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Welcome to the May 2025 edition of IndieWeb Movie Club!
As your host for this month¹, I invite you to (re)watch the film “Tomorrowland” (https://movies.disney.com/tomorrowland), with an optional prequel book reading assignment!
“Before Tomorrowland” (https://books.disney.com/book/before-tomorrowland/) was released about a month before the film, so it’s fine to read before watching.
#Tomorrowland is available in various physical media formats, and via streaming on DisneyPlus². 130 minutes, rated PG.
This month is the 10th anniversary of Tomorrowland’s release.
The world was quite different in 2015.
I had my own impressions of Tomorrowland when I first heard about it and then watched it much later (which I won’t link to yet to avoid spoilers or biasing your opinions). The film made such a strong impression on me that I held a group film viewing and discussion party in 2015!
I’m curious how both first time viewers in 2025 and folks watching a second (or more) time think of Tomorrowland.
If you would like to participate in this month’s IndieWeb Movie Club:
* optional: read the prequel book
* watch the film
* blog a read³ (for the book), watch⁴, review⁵, or even a simple note⁶ post of your impressions, or some or all the above and link to this post
If you want your post(s) to be included in the May 2025 IndieWeb Movie Club roundup, notify me with a Webmention⁷ from your post, or drop a link in the IndieWeb chat discussion channel⁸ and @-mention me.
Since this is an IndieWeb community activity, please both follow the Code of Conduct⁹, and also keep your post within the same rating (PG) as the movie. I may curate the roundup accordingly.
Happy reading, watching, and dreaming!
#TomorrowlandFilm #BeforeTomorrowland #IndieWeb #IndieWebMovieClub
This is post 11 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2025/077/t1/what-are-words-for-blogging
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References:
¹ https://indieweb.org/IndieWeb_Movie_Club#2025
² https://www.disneyplus.com/en-gb/browse/entity-3355a91d-addb-4c66-91a6-136325e6ecf7
³ https://indieweb.org/read
⁴ https://indieweb.org/watch
⁵ https://indieweb.org/review
⁶ https://indieweb.org/note
⁷ https://indieweb.org/Webmention
⁸ https://indieweb.org/discuss#indieweb
⁹ https://indieweb.org/code-of-conduct
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“Tell me, what are words for?” They are for blogging!
Earlier today during an informal espresso live stream in the #indieweb cafe, Spotify was playing an auto-generated daylist, something like “romantic 80s tuesday morning”, and the 1982 song “Words”¹ by the band Missing Persons came on.
When we heard this lyric:
🎶 What are words for when no one listens? 🎶
I remarked half-jokingly in response:
Words are for blogging, whether anyone is listening, reading, or not.
Another participant noted that blogging sometimes feels like screaming into the void.
I noted it doesn’t matter if anyone is reading (or listening), it’s fine to blog for an audience of one, yourself, even just to have something to refer to or reference in the future.
When I write a post it’s often directed at only a small number of people, who may be part of a larger conversation. The point of publishing it publicly is to assert a level of confidence and credibility by the act of “putting it on the permanent record” (since nearly everything blogged is promptly indexed and archived.) with a permalink.
The lyrics have some quite prescient bits, like this:
“No one notices, I think I'll dye my hair blue
Media overload bombarding you with action
It’s getting near impossible to cause distraction”
Written and sung more than forty years ago. Long before the web (or #socialWeb) was a thing.
Rewriting the lyrics as a parody could be a fun project, e.g.:
🎶 What are blogs for when no one reads them? 🎶
some existing lyrics barely need any edits, like:
“It’s like the feeling at the end of the page
When you realize you don't know what you just read”
perhaps an exercise for the reader for now.
Previously: “Inbox Zero” (parody of The Fixx “Saved by Zero”²)
* https://tantek.com/w/InboxZero (2009-01-29 https://twitter.com/t/status/1160324190)
This is post 10 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2025/055/t1/three-steps-indieweb-cybersecurity
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Glossary
blog
https://indieweb.org/blog
blogging
https://indieweb.org/blogging
permalink
https://indieweb.org/permalink
why blog
https://indieweb.org/why_post
References
¹ https://libre.fm/artist/Missing+Persons/track/Words (YouTube link inside)
² https://libre.fm/artist/The+Fixx/track/Saved+by+Zero (YouTube link inside)
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Last week I published my first Cybersecurity Friday post with three key steps for indieweb cybersecurity. In summary:
1. Email MFA/2FA. Add multi-factor authentication (sometimes called two-factor authentication) to everywhere you store or check email. Do not use phone/cell numbers.
2. Domain Registrar MFA. Add multi-factor authentication to your domain registrar account.
3. Web Host MFA. Same for your web host and any intermediate name servers (DNS) or content delivery network (CDN) service accounts.
Full post: https://tantek.com/2025/052/b1/steps-indieweb-cybersecurity
Next time: entropy is your friend in security.
