Embracing The Indie Web

The tinkerer in me - the same one who enjoys spending hours of his weekend trying out a fancy new framework even if he knows he'll never really use it - has latched onto the idea of embracing the indie web.

It's a lovely concept/movement/way of life, but it isn't without its complications. You can't blame it much for not being too user friendly. The fact of the matter is there's (currently) a lot of technical knowhow required to properly publish on your own site and syndicate elsewhere.

It wasn't too long ago that I added webmentions to my blog, and even more recently that I accidentally broke them by deleting (for obvious reasons) my Twitter account. I'm now left with figuring out how to properly start over from the Fediverse.

Bridgy is a cool tool I used to publish my posts to Twitter that I'll be diving deeper into now. You can even interact with GitHub on it! That's wild. I can't even imagine creating issues on repos through a post on my site, but you can bet I'm going to try.

This very post is going to be a test of publishing to Mastodon using Bridgy, so if you follow me over there then you'll know if it works.

The technical knowledge isn't the only barrier here. I'm confident I can figure this all out, but the time and effort it asks of me is hard to balance, let alone for someone who doesn't hold the web as a career or hobby.

A CMS like WordPress can go a long way in helping the average blog owner embrace the indie web and I hope that continues to get better, but I don't use a CMS so I'm building it all from scratch. I'm writing this post from my phone as an experiment with a mobile non-CMS blog-on-the-go solution. Every few weeks I get the idea that I'll move my content to a headless CMS but that is another time suck I'm not interested in starting.