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POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content.

▶️ watch Zach’s 1min* video intro to POSSE

Why

Let your friends read your posts, their way. POSSE lets your friends keep using whatever they use to read your stuff (e.g. social media silos like Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Neocities, etc.).

Stay in touch with friends now, not some theoretical future. POSSE is about staying in touch with current friends now, rather than the potential of staying in touch with friends in the future.

Friends are more important than federation. By focusing on relationships that matter to people rather than architectural ideals, from a human perspective, POSSE is more important than federation. Additionally, if federated approaches take a POSSE approach first, they will likely get better adoption (everyone wants to stay in touch with their friends), and thereby more rapidly approach that federated future.

POSSE is beyond blogging. It’s a key part of why and how the IndieWeb movement is different from just “everyone blog on their own site”, and also different from “everyone just install and run (YourFavoriteSocialSoftware)” etc. monoculture solutions.

Why In General

POSSE is considered a robust and preferable syndication model for the following reasons:

• Reduce 3rd party dependence. By posting directly to your own site, you’re not dependent on 3rd Party services to do so — if you can access your site, you can publish your content. On the contrary with PESOS, when the 3rd party site is down, you are unable to add content.
• Ownership. By posting first on your own site, you create a direct ownership chain that can be traced back to you without any intervening 3rd party services (silos) TOS’s getting in the way (which is a vulnerability of PESOS).
• Own canonical URLs to your content. Canonical URLs to your content are on your domain.
• Copies can cite the original. By posting content first to your own site (and thus creating a permalink for it), copies that you post on 3rd Party services can link or cite the original on your site (see syndication_formats and POSSE Notes to Twitter)
• Better search. Searching public content on your own domain (with any web search engine of your choice) works better than depending on silos exclusively to search your posts (e.g. Twitter for a while only showed recent tweets in search results. Facebook still has very poor search results).
• backfeed can be used to pull in (reverse syndicate) responses from other services
• allows taking advantage of other services’ social layers and aggregation features while storing the canonical copy of your content on your own site
• …

Why Link To Your Original

Common POSSE practice is to link from POSSE copies to your original, using a permashortlink. Here are a few reasons why:

• Discovery of your original content. discovery of your original content from the copies on 3rd party services is enabled by the permashortlinks to your originals posted on said services
• Subvert spammers who copy your posts. When spammers (e.g. @sin3rss) mindlessly copy from your POSSE copies and repost, they also copy the link back to the original, and thus provide more distribution for people to find and view your original post. “2011-01-09 internet aikido” of a sort.
• Better ranking for your original posts. If/when your POSSE copies are themselves copied by others and (re)posted elsewhere (e.g. manual retweets, RSS bots etc.), when the copies link to your original posts, search engines figure that out by following those links back to the original and ranking it higher.

How to

How to implement

This section is for web developers implementing POSSE.

In General

In general, when your content posting software posts something, it should also post a copy to the silo destinations of your choice, with an original post link (e.g. permashortlink or permashortcitation) back to your original.

The details of how to do so vary per destination. See the silo-specific sections below.

Once you have posted the copy to the silo, you should:

• link to the syndicated copy from the original in a posts-elsewhere section on your post.

User Interface

The best user interface (UI) is automatic, dependable, and invisible. If you can implement POSSEing in a way that always does exactly what you want, predictably, then no explicit UI is needed.

Preview

One way to provide more predictability and inspire confidence is to show what will be POSSEd (within the limitations of the destination) as a preview before publishing

(needs screenshot)

Twitter

Twitter is perhaps the most popular POSSE destination and a good place to start.

If you can start posting notes (tweets) to your own site and POSSEing to Twitter, instead of posting directly to Twitter, you have taken a big step towards owning your data.

Details:

See POSSE to Twitter for details on how to POSSE both notes and articles (blog posts) to Twitter.

Facebook

There are two options for POSSEing to Facebook currently:

• Manually crosspost
• Semi-automatically with the Bridgy browser extension for Facebook

Medium

WordPress

• How does veganstraightedge.com do it? (all his articles are manually POSSEd to WordPress.com)
• Chris Aldrich uses a WordPress plugin WordPress Crosspost to POSSE from a self-hosted WordPress install to WordPress.com.

Plain Text Notes

Some destinations (e.g. SMS or push notifications) may require a pure plain text representation.

• h-entry_to_text is a method of generating a plain text representation from an arbitrary h-entry

Software

Software and libraries to implement POSSE:

• PHP
  • The POSSE namespace in php-helpers (might be moved to a separate package) contains various truncation, preparation and syndication functions including HTML => plaintext µblog syntax converter
• Python
  • SiloRider is a command-line tool, implemented in Python, that lets you implement POSSE to various services (Twitter and Mastodon as of 2018-08-01).
  • Feed2Toot is another command-line python tool that parses any number of RSS feeds and posts their content on ActivityPub based services (tested with: Mastodon, Pleroma). Contains some neat bells and whistles like advanced post filtering, numerous options for feed parsing and toot formatting.
• Docker
  • POSSE Party: self-hosted software for POSSE