If you want my #Cybersecurity Friday posts as soon as I publish them, follow my site https://tantek.com/ directly in your reader rather than using #socialMedia or #Mastodon or some other notes-centric #fediverse client.
You can subscribe to my site directly with an h-feed supporting #indieweb Social Reader, or if you use a classic feed reader, it can auto-discover my Atom feed from my home page.
You can also read my article blog posts and those from other Mozillians on the Mozilla Planet:
* https://planet.mozilla.org/
If you look closely you might even find my not-so-secret articles-only Atom feed linked there if you prefer.
This is post 9 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #cyber #security
← https://tantek.com/2025/020/t1/seek-2024-year-in-review
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Glossary
article post
https://indieweb.org/article
Atom
https://indieweb.org/Atom
content delivery network
https://indieweb.org/content_delivery_network
cybersecurity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cybersecurity
DNS
https://indieweb.org/DNS
domain registrar
https://indieweb.org/domain_registrar
entropy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
feed reader
https://indieweb.org/feed_reader
h-feed
https://indieweb.org/h-feed
MFA / 2FA
https://indieweb.org/multi-factor_authentication sometimes called Two Factor Authentication or Second Factor Authentication
mobile number for MFA
https://indieweb.org/SMS#Criticism
note post
https://indieweb.org/note
social reader
https://indieweb.org/social_reader
web host
https://indieweb.org/web_hosting
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My Seek 2024 Year in Review:
* 141 new species observed, of those, the top three kinds:
* 79 plants
* 20 insects
* 16 fungi
* 56 challenge badges earned
June was the month I observed the most new species in 2024, followed by March, and then July.
Seek also gave me a graph of observations per month, and also a map of where I made my discoveries.
Rather than posting screenshots of the Year in Review that Seek provided me in the app, I am posting the relevant content here in a post on my personal site, which I know I’ll be able to search and look up in the future.
Seek is a delightful free (like actually free, free of tracking, free of surveillance) native mobile application for identifying species.
Made by the iNaturalist folks (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app), Seek works without creating an account, and is able to work completely offline to identify species out in the wild (and add them to your local collection).
Seek awards you Species Badges when you discover a number of species of a particular grouping, as well as Challenge Badges when you complete one or more of their monthly challenges that they post.
In some ways it’s like Pokemon Go, except based on finding and collecting observations of real living things.
I have found it quite useful especially when traveling, and wondering is that plant (or animal) the same as one I’ve seen elsewhere, perhaps around home, or is it a slightly different species?
I also really like the good example that Seek provides for how an app can be immediately useful without requiring extra labor (like creating an account, or logging on) on behalf of the person using it.
Lastly, Seek is an excellent example of a truly offline capable app where nearly all of its functionality works just fine without a network connection.
Both of these capabilities (offline first, no login wall) are what we should aspire to when we build #indieweb apps or websites for ourselves and our friends.
This is post 8 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #yearInReview #iNaturalist #SeekApp
← https://tantek.com/2025/012/t1/eight-years-webmention
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Glossary:
login wall
https://indieweb.org/login_wall
offline first
https://indieweb.org/offline_first
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🎉 Eight years ago today, the #IndieWeb Webmention protocol was published as a W3C REC https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/
As a social web building block, #Webmention was designed to work with various other building blocks. Small pieces, loosely joined. Every year developers find new ways to work with Webmention, and new subtleties when combined with other building blocks.
The primary uses of Webmention, peer-to-peer comments, likes, and other responses across web sites, has long presented an interesting challenge with the incorporation and display of external content originally from one site (the Webmention sender), on another site (the Webmention receiver).
There are multiple considerations to keep in mind when displaying such external content.
Two examples of external content are images (e.g. people’s icons or profile images from the author of a comment) and text (e.g. people’s names or the text of their comments).
For external images, rather than displaying them in full fidelity, you may want to compress them into a smaller resolution for how your site displays the profile images of comment authors.
If you accept Webmentions from arbitrary sources, there’s no telling what might show up in author images. You may want to pixelate images from unknown or novel sources into say 3x3 pixel grids of color (or grayscale) averages to make them uniquely identifiable while blurring any undesirable graphics beyond recognition.
For external text, one thing we discovered in recent IndieWeb chat¹ is that someone’s comment (or in this case their name) can contain Unicode directional formatting characters, e.g. for displaying an Arabic or Hebrew name right-to-left. Text with such formatting characters can errantly impact the direction of adjacent text adjacent.
