Groucho Marx once said, “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
He also said, “I refuse to join a club that would have me as a member.”
I followed a bit of a rabbit hole, today. I was reading Kelly Adams’ post about the IndieWeb, and I started to think about groups. His question was whether or not he was in fact a part of the IndieWeb. Given that he runs a personal blog on a site he owns, he’s in, right? That’s the rule.
- Personal site
- Domain you own
- You post content there before you post it somewhere else
- You own your work
Basically, if you tweet or Facebook or ‘gram or Tiktok or whatever — sorry, you’re not on the IndieWeb. If you write for Huffpost or Daily Kos, then again, those posts are not part of the IndieWeb.
But all of us participating in Blaugust, well, we are, right? Even if we don’t tell anyone about it? Our sites pretty much follow all the rules. (And to answer one of Kelly’s questions — no, using Blogger or WordPress does not disqualify you from the IndieWeb).
I don’t, however, think you can be part of a group that you haven’t joined. So while every blogger in Blaugust is a potential member of the IndieWeb and almost certainly qualify (except maybe Twitch streamers and YouTubers), you ain’t a member before you join.
It’s like Americans claiming to be Irish, though they don’t know anyone in Ireland that they are related to, have never been, aren’t joining the local Irish American association, don’t know Gaelic, etc, but come St. Patrick’s Day, they are Irish.
Your blog may be part of the IndieWeb, but they have a couple of things to officially become a member. Be able to log into IndieWeb.org using your custom domain name. This is automatic if you’re using WordPress; I had no trouble logging in with chasingdings.com. The second is to make an h-card, which is your personal business card on the IndieWeb. Again, WordPress has a plugin for that. And last, it’s to join the IndieWeb chat channel. Do all those things, and I guess you are in and can put a little badge on your blog along with your h-card professing your membership. You can even join your blog to the IndieWeb web ring and I defy anyone to say your blog is not a part of the IndieWeb after all that.
Here’s where belonging comes into it.
I have trouble with the whole “belonging” thing. I’ve grown up feeling there was no place that I fit in, that the only people who would talk to me were required to, or were related to me. So typically I feel that anyone who invites me into a group is doing it for ulterior motives, probably because they want to get money from me. This scammer Jun Yuh has been sending me spam insisting he can grow my follower base to 200K and more just by taking his course and I’m just wondering what the f*** 200K could possibly get from my blog? Or if I did have 200K people reading these words, how would that benefit me?
Anyway, his course is for content creators, and possibly he doesn’t realize I’m not a YouTuber. Video is the only form of content that is considered valuable.
I might take the couple steps to become a member of the “IndieWeb” and put a badge on my blog. But I’m not a joiner, so that might just be adding more noise. I applied for the Wes Fenlon web ring but you know, I have never even used the web ring to find a blog. Never went there once. I just thought it would be cool to join things, but if I never planned to participate, then there’s really no point to it, is there?
But here’s the thing. I joined Blaugust, I put the badge on my blog, I participate every day, and I guess, look, I can join things. I joined Blaugust, right?
So maybe I can belong after all.
Much <3 to Belghast, Krikket, and all the others who keep Blaugust going. I am so happy to be counted as one of you.
Thanks for your callouts! I’ll have to look into the ‘official’ IndieWeb membership steps you’ve listed and see if I can comply
Please share how it works out for you!
I am also not a joiner. As soon as you join a group, that group starts putting limits on you. Dollars to donuts says that if this IndieWeb thing (which I’ve never heard of before this post) catches on they’ll put up some rules about how using an AI to spell check your post gets you thrown out.
I’ve actually been toying with the idea of just deleting my blogs and taking up, y’know, journaling in a paper notebook. Then I don’t have to remember to take screenshots!! 🙂
Please don’t! I NEED to be able to read what you write!!!!
AFAIK AI use does not affect your membership in the IndieWeb. It’s all about having your own website where you publish stuff first.
I left a comment at Contains Moderate peril about this earlier and I would have left one at AgingGamer except I can never get comments to go through reliably there.
This whole Indieweb thing is beginning to get quite annoying. It’s quite revealing to hear Nimgimli say this is the first he’s even heard of it. I don’t believe it’s made any inroads into the popular consciousness but if you’re “doing Blaugust” it’s been quite hard to avoid it these last couple of years. You could certainly get the impression from that that it’s some kind of major movement but a quick search using the actual web tells you otherwise. It’s been around for over a decade now but the first I knew of it was last year because I’m not a web developer, IT professional or a hobbyist in any related area. The relevance of the movement to or for anyone outside those specific interest seems minimal and even within it it’s most likely fairly niche.
There’s just so much of this kind of thing in all aspects of life – this drive to do it all yourself and not give anything back to The Man. It’s being going on for the whole of my life and it goes back as far as you want to take it. I did my dissertation on William Blake and he was doing it in the 18th century. It’s always a sideshow but like all sideshows it comes with a lot of noise and bluster and shouting for attention. I find it pretty easy to ignore for most of the year but Blaugust makes it hard. It was one of the main reasons I thought last year might be the last time I do Blaugust and this year hasn’t helped.
I completely agree that Bel and now Krikket have done a superb job of organizing the event but I feel the focus is drifting towards something quite different than where it started and I’m not convinced that’s necessarily a journey I want to take. I don’t want to sign up to any organizations that are attempting to stake out their own corner of the web for whatever reason and I’m not interested in expanding my reach. I think it’s very much a case of “If it ain’t broke…” Clearly the people behind the Indieweb think the web is broken and they do want to fix it but since I don’t agree that it’s broken, it seems like a lot of fuss over nothing to me.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote quite a lot about the human need to belong, and considered loneliness to be the greatest scourge you could imagine.
In his novel “Player Piano”, automation and AI are doing all the real work, and regular people just get prefab homes and food given to them. They’re having an existential crisis — what are people for in a world with no real needs? Their solution: join groups. Any group. Multiple groups. And now you have purpose.
IndieWeb is a community you can join purely by having your own blog. Then you can join the chat channels, you can go to IndieWeb meetups, and maybe you are now writing about that community, etc. There’s nothing wrong with it.
There’s that old joke: How do you know if someone is a Vegan? Just wait five minutes — they’ll tell you. I imagine all of us could list the groups that we are a part of, even if it’s just “bloggers”.
When I read Roger’s post on CMP, I thought “indieweb” was just a label; I had no idea it was a formal thing. As a concept, we ARE all part of the indie web, but standing up a system sounds a bit like gatekeeping. BUT, I know that it may not be like that; it might just be resources for people helping people. Like I said, I know nothing about it.
I guess having a resource for people who want to do A Thing is useful, and over time providing those resources can get expensive, or form into a structure, as Bhagpuss said, and then how often do such things stray from their original mission.
In terms of joining, I guess that becomes a decision as to whether or not you believe that the structure provides value to you. I think a lot of proponents of the DIY tech movement believe that the value is more for society as a whole, but it also becomes a convenient way to pat oneself on the back for joining without looking like you’re just showing up for personal benefit.
I have stood up a Hugo blog, though I haven’t moved to it yet. It’s that sort of tinkering that I would consider to be in the spirit of the IndieWeb, though membership in that does not require you to host your own infrastructure. But from the notable people who call themselves a part of it, it really does seem like they are trying to invoke the old “Homebrew Computer Club” ethos; a bunch of nerds gathering together to show off cool stuff.
This was how Silicon Valley got started, after all.
I just think that blogging will never again have the cultural cachet it had back in the day, and I don’t expect people to stop infinity scrolling TikTok to read “words”. Still, it’s nice to look back toward the past when the internet was new and there were no rules or money.