of such an aggregator? Do people checkout blogs individually and subscribe to feeds to individual blogs or interest? The sheer number of the collection dissuades me. I’m wondering, instead, if it’d be useful for the aggregator to offer an aggregated feed itself, but that might be too random a feed and subjects!

Time is also a factor, doing rounds of IndieWeb discovery is a commitment. Getting started needs to be, somehow, easier. Back to Dobrey:

I remember surfing, actually surfing from link to link, from site to blog to web altar. And it took just a search or two to get started.

That’s what I did back in the day. But sans search engines. I was lucky enough to make, early on, the acquaintance of dozens of personal website owners (sometimes referred to as webmasters, as in masters of their web domain), and would read about their latest finds, as often as possible.

But I’d also stay up literally half the night, every night (even after coming in from a night out), and surf to the websites others had written about on their online journals.

That’s not so straightforward today. Back then, twenty-four hour days felt like they were forty-eight hours long. Now they feel more like twelve hour days. But to introduce more people, specifically audiences, to the joys of IndieWeb, there needs to be an easy path for newcomers to trek.

That is the challenge. That is the million dollar question.