Fortunately there is a CSS property, 'unicode-bidi', that can be used to isolate such external text. Thus when you embed text that was parsed from a received Webmention, possibly with formatting characters, you have to wrap it in an HTML element (a span will do if you have not already wrapped it) with that CSS property. E.g.:
<span style="unicode-bidi: isolate;">parsed text here</span>
Though even better would be use of a generic HTML class name indicating the semantic:
<span class="external-text">parsed text here</span>
and then a CSS rule in your style sheet to add that property (and any others you want for external text)
.external-text { unicode-bidi: isolate; }
This is post 7 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #socialWeb #openSocialWeb
← https://tantek.com/2025/004/t1/micro-one-onramp-open-social-web
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Glossary
HTML class name
https://tantek.com/2012/353/b1/why-html-classes-css-class-selectors
IndieWeb chat
https://indieweb.org/discuss
pixelate
https://indieweb.org/pixelated
small pieces, loosely joined
https://www.smallpieces.com/
Unicode directional formatting characters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_text#Explicit_formatting
unicode-bidi CSS property
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/unicode-bidi
References
¹ https://chat.indieweb.org/dev/2025-01-05#t1736092889120900
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The team @micro.blog have done it again.
They soft-launched https://micro.one yesterday¹.
This may be the most accessible onramp to the open social web ever.
Cost: $1 a month. Yes you read correctly.
This is the simplest and cheapest (where you are the customer, not the product) way to own your identity and content online².
Stop posting in someone else’s garage³.
Time to export your Twitter, and migrate your Mastodon handle to your own home on the web.
Of course you can bring your own domain name. Additionally:
* blog posts, naturally, both articles and microblogging notes
* photos
* podcasting
* custom themes
* web-clients and native mobile posting clients
* WordPress, Tumblr, Mastodon, Medium import
More details (and alternatives) at https://micro.one/about/pricing
And yes, it interoperates with the open #socialWeb, including:
* #ActivityPub support, #Mastodon and #fediverse compatibility
* #IndieAuth to sign-in to third-party apps
* #microformats support in all built-in themes
* #Webmention for sending and receiving replies across websites
* #Micropub standard posting API, supporting dozens of clients
* #Microsub standard timeline API, supporting social readers
More #indieweb support details at https://micro.one/about/indieweb
Did I mention the the superb micro.blog (and micro.one) Community Guidelines?
* https://help.micro.blog/t/community-guidelines/39
Well done @manton.org and team.
This is post 6 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #ownYourIdentity #ownYourData #openSocialWeb
← https://tantek.com/2025/003/t1/lastfm-year-in-review-playback24
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Glossary
IndieAuth
https://indieweb.org/IndieAuth
microformats
https://microformats.org/wiki/microformats
Micropub
https://indieweb.org/Micropub
Microsub
https://indieweb.org/Microsub
Webmention
https://indieweb.org/Webmention
¹ https://www.manton.org/2025/01/03/microone-was-effectively-a-softlaunch.html
² https://tantek.com/2025/001/t1/15-years-notes-my-site-first
³ https://tantek.com/2023/022/t2/own-your-notes-domain-migration
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Yesterday https://last.fm/ (@lastfm) emailed their year in review reports, which they called #Playback24 and Last.Year.
Kudos to them for waiting until the new year to do so, and breaking with the pattern of services prematurely posting year in review summaries.¹
They’re also available on the web, without requiring a native mobile app to view.
Mine is here: https://www.last.fm/user/tantekc/listening-report/year
You can find yours (if you’re a last.fm user) by going here:
* https://www.last.fm/user/_/listening-report/year
The page title calls it your #YearInMusic, and the URL your #ListeningReport.
It has many interesting elements, from various top listened lists (artist, album, track), to what percent of 2024 listens (which they call scrobbles) were new artists, albums, and tracks.
Their “Top Tags” time chart is quite cool. Fascinating to see the differences in music listening over the seasons and the whole year.
The report has many interactive features, so it will take me some time to figure out how to save, export, and/or republish my listening report on my personal #indieweb site.
For now I used Firefox to save the page as an .html page to my laptop, and was quite impressed with how much of the information was available in that one file. Much more than #Spotify’s #Wrapped.
That’s step 1. Step 2 is figuring out a good way to blog at least some of it.
This is post 5 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #LastFM #YearInReview
← https://tantek.com/2025/002/t1/indieweb-third-place-community
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Glossary:
scrobble
https://indieweb.org/scrobble
year in review
https://indieweb.org/year_in_review
¹ https://tantek.com/2025/001/t2/first-new-year-review-prior
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The #indieweb is more than #independence. It’s also a web, of both personal sites and “third place” sites like aggregators, bridges, proxies, directories, indexes, and other community sites.
Broadly speaking, such “third place” sites include places we collectively contribute to, and which license our contributions for free use by others. While open source projects come to mind, perhaps a more obvious example is Wikipedia.
Similarly, the most obvious “third place” in the #IndieWeb community is our community site and wiki https://indieweb.org/ as well as the heterogeneous chat https://chat.indieweb.org/.
We also have many services run by individuals (or small teams) in the community, for the benefit of the community, like:
* @snarfed.org’s https://brid.gy/ and https://fed.brid.gy/
* @aaronparecki.com’s https://webmention.io/ and many others
* @martymcgui.re’s https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/ (IndieWeb Webring)
* @gregorlove.com’s https://indiebookclub.biz/
* @mat.tl’s https://libre.fm/
and I’m sure many more I’m forgetting.
