friendly

From IndieWeb


IndieWeb friendly refers to online services interoperating by supporting open formats, protocols, and IndieWeb building-blocks as well as enabling users to transition to their own personal sites, and an implementation guide for social networks to interconnect with the IndieWeb.

Looking for IndieWeb friendly software? See:

Why

If you're making a content hosting service (e.g. for blogging, photo posting, etc.), by being indieweb friendly, you can reduce the fear of lock-in, and encourage more folks to freely experiment.

By interoperating with existing IndieWeb formats and protocols, you instantly help your users interact with an existing live, vibrant, and friendly community.

Some developers have been able to more rapidly build platforms & services, and allow their users more flexibility & choice by relying on IndieWeb building-blocks. For example, by supporting the W3C recommended Micropub specification, platforms don't need to immediately design and build user interfaces for posting content as there are a variety of (both web and mobile) clients that can handle this on their behalf. Many of these are also open source to decrease the time for modifying and adapting them to other use cases.

How

Follow these steps to make your service more IndieWeb friendly, and interoperate with indieweb sites:

Indieweb basics

Basic support for indieweb formats and protocols

  1. Provide a way for users to enter a personal website/blog, and then automatically link to it from their profile page with rel=me. If your site supports OAuth, this is key to becoming an RelMeAuth provider for Web sign-in.
  2. Markup users' feeds and post permalink pages with the h-entry microformat including a nested h-card for the authorship information. This permits others to easily provide rich reply-contexts when replying to posts on your site.
  3. Markup users' profile pages with h-card
  4. Let the user automatically syndicate in posts (marked up using h-entry) from their personal site

Be a good POSSE destination

  1. Support WebSub notifications for receiving posts from their personal site
  2. Link permalinks back to users' original posts from syndicated copies on your service
  3. Use rel-canonical on links from syndicated copies on your service to original posts.
  4. Send webmentions to users' original posts from comments on their POSSE copies.

Support distributed interactions

  1. Support receiving webmentions + h-entry parsing to accept decentralized comments on posts.
  2. If your service supports subscription/following/friending/anything showing an aggregated timeline/feed/stream, allow users to subscribe to other people’s personal site feeds marked up with h-feed and/or h-entry
  3. Support IndieAuth Ticket Auth so that users can safely provide private posts via feed subscriptions

Enable independence

  1. Let users link a domain name to their profile and content, treat that domain as canonical (e.g. like Tumblr and GitHub do)
  2. Provide a way for users to export all their user data (posts, comments, tags, likes/faves), and interactions on that data.
  3. Provide HTTP redirects if users want to change their domain name, or switch from a subdomain on your service to their own domain name

Friendly Services

Huffduffer

Main article: Huffduffer

Huffduffer, built by Jeremy Keith, is a tool for creating podcasts out of audio files from around the web. It supports several indieweb-friendly technologies that

  • Asks for your personal website on sign up and grabs rel="me" links to build your user profile
  • Huffduffer user profile is marked up with rel="me"
  • microformats2 support for podcast feeds, including h-feed (actually hfeed) and h-entry
  • https://huffduffer.com/add?page= ostensibly scrapes microformats data from the source page to fill in the title, permalink, and description.

Mastodon

Main article: Mastodon

Mastodon (and thus many instances) had basic Microformats mark up including h-entry and h-cards which allowed services like Bridgy to send Webmentions on it's behalf. See also: Mastodon#IndieWeb_Support.

micro.blog

Main article: micro.blog

The micro.blog service supports lots of IndieWeb building-blocks!

i.haza.website

Main article: i.haza.website

i.haza.website is a hosting service that can run your site on dobrado, supporting several IndieWeb building blocks. It is run by Malcolm Blaney.

Pine.blog

Main article: Pine.blog

Pine.blog is a reader and blog hosting service that supports Webmention.

Typlog

Main article: Typlog

Typlog is a website, blog, and podcast hosting service supporting several IndieWeb building blocks including WebSub, Webmention, and RelMeAuth.

Withknown

Main article: Withknown

Withknown, running hosted versions of Known, was designed from the start to be IndieWeb friendly and supports a huge amount of IndieWeb building blocks including WebSub, Webmention, Micropub, and IndieAuth. While existing accounts on the service are still supported, the company is not accepting new customers or accounts at this time.

In Progress

Sites that have in-progress (pending) work to make them more IndieWeb Friendly

Pandoc

There was a pull request to improve Pandoc templates to generate h-entry but no record of it exists in the repository or in The Internet Archive.

Tumblr

Tumblr has long had many IndieWeb or adjacent features, like RSS feeds, and in 2022 publicly committed to adding more IndieWeb building blocks support!

Posts about Tumblr adding IndieWeb support:

See the IndieWeb Friendly section on the Tumblr page for more details.

Brainstorming

Ideally, someone building a service who wants the service to be IndieWeb-friendly should be able to come to this page and have a clear path of how to do so.

In addition to a clear guide with examples of things like:

  • adding h-entry to posts,
  • h-card to authors, etc,

we should also provide links to tools that can validate or test the markup.

Previously

Sites that had some IndieWeb friendliness but appear to have been shut down or experienced site-death.

See Also