Services

• Bridgy Publish is POSSE-as-a-service. It supports Twitter, Flickr, GitHub and Mastodon. You can use it interactively or programmatically via webmention.
• Mugged Tweets – will POSSE a note to a mug (may require first POSSEing to Twitter)
• IFTTT allows automatically reposting content with an RSS or Atom feed to a number of silos incuding Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook
• EchoFeed

Publishing Flows

There’s at least two ways to implement a POSSE content posting flow:

Client to site to silo

• The user writes a piece of content using a publishing client
  • Optional: client provides UI for selecting which 3rd party services to push to if it knows about them, with optional customizations for per service
• Having finished the content, the user publishes content to their server (optionally: with metadata of which 3rd party services and any customizations thereof)
  • Optional: client can generate a permalink knowing the state of the server, and publish to that permalink
• The server publishes the content, generates a permalink and summary (and/or customized content suited to 3rd party services) if necessary
• The server posts copies with permalinks to 3rd party services

Advantages:

• User only has to interact with one site over the internet, their own
• Syndication can be done fully automatically by the server

Disadvantages:

• any?

Client to site and silo

• The user writes a piece of content using a publishing client
• Having finished the content, the user publishes it to their server
• The client queries the server for the URL of the content it just pushed
• The publishing client presents the user with an interface for selecting:
  • Which 3rd party services to publish to
  • The exact content published to the services, pre-filled with a summary based on the produced content
• The user selects the services and submits the form
• The publishing client posts the content summaries out to the 3rd party services

Advantages:

• More user control over timing and editing of copies of content to 3rd party services

Disadvantages:

• Syndication requires a manual step each time
• Dependent on client connectivity directly to 3rd party services (problematic in flakey mobile situations, or when client is publishing using domain-censored internet access).

IndieWeb Examples

The following IndieWebCamp participants’ sites support a POSSE architecture. If you have an implementation, add it, make screenshots or a screencast or blog about it and post the details/link here. In date order (earliest first) :

Tantek

Tantek.com as of 2010-01-01[1] (2010-01-26 Twitter syndication started[2] and caught up[3][4]). Tantek Çelik implemented POSSE in Falcon on tantek.com.

• all self-hosted posts are openly with PuSH v0.4 + h-feed and Atom real-time syndicated with a PubsubHubbub hub to StatusNet, other subscribers etc. (also to Google Buzz til it shutdown)
• note (and article titles), reply, RSVP posts are snowflake copied by the personal site server to Twitter with permashortlink citation links/references (see Whistle for details) back to the original. Copies of notes to Twitter are also automatically recopied from there to Facebook.
  • RSVPs to Facebook events are “copied” (more like propagated) to Facebook using Bridgy publish
• likes of tweets are “copied” (more like propagated) to Twitter using Bridgy publish

Barnaby Walters

Waterpigs.co.uk as of 2012-03-12. Barnaby Walters implemented POSSE over at waterpigs.co.uk

• as of 2012-09-25 all collections (notes, articles, activity) are PuSH-subscribable feeds.
• Using the Client to Server to 3rd Parties flow —Waterpigs.co.uk 06:08, 25 September 2012 (PDT)
• Syndicating to Twitter + Facebook
• As of 2014-06-19 Taproot can now optionally post additional POSSE tweets when updating a note or article — example of updated note and POSSE tweet for the update. Note that Bridgy successfully backfeeds silo interactions from the update tweet as well as the original POSSE tweet

Brennan Novak

brennannovak.com as of 2012-07-01[5][6]. Brennan Novak implemented POSSE on his site brennannovak.com with copies posted to Twitter and Facebook

Aaron Parecki

aaronparecki.com as of 2012-08-19[7][8]. Aaron Parecki implemented POSSE on his site aaronparecki.com with copies posted to Twitter containing permashortlinks back to originals on his own site.

• as of 2012-08-19 all collections (notes, articles, replies) are PuSH-subscribable feeds.
• Posting UI as of 2012-09-09: http://aaronparecki.com/2012/253/note/3

Sandeep Shetty

User:Sandeep.io First post POSSE’d on 2012-11-05. I primarily syndicate to Twitter using a very lo-fi solution of adding silo (Facebook, Twiiter, Google+) provided share links to each post that I can manually click to prefill content, edit and post. I’ve avoided API integration because of the extensive experience I’ve had using Facebook API and dealing with it’s random changes. “Integration” has high costs sometimes so I keep it as simple as possible.

Ben Werdmuller

werd.io as of 2013-05-31 [9]. Ben Werdmuller implemented POSSE in his idno platform via plugins. New content has an associated Activity Streams object type; POSSE plugins listen for post events associated with those object types and syndicate appropriately.

• Notes and articles are syndicated to Twitter and Facebook
• Images are syndicated to Facebook, Flickr and Twitter
• Places are syndicated to Foursquare
• More plugins are very easily possible; the Foursquare plugin took about an hour to build

Shane Becker

• Shane Becker using Dark Matter on veganstraightedge.com (since 2013-07-17[10]) with automatic rel-syndication markup on manual POSSEing:
  • articles: http://veganstraightedge.com/articles/2013/09/07/rorschach-and-roomba to Medium and WordPress
  • notes: http://veganstraightedge.com/notes/2013/10/23/of-irons-and-fires to Twitter
  • videos: http://veganstraightedge.com/videos/2013/5/30/backyard-squirrel-buddy to Vine

Glenn Jones

glennjones.net as of 2014-01-14 Glenn Jones The blog implemented POSSE using a new version of transmat.io system. New content added to transmat is associated with objects types. A POSSE twitter plugins listens for post events syndicating content. At moment only notes are syndicated.