All these services respect your data and your ownership of it. #ownYourData
All these services are swappable. Many (most?) are open source and self-hostable in case you want to run your own personal instance or another shared instance.
The web part of the indieweb complements, connects, and strengthens the indie part.
This is post 4 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2025/001/t3/strava-year-in-sport-how-to-get-info-save
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When we say #ownYourData we mean whatever data is important to you, like the data services aggregate about you and present back to you. Owning that data means extracting it into a form you can hang onto regardless of what the service does in the future (or disappears), and publishing whatever aspects of it you wish to, on your personal #indieweb site.
Speaking of year in reviews¹ and #Strava Year in Sport in particular, here are my brief notes for how to get the info from it (before it disappears after the 6th!²) and save it locally so you can write and publish your own year in sport.
How to find your Strava: Year in Sport 2024
For 2024, the Strava Year in Sport 2024 is only available on the native mobile app (iOS and presumably Android) and not accessible via the website. Prior years which were available on the website e.g. 2018(.)strava(.)com and 2017(.)strava(.)com are long gone.
From the mobile app home screen, tap the "📋 You" button in the lower right corner.
At the top you should see:
"Play back your 2024" heading with an orange button:
[ See your Year in Sport ]
Tap that button.
Saving Seven Summary Segments
You should immediately see an animation start playing, with seven "segments" (like Instagram stories) at the top, gradually filling-in as progress indicators one at a time.
For each "segment" if you press the screenshot combination of buttons on your mobile (e.g. volume-up + power on iPhone 14), in addition to taking a screenshot it will put you in a "share" screen with one or more videos or still images to share in a carousel format.
For each item in the carousel (if there is more than one)
* tap the item in the carousel
* tap the "[↑] More" button at the bottom.
* scroll down the list of options up a bit
* tap "Save Video [↓]" or "Save Image [↓]" option to store it locally on your mobile.
The seventh "segment" is your overall summary, and shows all your sports combined.
Save it (as an image as noted above), then
* tap the "✏️ Customize" button
* choose an individual sport (e.g. "👟 Run")
* tap "Save changes"
* save that image (as above)
* tap customize again
* choose the next sport (e.g. "🚲 Ride")
* save changes again
* save image again
Strava seemingly only reports summaries of (up to?) two or your sports it appears. Those were Run (presumably all running, street and trail) and Ride for me.
Cleanup Your Screenshots
After having saved all the videos/images for each "segment", you can:
* go back to your mobile’s top level Photos app/stream
* delete the screenshots
You should see all the videos/images you've saved. If anything is missing, go back to the previous steps and save them again, then remove any duplicates as necessary.
Post Your Year In Sport
Go through your saved videos/images, and either post on your own site as-is, or use your mobile’s built-in image OCR to copy the text bits into a plain personal year in sport note summary post on your own site. Or some combination of both if you prefer.
Add other summaries of your activities and sports as you see fit, like:
* info on other sports (beyond running and biking), e.g. yoga, weight-lifting, bouldering etc.
* total days active (of 366)
* total distance (if applicable)
* total elevation (if applicable)
* total time
* number of races you ran, biked etc. (and finished, if not the same)
* number of miles (or km) you raced (per sport and/or total overall)
* number of (or full set of) awards or trophies you earned at races
* any other stats that you think of that seem interesting to you
For each of these annual numbers, you could also compute (optionally display) the percentage change from 2023, if you happen to have those numbers around.
This is also a good reason to at least total up these numbers for 2024, whether you publish them or not, for figuring out the percentage change in 2025 next year.
When you publish your own year in sport post, might as well re-use the existing #YearInSport hashtag too.
I have already saved all the videos/images from my own Strava Year In Sport, and as I assemble the pieces into my own post, I’ll take more notes, and add to the IndieWeb year in review page³ accordingly.
This post could also be improved with a few screenshots for a few of the steps above. I figured I’d publish my notes first to hopefully help some people sooner (since the Strava Year In Sport will disappear after January 6th as mentioned!). I might upload a few screenshots to the IndieWeb wiki later as well.
#yearInReview #ownYourYearInReview
This is post 3 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2025/001/t2/first-new-year-review-prior
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Glossary:
hashtag
https://indieweb.org/hashtag
own your data
https://indieweb.org/own_your_data
¹ https://tantek.com/2025/001/t2/first-new-year-review-prior
² https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/22067973274509-Your-Year-in-Sport#h_01HH5VW132BPDTEZJZDHBGJ6KM
³ https://indieweb.org/year_in_review
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The first of a new year seems like a good day to assemble, aggregate, summarize and publish various year in review posts for the prior year.
When various online services create a year in review for you many weeks before the end of the year (whether #Spotify #Unwrapped or #Strava #YearInSport), it seems they are short-changing you.
