
Homesteading on the Indie Web (2011) - Tomte
http://markmhendrickson.com/posts/homesteading-on-the-indie-web
======
AlexDragusin
_The user couldn 't be expected to use FTP, a command line interface, a file
system, or any other technologies beyond the browser because doing so would
severely limit its accessibility. User interactions had to be limited to
filling out web forms and clicking on things.

The financial and time burden of using the tool to both set up and maintain a
homestead needed to be minimized as much as possible._

If we eliminate these barriers, we will end up with the type of user that is
prevalent on Facebook, Twitter et al thus pointless. Something that comes
without effort will not be appreciated at its true value.

I think there has to be a reasonable barrier of entry as to keep these kind of
people who are not really interested in bringing anything of value, as they
have proven time and time again. The barrier of entry, in all fairness is low
even as described above so as the word goes, how low you can go?

~~~
apatters
This is basically what www.sdf.org is, right? A community where you have to
somewhat know your way around the command line to get around. And it's
awesome. But by definition communities like this will probably never dominate
the market.

------
atheiste
I think there are multiple projects that Mark describes. One of the good
looking one is [https://yunohost.org/#/](https://yunohost.org/#/) for example.
I wish the community could join forces, select one solution and make it
production ready. Does anyone know about similar projects to yunohost that
look promising?

~~~
southerntofu
Yunohost is by far the most advanced and has the strongest community. Any help
is welcome (especially python devs)

FreedomBox is slowly making progress, but nothing comparable to Yunohost so
far.

FreedomBone is a one-person project that actively researches privacy-enabling
self-hosting (Tor/I2P) and off-the-grid mesh networking. It's an inspiring
project and the blog is full of good stuff :
[https://blog.freedombone.net/](https://blog.freedombone.net/)

------
mxuribe
> ...mapping social networking relationships onto the Internet in a
> distributed, peer-to-peer fashion...

Quick, someone hop into their time machine, and go back and tell the author
that the fediverse _NOW_ exists!

(Note to self: Never dismiss my future self, if...no, when, he comes back to
warn me of something.)

~~~
southerntofu
> the fediverse NOW exists!

The fediverse is interesting but it's not the only approach.

XMPP is similar to ActivityPub/ActivityStreams but has more explicit
specifications, good reference implementations, and the community has gained
lots of experience in running federated systems over the years. Also, XMPP
works on different transports (TCP, HTTP..) while ActivityPub is constrained
to the web.

The Indieweb takes an interesting low-tech approach to web federation, by
using standard web primitives (semantic microformats2 classes and POST
requests) so that every body can federate their "dumbest" blogs without having
to implement a whole complex dynamic social network.

ActivityPub tries to play on the two fields and therefore facing many
challenges to come. Namespaced JSON (JSON-LD) could help it grow as a
federation, but the specifications are not always very precise (though they
keep getting better) and the fediverse community is constantly reinventing the
wheel that email/XMPP folks have perfected over the years.

The two main problems with the Fediverse at the moment in my view:

\- no proper decoupling of identity/service providers so you have to create
many accounts on many services (Mastodon, Peertube, Plume..) where Indieweb
uses the `rel=me` and `IndieAuth` protocols to avoid running many profiles,
and XMPP has XEP-0070 for 3rd-party HTTP auth (i.e. authenticating XMPP users
from your website)

\- most implementations rely on client-side DOM generation (i.e. Javascript
that outputs HTML), which is far from efficient (running the same calculations
many times over every client) or accessible ; Indieweb federation is based on
web primitives and plays well with _any_ browser

These problems can of course be addressed, but they have already been in the
Indieweb/XMPP communities for some time. If you want to get a grasp of what
people build on top of XMPP nowadays:

[https://salut-a-toi.org/blog/view/salut-a-
toi@libervia.org/@...](https://salut-a-toi.org/blog/view/salut-a-
toi@libervia.org/@/id/HxQXe4C4iHLtqvKwREESPG/salut-alpha-contributors,-take-
your-keyboards)