Jeremy Keith

adactio.com as of 2014-05-27 Jeremy Keith has implemented POSSE using his own custom CMS.

• Notes have been POSSEd since he first started posting them on his own site, on 2014-05-27 (Note POSSE copy may say 2014-05-26 presumably because of timezone differences, Jeremy’s is in BST, while a PDT viewer sees datetime adjusted accordingly). See also related blog post 2014-06-01.
• Photos have been POSSEd to Twitter since he first started posting them on his own site on 2014-07-05 and to Flickr since 2014-07-08. Examples:
  • http://adactio.com/notes/6978/
    • POSSE copy: https://twitter.com/adactio/status/485552177080201217
  • http://adactio.com/notes/7021 – first photo POSSEd to both Twitter and Flickr:
    • https://twitter.com/adactio/status/486617601167339521
    • https://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/14604446101

Shane Hudson

shanehudson.net as of 2014-09-19 Shane Hudson has implemented POSSE to Twitter for Craft CMS.

• Previously working on WordPress but he was not keen on the UX.
• Has reply contexts working but has to manually copy the ID.
• Not yet POSSEing photos but plans to.
• Currently he has to manually copy the tweet from the main text box to a 140 character limit tweet text box. He plans to make that automatic.

Ravi Sagar

http://www.ravisagar.in/blog/implementing-posse-my-site Implementing POSSE on my site as of 2018-02-21.

• The new blogs and notes are posted on Drupal
• http://www.ravisagar.in/rss-social.xml RSS Feed is generated for the blogs and notes tagged with “Share” keyword
• Using Rebrandly to create shortlinks for the RSS Feed
• Using Zapier to share the newly created rebrandly links to Twitter and Linkedin

Ludovic Chabant

ludovic.chabant.com as of 2018-07-30 Ludovic Chabant has implement POSSE to Twitter and Mastodon from PieCrust CMS, using SiloRider

• SiloRider is CMS independent — it only relies on Microformats found in the published markup.
• New articles are posted as title and link.
• New microblogging updates are mostly copied verbatim (if the fit the external service’s character limits), and support photo posts, including multi-photo posts.

Adam Dawkins

adamdawkins.uk as of 2019-01-16 Adam Dawkins has implemented POSSE using his own custom CMS.

• Notes have been POSSEd since he first started posting them on his own site, on 2019-01-16

Examples

• Original note: https://adamdawkins.uk/2019/1/16/this-tweet-originated-on-adamdawkins-uk-posse
  • POSSE copy: https://twitter.com/adamdawkins/status/1085327551415894016

Shaun Ewing

shaun.net as of 2020-01-16 Shaun Ewing has implemented POSSE using Jekyll, and custom APIs.

• More information https://shaun.net/notes/taking-back-control-of-my-content/
• Syndication is still manual, and I’m still working on Level 3/4 “IndieMark” items s

Read More

Back on my blog, I started a rolling list of WebMention blogs. I’ve not maintained that series, but this list started from that blog post series. I’ve marked a few in bold – these are specifically general-purpose conversation starters and topic ideas.

A

• Aaron Parecki
• ActivityPub isBrill
• Alberto Mardegan
• Andrew Canion
• Author Buzz UK
• Author Buzz Developer Blog
• Andy Sylvester’s Web
• Archaic Words, Using

B

• Barnaby Walters
• Barry Frost
• beko
• Boosting others
• busybee
• Brain Baking
• Brill Making isBrill

C

• Christian Kruse – WWWTech
• Calum Ryan
• cybercultural.com

D

• DragonFly BSD Digest
• DJ, I Am The
• DocPop
• Doctor Who isBrill
• Does a bear code in the woods?

E

• Endless Rooms, the
• EINDEX’s Blog

F

• Fantastic Site of Lord Matt, The
• Ferdinand Mütsch
• Fictional Dictionary of Bad Language, The
• fundor333.com

G

• Gothmas
• Green Stuff, isBrill
• gRegorLove

H

• Have ideas?

I

• Ian Forrester
• Interdependent Thoughts by Ton Zijlstra
• Inventing Words
• Indie Web isBrill
• See also: Webmention – IndieWeb

J

• James’ Coffee Blog
• Jamie Tanna
• Jason Garber
• Jan-Lukas Else
• Jeena
• Jeremy Keith

K

• Khürt Williams
• Konfetti explorations, Marisabel

L

• Local Yarn: Blog, The

M

• Mastodon isBrill
• Matrix Dreams
• Matt’s Big Fat Arse
• Matt’s Social Node
• Matthew D Brown
• Max Dietrich
• Michael “Spell” Spellacy
• Muse of Last Resort, The

N

• Nick Jordan

O

• Open Mentions
• Open Mentions: Question of the week
• Open Mention: Topics
• Over-Wording

P

• Peter Murray
• Punning isBrill
• Phil Gyford’s website
• Photos, Taking (isBrill)
• Pelle Wessman
• Pegwell Bay, isBrill
• Professor Elemental isBrill (fan site)
• Putin is pants

Q

• Quick think of something to go here

R

• Rachel Andrew
• Replying isBrill
• Raymond Camden
• Read Write Respond
• Read Write Collect
• Robin Boers
• Ryan Barrett

S

• Soft SciFi
• Silvia Maggi Design, blog
• Simone Silvestron
• Starrwulfe
• Steampunk isBrill
• Shall we talk?