No one asks for an 11 months in review (except HR departments, which is a different problem).
So why do people accept only an ~11 months summary when services provide such a premature “year” in review?
When people say things like “Make every day count” do they not also believe you should “Count every day”?
In this case, 2024 had 366 days. You should count every one of them, and every thing from every one of them.
Rather than “sharing” a premature year in review, request your “year in review” today on the 1st of the year from various services, extract the data you want, fill in any gaps, and post your year in reviews on your own site¹.
#yearInReview #ownYourYearInReview
This is post 2 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2025/001/t1/15-years-notes-my-site-first
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Glossary:
year in review
https://indieweb.org/year_in_review
¹ https://indieweb.org/year_in_review#IndieWeb_Examples
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Welcome to 2025!
15 years ago today I began posting notes on my own #indieweb site first, and only later on #socialMedia: https://tantek.com/2010/001/t1/declaring-independence-building-it
You can too.
I am once again encouraging you start the year with:
1. Getting a personal domain name
2. Posting on your own site first, then syndicating elsewhere: #POSSE
In 2025 there are even more neighborhoods with other people’s garages¹ to post into. Companies, servers, services, disappear all the time, taking all their posts and permalinks with them to graveyard 404².
This is your annual reminder to embrace #independent ownership of your online self, your creations, and their #longevity:
* Own your domain -> own your online identity
* Own your permalinks -> own your posts
Want help? Just ask: https://chat.indieweb.org/
#ownYourContent #ownYourData
Once again I am restarting a #100PostsOfIndieWeb #100Posts project for the year.
This is post 1.
Previously, previously, previously:
* https://tantek.com/2024/001/t1/restarting-100days-indieweb-gift-calendar
* https://tantek.com/2023/001/t1/own-your-notes
* https://tantek.com/2022/001/t1/12-years-notes-my-site
* https://tantek.com/2020/001/t1/10-years-notes-my-site
* https://tantek.com/2015/002/t1/notes-replies-faves-before-twitter-ownyourdata
← ✨
→ https://tantek.com/2025/001/t2/first-new-year-review-prior
Glossary:
IndieWeb
https://indieweb.org/
longevity
https://indieweb.org/longevity
post
https://indieweb.org/post
permalink
https://indieweb.org/permalink
personal domain name
https://indieweb.org/personal-domain
POSSE
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
syndicate
https://indieweb.org/syndicate
¹ https://tantek.com/2023/022/t2/own-your-notes-domain-migration
² https://indieweb.org/site-deaths
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I have written several posts with tips for various aspects of blogging. This post curates those posts and bits from the #IndieWeb wiki into a linear progression, from why, to what, and how to post. This post assumes you already have a blog — if you don’t have one and wonder why you should, that’s a different blog post.
Why Post
There is a whole wiki page on the topic:
* https://indieweb.org/why_post — which could use some gardening
Here is a summary of reasons why to post:
1. Wean yourself off social media. Post to your own site instead of social media. If you already post on social media, into someone else’s garage¹, then you already have reason enough to post. So post on your own site first, and optionally syndicate² to that silo, only if you have friends who still use it to read posts.
2.
What to Post
* Post positive things promptly: https://tantek.com/2018/357/t3
* … from that day first: https://tantek.com/2018/364/t1
* … in time order: https://tantek.com/2018/364/t5
* Make and share lists. People like lists
How to Post
* Use a local text editor
* Capture first, edit & publish later: https://tantek.com/2023/365/t1/
* Do something positive (in-person), then post about it: https://tantek.com/2018/002/t1
* Single topic post
* Short and to the point. Edit and remove anything distracting from the main point.
* Quotable post title
* Summary opening paragraph
* Put tangents aside
* Quotable sentences and multi-sentence paragraphs
* Subheadings help cluster related paragraphs
* Use a footer for updates, terminology, previous writings, additional reading, and citations.
* Move definitions, citations, etc. to the footer unless including them inline either provides little risk of distraction or significantly helps reading flow.
* Use footer subsections: Previously, Post Glossary, References, Additional Reading
* Check your references
Each of these points could be its own blog post.
Glossary
silo
https://indieweb.org/silo
social media
https://indieweb.org/social_media
References
¹ https://tantek.com/2023/001/t1/own-your-notes
² https://indieweb.org/POSSE
This is post 29 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/306/t1/simple-embeds
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Day 1 of #IndieWebCamp #Berlin 2024¹ was very well attended!
* 20 participants, more than 3x the previous one in 2022, and second highest (2019 had 22).
* 18 introduced themselves² and their personal sites or aspirations for one
Collectively we proposed and facilitated 11 breakout sessions³ on many timely #indieweb topics covering #syndication, #inclusion, #longevity, #federation / #fediverse, how to best use #Mastodon with your personal site, #privacy and #security concerns of being online, #writing, how can we design better user interfaces for text authoring, and personalized reading #algorithms for staying connected with friends.
