Ravelry

 Ravelry  is a silo that has social and e-commerce functionality for building a community and around knitting.

Co-founder Cassidy Forbes has indicated in the past she'd be willing to help with code-related questions toward making Ravelry more IndieWeb friendly particularly with respect to syndicating content via POSSE.

API
All of Ravelry’s pattern and yarn data, advanced search, and more is available via the Ravelry API at https://ravelry.com/api. This should make it easier to syndicate data back and forth.

Philosophy
Their general philosophy about data and their desire to enhance ideas like discovery has a very IndieWeb feel.

The initial spark that lit Ravelry was the idea that our community needed an index, a database, to tie together all of the projects and patterns that people have shared and spread across the internet and social media.

Ravelry was developed with this idea at its core. We work hard to be responsible stewards of the community’s data and we walk a line between limiting contamination from commerce/money and trying to help small designers and yarnies be successful. We are filling a void but we aren’t the end of the story.

It’s just a start. It’s not enough. The community still deserves an independent, not for-profit, decentralized directory of patterns, yarns, and their connections to projects. Rav should be just one of many interfaces to this database and one of many ways of creating projects that are linked to this database. The data that forms the heart of Ravelry belongs to everyone.

Ultimately, perhaps once there are more yarn tech companies like us, I hope that people will work together to design a common, community-owned platform that can provide pattern, yarn, and project data to all and power yarn-related sites, apps, and other technology of all kinds.

The yarn community’s digital history does not belong to any company.

Earlier in our history, a larger company argued that if we didn’t sell to them, they’d build their own Ravelry and we’d be dead and buried. We are still here. I’m proud that we’ve been holding the line for all of these years and saving space for this community to own its own infrastructure. &mdash;Cassidy