T

• Tantek Çelik
• Tea isBrill
• Thanet Creative
• Thanet Views

U

• Under construction

V

• Very good reason to add more

W

• Werd I/O
• Wrong Answers Only
• Will Norris
• Webmention isBrill
• Wildlife isBrill

X

• Xenagogues wanted

Y

• You are here

Z

• Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design

I’m open to suggested additions, title corrections, ideas, and anything else related you might want to share. Comments, suggestions, praise, and other feedback by WebMention or ActivityPub only.

Additions and subtractions

I will periodically review this list. Sites that seem inactive, I will prune, while new sites I find will be added. To talk about this list, there is a meta page.

Notes

This page had some problems (repeating pings). I hope I’ve stopped it now.

Back on my blog, I started a rolling list of WebMention blogs. I’ve not maintained that series, but this list started from that blog post series. I’ve marked a few in bold – these are specifically general-purpose conversation starters and topic ideas.

A

• Aaron Parecki
• ActivityPub isBrill
• Alberto Mardegan
• Andrew Canion
• Author Buzz UK
• Author Buzz Developer Blog
• Andy Sylvester’s Web
• Archaic Words, Using

B

• Barnaby Walters
• Barry Frost
• beko
• Boosting others
• busybee
• Brain Baking
• Brill Making isBrill

C

• Christian Kruse – WWWTech
• Calum Ryan
• cybercultural.com

D

• DragonFly BSD Digest
• DJ, I Am The
• DocPop
• Doctor Who isBrill
• Does a bear code in the woods?

E

• Endless Rooms, the
• EINDEX’s Blog

F

• Fantastic Site of Lord Matt, The
• Ferdinand Mütsch
• Fictional Dictionary of Bad Language, The
• fundor333.com

G

• Gothmas
• Green Stuff, isBrill
• gRegorLove

H

• Have ideas?

I

• Ian Forrester
• Interdependent Thoughts by Ton Zijlstra
• Inventing Words
• Indie Web isBrill
• See also: Webmention – IndieWeb

J

• James’ Coffee Blog
• Jamie Tanna
• Jason Garber
• Jan-Lukas Else
• Jeena
• Jeremy Keith

K

• Khürt Williams

L

• Local Yarn: Blog, The

M

• Mastodon isBrill
• Matrix Dreams
• Matt’s Big Fat Arse
• Matt’s Social Node
• Matthew D Brown
• Max Dietrich
• Michael “Spell” Spellacy
• Muse of Last Resort, The

N

• Nick Jordan

O

• Open Mentions
• Open Mentions: Question of the week
• Open Mention: Topics
• Over-Wording

P

• Peter Murray
• Punning isBrill
• Phil Gyford’s website
• Photos, Taking (isBrill)
• Pelle Wessman
• Pegwell Bay, isBrill
• Professor Elemental isBrill (fan site)
• Putin is pants

Q

• Quick think of something to go here

R

• Rachel Andrew
• Replying isBrill
• Raymond Camden
• Read Write Respond
• Read Write Collect
• Robin Boers
• Ryan Barrett

S

• Soft SciFi
• Silvia Maggi Design, blog
• Simone Silvestron
• Starrwulfe
• Steampunk isBrill
• Shall we talk?

T

• Tantek Çelik
• Tea isBrill
• Thanet Creative
• Thanet Views

U

• Under construction

V

• Very good reason to add more

W

• Werd I/O
• Wrong Answers Only
• Will Norris
• Webmention isBrill
• Wildlife isBrill

X

• Xenagogues wanted

Y

• You are here

Z

• Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design

I’m open to suggested additions, title corrections, ideas, and anything else related you might want to share. Comments, suggestions, praise, and other feedback by WebMention or ActivityPub only.

Additions and subtractions

I will periodically review this list. Sites that seem inactive, I will prune, while new sites I find will be added. To talk about this list, there is a meta page.

Notes

This page had some problems (repeating pings). I hope I’ve stopped it now.

Back on my blog, I started a rolling list of WebMention blogs. I’ve not maintained that series, but this list started from that blog post series. I’ve marked a few in bold – these are specifically general-purpose conversation starters and topic ideas.

A

• Aaron Parecki
• ActivityPub isBrill
• Alberto Mardegan
• Andrew Canion
• Author Buzz UK
• Author Buzz Developer Blog
• Andy Sylvester’s Web
• Archaic Words, Using

B

• Barnaby Walters
• Barry Frost
• beko
• Boosting others
• busybee
• Brain Baking
• Brill Making isBrill

C

• Christian Kruse – WWWTech
• Calum Ryan
• cybercultural.com

D

• DragonFly BSD Digest
• DJ, I Am The
• DocPop
• Doctor Who isBrill
• Does a bear code in the woods?