Session titles (and hashtags)
* How to #POSSE
* How to make the web queerer / stranger. #queer
* Online presence after our #death
* Threat modeling #threatmodeling
* Non-technical collaboration on the internet. #collab
* Locations and #places check-in
* Writing with images. #imagewriting
* Text authoring UX. #textUX
* #SSR, organizing CSS/JS
* Website design without being a designer. #designfordummies
* Timeline algorithms. #timelines
Etherpad notes from sessions have been archived to the wiki, with session recordings to follow!
Day 2 also had 20 in-person participants, the highest IndieWebCamp Berlin day 2 attendance ever! Most everyone from day 1 came back to hack, and three new people showed up. We also had several remote participants.
References
¹ https://indieweb.org/2024
² https://indieweb.org/2024/Berlin/Intros
³ https://indieweb.org/2024/Berlin/Schedule#Saturday
This is post 28 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/306/t1/simple-embeds
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Last week at a #HomebrewWebsiteClub session¹ I pointed out that I was working on implementing a “simple” way to support embeds of my notes, that is, make my short notes embeddable, like how people embed tweets or toots.
I noted that to keep it as simple as possible while being flexible to implementation changes, I planned to implement three things:
1. A separate “embed” version of my post permalinks, with just the entry information (no header, nav, search, sidebar, footer etc.), embeddable via copy/paste or an iframe.
2. A way to “Follow Your Nose” discover that separate embed version
3. A way to discover the original post from the embedded version
For (1) a minimal h-entry, with perhaps a little bit of inline CSS would suffice.
For (2) I proposed using “rel=embed” which I’ve subsequently written up briefly².
For (3) The obvious existing answer is rel=canonical link from the embed version to the canonical post permalink.
Soon thereafter, several folks in the #IndieWeb community went ahead and implemented such embeds for their own sites, and even the https://libre.fm/ open scrobbling service!
https://indieweb.org/embed#IndieWeb_Examples
I have yet to implement it myself, and that’s fine. This is one of the things I appreciate about the community, we can share our plans and ideas for improving things on our own sites, and if someone else does it first, that's great! We celebrate it and explore the solution space together.
Got other ideas for simple embeds? Want to implement them on your own site?
Join us in the #indiewebdev chat: https://chat.indieweb.org/dev
UPDATE: What about oEmbed? tl;dr: oEmbed requires JS and backend code, more work and unsuitable for embeds from static site hosting (like GitHub pages).
A simple HTML method is accessible to many more independent publishers and easier to implement. More: https://tantek.com/2024/306/t2
Glossary
embed
https://indieweb.org/embed
Follow Your Nose
https://indieweb.org/follow_your_nose
h-entry
https://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry
oEmbed
https://indieweb.org/oEmbed
rel-canonical
https://indieweb.org/rel-canonical
static site hosting
https://indieweb.org/static_web_hosting
References
¹ https://indieweb.org/events/2024-10-23-hwc-europe#embedding
² https://indieweb.org/rel-embed
This is post 27 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/287/t1/fediverse-unfollow-bridgyfed-bug
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No I did not block you on the #fediverse / #Mastodon / #Misskey etc.
If you were following me @tantek.com on your client/server/instance of choice but noticed you were no longer doing so, that was due to a recent software bug in my fediverse provider which accidentally caused everyone’s #ActivityPub servers to unfollow me (bug details below).
No it’s absolutely not your fault, you did nothing wrong.
We need a variant of Hanlon’s Razor¹ like:
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a software bug.”
Take another look at my posts if you want (directly on @tantek.com or try searching for that on your instance) and if you like what you see or find them otherwise informative and useful, feel free to refollow. If not, no worries!
Also no worries if you ever unfollow/refollow for any reason. I mean that.
I always assume people know best how to manage their online reader/reading experiences, everyone’s priorities and likes/dislikes change over time, and encourage everyone to make choices that are best for their mental health and overall joy online.
Bug details:
This was due to a #BridgyFed bug² that deleted my profile (“ActivityPub actor”) from (nearly?) all instances, making everyone’s accounts automatically unfollow me, as well as remove any of my posts from your likes and reposts (boosts) collections. It also removed my posts from any of your replies to my posts, leaving your replies dangling without reply-contexts. Apologies!
The bug was introduced accidentally as part of another fix about a month ago³, and was triggered within the following week⁴.
Anyone following me before ~2024-09-22 was no longer following me. A few folks have noticed and refollowed. Any likes or reposts of my posts before that date were also undone (removed).
Ryan (@snarfed.org) has been really good about giving folks a heads-up, and apologizing, and quickly doing what he can to fix things.
Bugs happen, yes even in production code, so please do not post/send any hate.
I’d rather be one of the folks helping with improving BridgyFed, and temporary setbacks like this are part of being an early / eager #IndieWeb adopter.
