
The IndieWeb needs to believe in itself (2018) - cameronbrown
https://fogknife.com/2018-05-04-i-believe-in-the-indieweb-it-needs-to-believe-in-itself.html
======
smacktoward
My interest was piqued enough by this post to go clicking around the IndieWeb
site for more information on Webmentions, and I was amused to see, on the page
where they discuss an earlier spec that attempted to do the same thing,
TrackBack ([https://indieweb.org/Trackback](https://indieweb.org/Trackback)),
a link to an essay I wrote 14 years ago critiquing the thing that ended up
killing TrackBack -- its complete lack of spam-proofing. (This one:
[http://anthillcommunities.com/archives/001653.html](http://anthillcommunities.com/archives/001653.html))

I guess somebody actually read it! Huh. In unrelated news, now I feel old :-D

I was curious to see how Webmentions sets out to avoid the same problems,
since they should be more obvious today than they were when TrackBack was
created in 2002. The answer appears to be one of your classic "good news/bad
news" situations.

The good news is, it appears some thought has been actually been put into
spam-proofing this time around. The Webmentions spec lays out a verification
process that incoming Webmentions MUST pass in order to be accepted as valid
(see [https://www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-
webmention-20170112/#webmenti...](https://www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-
webmention-20170112/#webmention-verification)), which is good.

The bad news is, assuming I'm reading the spec correctly, that verification
process boils down to "do an HTTP GET of the page that supposedly linked to
you and parse its HTML to make sure there actually is a link to you in there,"
which doesn't seem like much of an anti-spam speed bump. All your spammer has
to do is send all their Webmentions from the same URL, and then publish an
automatically-updated list of links to all the URLs they've spammed over the
last six hours at that URL, and boom, they're valid, right? Or is there
something I'm missing here that makes this more spam-resistant than it first
appears?

~~~
klez
Just my opinion, but I'm not sure that the antispam should be built into the
protocol itself. There's nothing there that say the receiver MUST NOT perform
additional checks on the sender. Furthermore section 4.1 says that the
receiver MAY moderate webmentions before publishing, so I guess that's the
place where the receiver checks the source with some antispam list.

EDIT: I researched a bit more, and noticed that there's an extension to
Webmentions, called Vouch[0], which may be a bit complicated to bootstrap, and
seems like a web-of-trust-ish mechanism to approve of webmentions.

[0] [https://indieweb.org/Vouch](https://indieweb.org/Vouch)

------
klez
Frankly, thanks but no, thanks.

The moment it becomes a legal entity is the moment bureaucracy starts to kick
in, big names join and poison the well, internal politics rips stuff apart.

I know this view is a bit extreme and pessimistic, but I've yet to see
anything that _doesn 't_ go like this. I see no reason indieweb would be the
exception.

As it is, the indieweb community is agile enough to be able to fork at a
moment's notice if things start to go sour. If money and papers start to get
involved, that becomes more difficult.

------
simplecomplex
If anyone from IndieWeb community is reading this thread:

Stop bikeshedding formats and random features (likes, bookmarks, etc) and
focus 100% on getting Webmention and rel="in-reply-to" working smoothly and
integrated across the blogosphere.

 _Build on what works_ , instead of rejecting the entire blogosphere because
of some guy's pet project. Forget about bikeshedding microformats and
micropub/microsub APIs.

IndieWeb talks a lot about "standards" and interoperability and all this crap
but at the end of the day the focus is mostly "let's replace Atom with
microformats to do the same things, and argue about how to encode likes and
bookmarks." The NIH syndrome regarding replacing Atom/RSS with microformats is
incredibly counter-productive.

Start with replies to blog articles, build consensus, build software support,
make it a success. THEN move onto replicating Facebook. Webmentions/replies
can be done _today_ with Atom/RSS. Just think if all that time spent on
microformats was spent building support for webmentions/replies in existing
tech stacks!