E

• Endless Rooms, the
• EINDEX’s Blog

F

• Fantastic Site of Lord Matt, The
• Ferdinand Mütsch
• Fictional Dictionary of Bad Language, The

G

• Gothmas
• Green Stuff, isBrill
• gRegorLove

H

• Have ideas?

I

• Ian Forrester
• Interdependent Thoughts by Ton Zijlstra
• Inventing Words
• Indie Web isBrill
• See also: Webmention – IndieWeb

J

• James’ Coffee Blog
• Jamie Tanna
• Jason Garber
• Jan-Lukas Else
• Jeena
• Jeremy Keith

K

• Khürt Williams

L

• Local Yarn: Blog, The

M

• Mastodon isBrill
• Matrix Dreams
• Matt’s Big Fat Arse
• Matt’s Social Node
• Matthew D Brown
• Max Dietrich
• Michael “Spell” Spellacy
• Muse of Last Resort, The

N

• Nick Jordan

O

• Open Mentions
• Open Mentions: Question of the week
• Open Mention: Topics
• Over-Wording

P

• Peter Murray
• Punning isBrill
• Phil Gyford’s website
• Photos, Taking (isBrill)
• Pelle Wessman
• Pegwell Bay, isBrill
• Professor Elemental isBrill (fan site)
• Putin is pants

Q

• Quick think of something to go here

R

• Rachel Andrew
• Replying isBrill
• Raymond Camden
• Read Write Respond
• Read Write Collect
• Robin Boers
• Ryan Barrett

S

• Soft SciFi
• Silvia Maggi Design, blog
• Simone Silvestron
• Starrwulfe
• Steampunk isBrill
• Shall we talk?

T

• Tantek Çelik
• Tea isBrill
• Thanet Creative
• Thanet Views

U

• Under construction

V

• Very good reason to add more

W

• Werd I/O
• Wrong Answers Only
• Will Norris
• Webmention isBrill
• Wildlife isBrill

X

• Xenagogues wanted

Y

• You are here

Z

• Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design

I’m open to suggested additions, title corrections, ideas, and anything else related you might want to share. Comments, suggestions, praise, and other feedback by WebMention or ActivityPub only.

Additions and subtractions

I will periodically review this list. Sites that seem inactive, I will prune, while new sites I find will be added. To talk about this list, there is a meta page.

Back on my blog, I started a rolling list of WebMention blogs. I’ve not maintained that series, but this list started from that blog post series. I’ve marked a few in bold – these are specifically general-purpose conversation starters and topic ideas.

A

• Aaron Parecki
• ActivityPub isBrill
• Alberto Mardegan
• Andrew Canion
• Author Buzz UK
• Author Buzz Developer Blog
• Andy Sylvester’s Web
• Archaic Words, Using

B

• Barnaby Walters
• Barry Frost
• beko
• Boosting others
• busybee
• Brain Baking
• Brill Making isBrill

C

• Christian Kruse – WWWTech
• Calum Ryan
• cybercultural.com

D

• DragonFly BSD Digest
• DJ, I Am The
• DocPop
• Doctor Who isBrill
• Does a bear code in the woods?

E

• Endless Rooms, the
• EINDEX’s Blog

F

• Fantastic Site of Lord Matt, The
• Ferdinand Mütsch
• Fictional Dictionary of Bad Language, The

G

• Gothmas
• Green Stuff, isBrill
• gRegorLove

H

• Have ideas?

I

• Ian Forrester
• Interdependent Thoughts by Ton Zijlstra
• Inventing Words
• Indie Web isBrill
• See also: Webmention – IndieWeb

J

• James’ Coffee Blog
• Jamie Tanna
• Jason Garber
• Jan-Lukas Else
• Jeena
• Jeremy Keith

K

• Khürt Williams

L

• Local Yarn: Blog, The

M

• Mastodon isBrill
• Matrix Dreams
• Matt’s Big Fat Arse
• Matt’s Social Node
• Matthew D Brown
• Max Dietrich
• Michael “Spell” Spellacy
• Muse of Last Resort, The

N

• Nick Jordan

O

• Open Mentions
• Open Mentions: Question of the week
• Open Mention: Topics
• Over-Wording

P

• Peter Murray
• Punning isBrill
• Phil Gyford’s website
• Photos, Taking (isBrill)
• Pelle Wessman
• Pegwell Bay, isBrill
• Professor Elemental isBrill (fan site)
• Putin is pants

Q

• Quick think of something to go here

R

• Rachel Andrew
• Replying isBrill
• Raymond Camden
• Read Write Respond
• Read Write Collect
• Robin Boers
• Ryan Barrett

S

• Soft SciFi
• Silvia Maggi Design, blog
• Simone Silvestron
• Starrwulfe
• Steampunk isBrill
• Shall we talk?

