---
title: "Joining the Indie Web"
description: "I've decided to make an effort to join the Indie Web.  This is mostly a philosophical distinction, but there are also some technical details."
---

I decided to give this site some more attention. That leads me to an important question: what is it for? There's an easy answer that it's where I can publish some of my ideas. I can host files and link to them. However, that's not the real power of the web. Let me explain.

I already have a folder of Markdown files that I keep for informational purposes. They have internal links, formatting, structure, etc. I was originally inspired by [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/), but decided I simply love [NeoVim](https://neovim.io/) with [LazyVim](https://www.lazyvim.org/) too much and have since transitioned to using that as my editor of choice. I keep the documents in sync across four devices—including a server and a phone—using [SyncThing](https://syncthing.net/). I some day want to get more of this information online so that I can share it, but that's still effectively the same thing. That's just publishing.

The web enables something far more interesting: connection. These days we have a mess of siloed accounts across 100 different services. Since the '00s companies have been shoving social features into anything they can. I just checked my password vault and I have over 350 entries private to me and another 200 shared with my spouse. I know a bunch of these are sites with their own profiles, but I'm certainly not going to go through and count. How many is it, dozens? All these are fragmented. All of them want my attention. How do I connect these accounts when each one wants me to spend all my time with them alone?

This brings me to my recent discovery: the [Indie Web](https://indieweb.org/). It bills itself as the more personal alternative to the corporate web. It's centered around the idea of a personal website, like this one. It's a space that I own, I control. It makes it a place that is more human. And that enables so much more connection.

The web has turned into a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four[^1]. We spend our time in various silos: TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Discord. It's all very disconnected and you ultimately have no control.

I'm old enough to have grown up in an age where personal websites were common, though many were hosted through sites like the long-gone [GeoCities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities) and [AngelFire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelfire). The web was a lot of little sites where people shared their passion or just a little bit about themselves. Search engines used to be one of the major tools for finding these sites, along with directories and [web rings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring). I spent many a teenage year browsing around sites looking for more information on Magic: the Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, or learning how to build my own sites and wrangle with that new-fangled CSS thing.

## What is the Indie Web

The Indie Web seems to have come out of Bruce Sterling's IndieWeb Camp way back in 2013. There he outlined a few major principles, which are [largely unchanged today](https://indieweb.org/principles).

I think it can largely be summed up by two major themes:

- Build things for people. You are the first customer so design for yourself and what you love. Don't agonize about making things interoperable for machines.
- Build things that last. You should have control over the data and site. It should only loosely depend on APIs and platform

So how do we go about joining the Indie Web?

## Step 1: Have a website

This is off to a great start!

I picked up this domain about a year ago. I was looking for some places to host some of my own things. There's a domain I've had for over a decade but never really liked. I wanted something memorable, a bit obscure, but easy to describe. I came across Blaze Star when there was talk of the star [T Coronae Borealis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_Coronae_Borealis) flaring. It is theorized to have a roughly 80-year cycle, though this latest one has yet to materialize. It has the official proper name "Blaze Star". I thought it particularly fitting since I've been using the handle Periodic for over a decade now.

The site itself is running on a home server. I should transfer it to a VPS, but that is pretty low on my priority list.

The site is built with [Astro](https://astro.build/), which is _fine_. I think it tries to be a bit too magical in a way that makes the code hard to follow, but it works well enough. I'll likely replace it soon with something a little more dynamic.

## Step 2: Create an Identity

This is where the interesting part starts to happen. We can start to turn this website into an identity by linking it to other profiles and starting to connect things together.

First, I can start to link to my profiles on other sites using [`rel=me`](https://indieweb.org/rel-me) links. This is a common attribute of the `<a>` tags that is short for "relationship". It's meant to tell the browser what the relationship of the linked item is, for example, whether it links to an alternate representation, the next document in a series. It also encodes a bunch of technical things like `nofollow` and `prefetch` which are more about actions than relationships. That's what decades of standards development will do!

Anyway, I can link to things like my Mastodon and GitHub profiles to indicate that they are mine. I should also make sure that those profiles _link back_ to this page to complete the link and show that I have control of both profiles. There's nothing to stop me from linking to any old profile and calling it mine. The link-back shows that there's at least a mutual relationship.

Next up is [h-card](https://microformats.org/wiki/h-card)

[^1]: Credit to Tom Eastman on Twitter on 12/3/18. I feel dirty just [linking to that site](https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040).