~~~
epeus
If you want to get replies working across the blogosphere, try brid.gy which
has support for various blogging platforms. If you want to transform atom/rss
to microformats, there's unmung.com If you want conversion between lots of
formats there's [https://granary.io/](https://granary.io/)

You're very welcome to spend the time integrating this with your own site or
other existing tech stacks.

------
jamietanna
I've been blogging on my personal website,
[https://www.jvt.me](https://www.jvt.me) for a good few years, but I've found
the scope, functionality and interactions increase since joining the IndieWeb.

I've written some posts about my journey which are tagged and can be found at
[https://www.jvt.me/tags/indieweb/](https://www.jvt.me/tags/indieweb/) if
you're interested

------
kradeelav
I'm not a coder, merely an artist with a blog and the interest of thumbing the
nose at authority by knowing things.

I don't see a place in the article or the comments here that describes how (or
frankly, why) this can be used for the layman (of course, I'm assuming
indieweb wants to expand to more folks like mastodon did). Can someone
enlighten me?

~~~
klez
As for the why, there's a good list of reasons here[0].

As for the how, first of all it depends on the _what_. The indieweb is a
concept like "free software", not a technology like mastodon. You can't just
"implement the indieweb". You implement parts of it. And especially you
participate in it. A good rundown of fictitious "levels of compliance" can be
found here[1].

[0] [https://indieweb.org/why](https://indieweb.org/why)

[1] [https://indieweb.org/IndieMark](https://indieweb.org/IndieMark)

------
foobar_
The thing is you can setup website and host your own website. It doesn't get
more independent than that.

I don't think you can build a public park for everyone.

~~~
klez
That's not even the main part about the indieweb concept. What really
differentiate it from just having your home page is the interaction between
indieweb websites. Mainly webmentions, but also profile-sharing across
different websites, or using your own website as an authentication method in
tandem with third-party identity providers.

------
qubyte
Regarding webmentions, webmention.io (receiving) and webmention.app (sending)
are excellent. If you prefer to manage your own like me, then you may find
this glitch helpful: [https://glitch.com/~lean-send-
webmentions](https://glitch.com/~lean-send-webmentions).

I've also written a complement to webmention.io which it can use as a callback
hook to turn webmentions it receives into GitHub issues (great for if you use
a static site generator). [https://glitch.com/~webmention-io-webhook-to-
github-issue](https://glitch.com/~webmention-io-webhook-to-github-issue)

------
amelius
Sad to see that Bridgy lost support for Facebook:

> Facebook is no longer supported. So long, and thanks for all the fish!

> Bridgy included support Facebook from the very beginning, when it launched
> in January 2012. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook
> started limiting its API in a number of ways. Notably, it disabled RSVPing
> on April 24, 2018, posting on August 1, 2018, and reading other people's
> comments and likes on May 24, 2018, which killed Bridgy for Facebook
> entirely.

~~~
mxuribe
Just to be very clear, this was ALL Facebook's fault...FB clenched their fist,
squeezing their grip ever tighter of their walled garden. Bridgy, all users of
Bridgy, as well as all the consumers of the content from these bloggers were
the victims of FB's actions. You can have whatever opinions you wish about
FB's right to do so...but the content that users freely submitted INTO FB has
now been locked off by FB. Make of that what you will...But Bridgy isn't the
bad guy here, just the victim.

------
infominer
If you are curious to know more, I've collected an array of indieweb info on a
site built with an Indieweb enabled Hugo theme, and detailed its features:

[https://web-work.tools/indieweb/indigo/features/](https://web-
work.tools/indieweb/indigo/features/)

------
SJk7TAy
As a first step, I'd suggest IndieWeb applies to become a supported project
under Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). SFC provides various services to
libre software projects such as fiscal sponsorship, fundraising assistance,
legal advice, logistical support for conferences, etc. See
[https://sfconservancy.org/projects/services/](https://sfconservancy.org/projects/services/)