T

• Tantek Çelik
• Tea isBrill
• Thanet Creative
• Thanet Views

U

• Under construction

V

• Very good reason to add more

W

• Werd I/O
• Wrong Answers Only
• Will Norris
• Webmention isBrill
• Wildlife isBrill

X

• Xenagogues wanted

Y

• You are here

Z

• Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design

I’m open to suggested additions, title corrections, ideas, and anything else related you might want to share. Comments, suggestions, praise, and other feedback by WebMention or ActivityPub only.

Additions and subtractions

I will periodically review this list. Sites that seem inactive, I will prune, while new sites I find will be added. To talk about this list, there will be a meta page added very soon.

In reply to: New-new Reddit

https://waterpigs.co.uk/articles/chien/

Chien（うなり駒）自作のすすめ

3Dプリンタで作る人いないんでしょうか。

いた　← Facebook の記事は消えてしまいますね。

3Dプリンタによる chien: こういうのがあります。

I always find it interesting, when people ascribe the social expectations to the technology. Even if there is nothing in technology, that would force it that. In the last week, I have read two articles about the webmentions, that had this phenomena.

The first was Matt's article of how webmentions have spam and privacy problem. That webmentions allow other people to post content on the site. So it need to involve the moderation. The second one was from Robert, where he writes how webmentions make you display the social media like posts on your site.

What I find even more interesting is, that Robert solution ended up being very similar to how I am using webmentions. And the only reason we went a different route technologically is, because of a single preposition.

Webmentions are always displayed on the receiving site.

They don't need to be? Sure, they can be, and displaying comments in the example used in the spec introduction. Plus, a lot of people use them in this way. But there is nothing in the technology, that they need to be used this way.

Technology-wise, all webmentions do is send a message of 'I linked to your page'. There is nothing in technology to say that you need to do anything with this - either displaying or checking it.

I can imagine a use case, where people would implement webmentions just for gathering statistics of which of their posts are popular. So they would just collect them and count them by post or something.

Which also goes against another assumption:

Webmentions are always comments / social media-type reactions.

I think we in the IndieWeb are a bit responsible for this. We are using them a lot of comments, likes, bookmarks and similar. Outside of that we used them for RSVPs and for aggregating content on the planets.

Maybe as a community we need more examples. More games like tic-tac-toe James, Sven and Barnaby played in Berlin. At least as far as I remember, it had been some time ago.

I guess the tagging game suggested by Tantek in the last Europe Online Homebrew Club could also be like that. Though for me is it social media type, since I associate it with Tumblr.

I really wish there would be another non-social media and not comment like example of webmentions use, but I can not remember any from the top of my mind.

I have occasionally being paying around with the idea of doing a story game through posting and webmentions. Though I always stop before figuring out, how we could do this. Something like Crossroads story game could solve most of the problems, since the only role of the game master is to set the tasks at the start and decide, if what people are doing is reasonable. And it is created in a way, that it would not matter if somebody joined late or not participate in a 'round'. Though the fun is in using elements from each other stories. And I am not sure how this could be done without stories contradicting each other.

When I was checking things for this article, I found that Martijn had also though about the same usecase. Since I only have experience with the offline playing of these games, it was interesting reading a bit of a different perspective on this.

I am wondering, are there any other webmentions uses that I am missing? They can be just potential use cases.

I have a itch to just use this as the tagging game to put the yesterday's idea into action. The question would probably be: 'What are other used or potential usecases of webmentions you are exited about?'. Probably better to leave it for something, that is and easier and quicker to answer, until people get used to it. :)

Also published on Indienews

I always find it interesting, when people ascribe the social expectations to the technology. Even if there is nothing in technology, that would force it that. In the last week, I have read two articles about the webmentions, that had this phenomena.

The first was Matt's article of how webmentions have spam and privacy problem. That webmentions allow other people to post content on the site. So it need to involve the moderation. The second one was from Robert, where he writes how webmentions make you display the social media like posts on your site.

What I find even more interesting is, that Robert solution ended up being very similar to how I am using webmentions. And the only reason we went a different route technologically is, because of a single preposition.

Webmentions are always displayed on the receiving site.

They don't need to be? Sure, they can be, and displaying comments in the example used in the spec introduction. Plus, a lot of people use them in this way. But there is nothing in the technology, that they need to be used this way.

Technology-wise, all webmentions do is send a message of 'I linked to your page'. There is nothing in technology to say that you need to do anything with this - either displaying or checking it.

I can imagine a use case, where people would implement webmentions just for gathering statistics of which of their posts are popular. So they would just collect them and count them by post or something.

Which also goes against another assumption:

Webmentions are always comments / social media-type reactions.

I think we in the IndieWeb are a bit responsible for this. We are using them a lot of comments, likes, bookmarks and similar. Outside of that we used them for RSVPs and for aggregating content on the planets.

Maybe as a community we need more examples. More games like tic-tac-toe James, Sven and Barnaby played in Berlin. At least as far as I remember, it had been some time ago.

I guess the tagging game suggested by Tantek in the last Europe Online Homebrew Club could also be like that. Though for me is it social media type, since I associate it with Tumblr.

I really wish there would be another non-social media and not comment like example of webmentions use, but I can not remember any from the top of my mind.