This bug has also revealed some potential weaknesses in other ActivityPub implementations. E.g. deleting an “actor” should be undoable, and undoing a delete should reconnect everything, from follows to likes & reposts collections, to reply-contexts. Perhaps the ActivityPub specification could be updated with such guidance (if it hasn’t been already, I need to double-check).
To be clear, I’m still a big supporter of #BridgyFed, #ActivityPub, #Webmention, and everyone who chooses to implement these and other #IndieWeb related and adjacent protocols as best fits their products and services.
All of these are a part of our broader open #socialWeb, and making all these #openStandards work well together (including handling edge-cases and mistakes!) is essential for providing #socialMedia alternatives that put users first.
References:
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
² https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/1379
³ https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/commit/4df76d0db7b87cabbd714039546c05b3221169be
⁴ https://chat.indieweb.org/dev/2024-09-22#t1727028174623700
This is post 26 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/285/t1/io-domain-suggested-steps
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I have put a lot of thought into deliberately shifting¹ metaphors², often in the context of the #indieweb³. One goal is to replace use of violent or divisive metaphors with actively constructive, cooperative, or joyful alternatives, like:
* gardening/farming e.g. digital garden⁴
* biology/ecology/nature e.g. digital ecosystem⁵
* cooking/baking e.g. eat your own cooking⁶
* toolmaking, clothing making, other useful crafts e.g. sew what you want⁷
* music, dancing, painting, and other expressive crafts e.g. remixing⁸
* travel, navigation, maps e.g. information superhighway⁹
* games, sports, running, e.g. surfing the net¹⁰
Some of these areas are well developed (sports metaphors), others are obvious or emergent from various IndieWeb efforts like our principles¹¹, and others could use brainstorming and experimentation.
Thoughts and words, whether spoken or written, influence each other in reinforcement feedback loops. Consciously choosing one can impact the other and vice versa.
Especially in messages to others or our even future selves, words and metaphors communicate and reinforce our values and thus merit care in their invention¹² and usage.
What are metaphors you have found constructive, cooperative, or joyful?
References:
¹ https://tantek.com/2023/132/t1/agenda-gardening-metaphors
² https://tantek.com/2023/023/t3/
³ https://tantek.com/2023/022/t1/indieweb-eat-what-you-cook
⁴ https://indieweb.org/digital_garden
⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_ecosystem
⁶ https://indieweb.org/cook_what_you_want
⁷ https://indieweb.org/events/2020-08-19-hwc-west-coast#sewing
⁸ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix_culture#Analog_era
⁹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway
¹⁰ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_metaphors#Functional_metaphors
¹¹ https://indieweb.org/principles
¹² https://tantek.com/2024/180/b1/responsible-inventing
This is post 24 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/277/t2/october-blogtober-indieweb
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Happy October!
For some reason this month has a plethora of daily blogging or other creativity prompts. Here’s a list of the ones I found so far:
* #Blogtober (consider this post my first for this, retroactively day 1)
* Inktober — https://inktober.com/
* LOLtober - https://weblog.anniegreens.lol/2024/10/loltober-2024
* Looptober — https://looptober.com/
* Mathober - https://mathober.com/
* Viztober — https://www.instagram.com/evalottchen/p/DAiNm3ZtuTj/
Having found so many for the month I created an “October” page on the #IndieWeb wiki to document them all (and in case folks find others to add):
* https://indieweb.org/October
October is also a very popular month for seasonal blog styling:
* https://indieweb.org/Halloween
Do you have a custom Halloween theme for your personal site? Add it to the wiki!
This is post 23 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/247/t4/w3c-link-checker-before-federating
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Tip: use the W3C Link Checker and fix any errors before federating with Bridgy Fed.
https://validator.w3.org/checklink
If you are using Bridgy Fed to federate your posts from your personal site, I highly recommend you first run the W3C Link Checker on a post, and verify there are no “red” errors (or fix any you find), before pinging Bridgy Fed to federate the post.
The reason is that if your post contains broken links, especially broken https: links as part of an @-mention, a weird set of timeout interactions will occur between #BridgyFed and #Mastodon that will cause any Mastodon instances following your posts to drop your federated posts as if they had not been received.
Further, those instances will also ignore any UPDATES to that post.
More discussion here:
* https://chat.indieweb.org/dev/2024-09-04#t1725421768496000
More bug details here:
* https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/884#issuecomment-2327861883
#IndieWeb #federate #fediverse #interoperability
This is post 22 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/246/t1/adventures-indieweb-activitypub-bridgy-fed
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Adventures in IndieWeb / ActivityPub (AP) bridging:
While in general my posts are being successfully federated by https://fed.brid.gy/ (#BridgyFed), my most recent three posts, and two more earlier this year, were delivered successfully to multiple #Mastodon instances AP inboxes (returned 202), however the posts do not show up if you look-up my profile on those instances (and thus followers never saw them).