I have occasionally being paying around with the idea of doing a story game through posting and webmentions. Though I always stop before figuring out, how we could do this. Something like Crossroads story game could solve most of the problems, since the only role of the game master is to set the tasks at the start and decide, if what people are doing is reasonable. And it is created in a way, that it would not matter if somebody joined late or not participate in a 'round'. Though the fun is in using elements from each other stories. And I am not sure how this could be done without stories contradicting each other.

When I was checking things for this article, I found that Martijn had also though about the same usecase. Since I only have experience with the offline playing of these games, it was interesting reading a bit of a different perspective on this.

I am wondering, are there any other webmentions uses that I am missing? They can be just potential use cases.

I have a itch to just use this as the tagging game to put the yesterday's idea into action. The question would probably be: 'What are other used or potential usecases of webmentions you are exited about?'. Probably better to leave it for something, that is and easier and quicker to answer, until people get used to it. :)

Also published on Indienews

The collapse of Twitter last year got me thinking about closed platforms and reducing the hold that privately owned platforms have over the Internet.

I’ve been blogging for nine years now on my personal website. I like owning my own domain as it allows me to retain control and stay independent of particular services. Private platforms have a tendency to be bought out and/or ruined by commercial interests, especially now with tech growth slowing down and investors getting uneasy.

However, there are some benefits to closed blogging platforms. Medium provides a network effect that small blogs don’t have. It has an algorithm that promotes posts that users may find interesting. This allows the blogs to organically gain new readers. Additionally, Medium makes it super easy to like, comment, and reply to a post, resulting in a platform that feels a lot more like a social network than your standard cloud blogging service.

Last year, I started looking into ways independent blogs could communicate, just like on Medium. I considered making my blog ActivityPub-compatible, as that would allow users on Mastodon and the Fediverse to like, share, and comment on articles. And then, I stumbled upon the IndieWeb.

Table of contents

• What is IndieWeb?
  • POSSE and Backfeeding
• Webmentions
  • Receiving Webmentions
  • Sending Webmentions
• Microformats2
• Backfeeding
  • Backfeeding likes
  • Backfeeding replies
  • Comment form
• Thoughts on the IndieWeb
• Conclusion

What is IndieWeb?

IndieWeb.org describes the IndieWeb as:

The IndieWeb is a community of independent & personal websites connected by simple standards, based on the principles of: owning your domain & using it as your primary identity, publishing on your own site (optionally syndicating elsewhere), and owning your data.

To phrase it another way, IndieWeb is about posting the things you make on your personal website and domain, to keep control of your data and stay independent from private platforms (aka silos). You may still post to silos but you should post to your personal website first.

IndieWeb isn’t just about blogging. You might post Twitter-like microposts, photos, location check-ins, reviews, replies to other sites, and more.

POSSE and Backfeeding

An important concept is “Publish on your Own Site; Syndicate Elsewhere” (POSSE). This means that you should post the original version on your own website and then share links or copies of your content with relevant social media communities. This is simpler and more flexible than adding ActivityPub support to my blog, and is so obvious that I’ve already been doing it without realising it.

You may be thinking that POSSE is pretty obvious and a bit of a cop-out. But where POSSE truly shines is when combined with backfeeding. A Backfeed is a list of replies, likes, and mentions for the current page. Combined with POSSE, this allows you to see replies to the current page across all different private silos. For example, you might see comments from Mastodon and Reddit at the bottom of a blog post, as well as replies from other IndieWeb websites.

Together, POSSE and backfeeding strike a good compromise between owning your own presence and participating in silos. They improve discoverability and allow for reader interaction.

Webmentions

The IndieWeb community has authored several standards that allow IndieWeb websites to communicate.

Webmentions allow websites to be notified when another site links to them. By receiving a notification, a site can know about replies and mentions without having to maintain impractical web crawlers or subscribe to a backlinking service.

Receiving Webmentions

I started by implementing support for receiving Webmentions. This was super easy, I just needed to add a couple of link tags to the top of all pages:

<link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/example.com/webmention">
<link rel="pingback" href="https://webmention.io/example.com/xmlrpc">

WebMention.io is a cloud service for receiving Webmentions. You might think it’s odd to use a cloud service for this, but it’s not a problem as I’m still using my own domain for the pages and could switch the Webmentions service at any time. IndieWeb isn’t about self-hosting, it’s about owning your identity and data.

Sending Webmentions

I currently send Webmentions manually using Telegraph or IndieWebify.

My blog is statically hosted and is built using GitLab CI. As the site is only published when CI finishes, it would be impossible to include sending web mentions as part of the same CI pipeline. In the future, I’ll probably look into using Brid.gy or some other tool to send Webmentions by monitoring my web feeds.

Microformats2

Personal websites can contain a variety of content. Long-form articles, Twitter-like notes, location check-ins, reviews, and replies. Microformats2 is a way of marking up the content of web pages so that machines can understand it better. This is a powerful thing when combined with Webmentions as it allows the receiving website to understand what is linking to it and why.

Microformats2 works by adding classes to elements representing content:

<article class="h-entry">
    <h2 class="p-name">Hello world!</h2>
    <a href="/tags/a-tag/" class="p-category">
        A tag
    </a>
    <div class="e-content">
        This is the article's content.
    </div>
</article>

Implementing support for Microformats2 (mf2) was a huge pain, I cannot overstate how much so. The documentation was very fragmented and inconsistent, and the tools I found to test mf2 didn’t match the documentation.

The most extreme problem I had was with authorship - authorship is how you find out who is the author of a piece of content. The documentation says that you should be able to just include a link to the homepage in each piece of content, and tools should fetch the author info:

<article class="h-entry">
    <div class="e-content">This is an example note</div>
    <a href="https://rubenwardy.com" class="u-author"></a>
</article>

However, this did not work at all. Most of the tools I found didn’t make further requests and only looked at the current page. This makes sense I guess, but it’s annoying that the documentation said it was possible.

The next thing I looked at was including the authorship information in the footer of each page, and then referencing it from each piece of content like so:

<article class="h-entry">
    <div class="e-content">This is an example note</div>
    <a href="/" class="u-author"></a>
</article>
<footer>
    <a href="/" class="h-card">
        <img class="u-photo" src="/me.jpg">
        <span class="p-name">Author Name</span>
    </a>
</footer>

Unfortunately, this didn’t work with any of the tools either. The only thing I found that worked was to include the authorship information in full in every single piece of content.

<article class="h-entry">
    <div class="e-content">This is an example note</div>
    <div class="p-author h-card d-none">
        <a class="u-url p-name" href="https://rubenwardy.com/">rubenwardy</a>
        <img class="u-photo" src="/me.jpg">
    </div>
</article>

Thank you to users on the IndieWeb IRC channels for pointing towards useful tools and documentation, and asking my newbie questions. Without them, I wouldn’t have been able to implement support at all. I believe that they have improved the documentation a bit based on my feedback, although the authorship page still mentions the methods I tried that didn’t work.

The three main tools I used for testing Microformats2 were IndieWebify, pin13.net mf2, Waterpigs mf2.

Backfeeding

A Backfeed is a list of replies, likes, and mentions for the current page. For example, you might see comments from Mastodon and Reddit at the bottom of a blog post, as well as replies from other IndieWeb websites.

Backfeeding likes

My blog shows likes from Mastodon and other social platforms using Brid.gy and Webmentions. When I post a link to my blog on social media, Brid.gy monitors activity and sends Webmentions. JavaScript on my blog fetches Webmentions and updates the counter. My blog also caches like counts at build time. In the future, I’ll make it so that the JS only fetches activity since the blog was last built, reducing the amount of work the Web Mentions API needs to do.

Backfeeding replies

I decided not to implement the backfeeding of comments from social media as I’m concerned about the privacy implications. Just because someone decides to reply publicly on social media silos doesn’t mean that they want their post and their profile picture to appear on my website. Additionally, Webmentions can’t be deleted meaning that the comment may continue to appear on my website even after the author deletes it on the silo.

Two good articles discussing the ethics and privacy challenges of backfeeding include “The ethics of syndicating comments using WebMentions” and “The IndieWeb privacy challenge”.

I may reconsider this in the future. I’d need to make it sufficiently clear to commenters and allow them to opt-out. I’d also need to make sure that deleting the comment on the silo also deletes it from my website.

Comment form

I added a comment form to the bottom of posts on my blog. My blog is statically hosted. To collect comments, I have a service running on another subdomain that collects any comments and sends them to me. Users can also choose to send comments by email or another method. All comments are moderated before showing on my blog.

To avoid spam, the comment form has a “username” form hidden using CSS. Most spam bots don’t bother applying the CSS so will see the field and fill it in. This is called a honeypot field and is surprisingly effective - I was receiving multiple spam comments a day, but since adding the field I’ve only received a single spam comment.

<style>
    input[name="username"] {
        display: none;
    }
</style>
<input type="text" name="username">

You can find the source code behind commenting on GitLab.

Thoughts on the IndieWeb

IndieWeb standards are fairly obscure and don’t seem to have been adopted much yet. Of all the posts I’ve made since adding IndieWeb support, this is probably the only one that will actually find websites linked to that can receive Webmentions. If a popular Content Management System, like WordPress, added built-in support for Webmentions and mf2, I could see it suddenly becoming a lot more popular.

Whilst Webmentions are pretty cool, Microformats2 is pretty complicated and was pretty annoying to implement. I know that the IndieWeb crowd will have strong opinions on this, but I quite like how simple JSON-LD was to add support for and that it’s JSON.

As for the community side of IndieWeb, personal websites have seen a big resurgence since the fall of Twitter. I think we’re in a new golden age for RSS and personal websites. I’ve been encouraging a lot of my friends to take up blogging.

Conclusion

I’m certainly a more technical user than the average blogger. I don’t mind being an early adopter of technology and appreciate the goals of IndieWeb. I like how they try to focus on the people before the technology, even though Microformats2 leaves much to be desired.

I currently only post blog posts on my website. I don’t plan to post notes on my website as I prefer to use Mastodon directly. But I might start posting my photography here.

I’m undecided as to whether I’ll stick with IndieWeb technology in the long term, but I’ll certainly continue to own and publish on my own domain.

https://waterpigs.co.uk/articles/how-to-stream-live-audio-over-the-web-using-icecast2-and-puredata/