These most recent posts:
* https://tantek.com/2024/245/t1/read-write-suggest-edit-web
* https://tantek.com/2024/242/t1/indiewebcamp-portland
* https://tantek.com/2024/238/t3/indiewebcamp-auto-linking
and these earlier this year:
* https://tantek.com/2024/173/t1/years-posse-microformats-adoption
* https://tantek.com/2024/044/t1/twenty-years-microformats
were all delivered to over 300 instances, which returned "202" codes, however none of them show up in profile views on those instances, e.g.
* https://indieweb.social/@tantek.com@tantek.com
* https://mastodon.social/@tantek.com@tantek.com
* https://social.coop/@tantek.com@tantek.com
* https://w3c.social/@tantek.com@tantek.com
(My most recent post on all of these is the same 2024-08-25 post starting with “All setup here at IndieWebCamp Portland!”)
Why would a Mastodon instance respond with a 202 to an AP inbox delivery and then not show that post on the local profile view?
GitHub tracking bug in case you can help narrow/track this down or have
* https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/884
Let’s see if this post makes it to your Mastodon (or other #fediverse) reader/client.
#indieweb #ActivityPub
This is post 21 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/245/t1/read-write-suggest-edit-web
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✏️ I want the Read Write Suggest-Edit Accept-Edit Update Web.
The consumer Infinite Scroll Web leaves us feeling empty.
Too few of us participate in the Read Write Web, whether with personal sites or Wikipedia.
A week ago when we wrapped up #IndieWebCamp Portland and I was reading Kevin Marks (@kevinmarks@indieweb.social) live-tooting of the demos¹, I noticed a few errors, typos or miscaptures, and pointed them out in-person.
Kevin was able to quickly edit his toots and update them for anyone reading, thanks to #Mastodon’s post editing feature and its support of #ActivityPub Updates. But this shouldn’t require being in the same room, whether IRL or chat.
We should be able to suggest edits to each other’s posts, as easily as we can reply and add a comment.
13 years ago I wrote²:
“The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web.”
Now I want the Read Write Suggest-Edit Accept-Edit Update Web.
The ↪ Reply button is fairly ubiquitous in modern post user interfaces (UIs).
Why not also a ✏️ Suggest Edit button, to craft a fix for a typo, grammar, or other minor error, and send the author for their review, and acceptance or rejection? Perhaps viewable only by the suggester and the author, to avoid "performative" suggested edits.
If the author’s posts provide revision histories, when a suggested edit is accepted, a post’s history could show the contributor of the edit.
Instead of asking Kevin in-person, what if I could have posted special "Suggested Edit" responses in reply to his toots, for which he would receive special notifications, and could choose to one-click accept and update (or further edit) his toots?
To enable such UIs and interactions across servers and implementations, we may need a new type of response³, perhaps with a special property (or more) to convey the edits being suggested.
There is documentation of this and similar use-cases, prior art / UIs, as well as some brainstorming on the #IndieWeb wiki:
* https://indieweb.org/edit
Our interaction after IndieWebCamp has inspired me to take another look at how can we design and prototype solutions to this problem.
For now, if you host your blog and posts as static files on GitHub (or equivalent), you could add a button like this to your posts alongside Like, Reply, Repost buttons:
✏️ Suggest Edit
and link it to an edit URL for the static file for the post.
I don’t use GitHub static files myself for posts, but here’s an example of such an edit link for one of my projects:
https://tantek.com/github/cassis/edit/main/README.md
This will start the process of creating a “pull request”, GitHub’s jargon⁴ for a “suggested edit”.
After completing GitHub’s ceremony of entering multiple text fields (summary & description), and multiple clicks to create said “pull request”, it’ll be sent to the author to review. Presuming the author likes the suggested edit, they can perform the other half of GitHub’s jargon-filled ceremonies to “Merge” or “Squash & Merge”, “Delete fork”, etc. to accept the edit.
It’s an awkward interaction⁵, however useful for at least prototyping a ✏️ Suggest Edit button on sites that store their posts as files in GitHub. Certainly worthy of experimenting with and gathering experience to design and build even better interactions.
We can start with the shortest path to getting something working, then learn, iterate, improve, repeat.
#readWriteWeb #editableWeb #suggestEdit #acceptEdit
References:
¹ https://indieweb.social/@kevinmarks/113025295600067213
² https://tantek.com/2011/174/t1/read-fork-write-merge-web-osb11
³ https://indieweb.org/responses
⁴ The phrase “pull request” was derived from the git command: “git request-pull” according to https://www.reddit.com/r/git/comments/nvahcp/comment/h12hzj7/
⁵ “edits” in GitHub require taking far more steps, and navigating far more jargon, then say, Wikipedia pages, which come down to “Edit” and “Save”. We should aspire to Wikipedia’s simplicity, not GitHub’s ceremonies.
This is post 20 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts
← https://tantek.com/2024/242/t1/indiewebcamp-portland
→ https://tantek.com/2024/246/t1/adventures-indieweb-activitypub-bridgy-fed
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