I used the time I between the time differences (there was about 5 hours difference between GMT & EST) to make serious changes with my yunohost raspberry pi. Seeing how I mentioned how I wanted to understand more about micropub, indieauth and kinds. A good staring point is my own gratitude diary, as changing my blog is a bit more tricky.
So long story short, I setup wordpress on my Raspberry Pi, got IndieAuth working and was able to post from another micropub server. The most tricky part I found is actually replacing the placeholder image, which I had to SSH into the raspberrypi to replace as there seemed to be no other way?
Not bad for a weekend while locked down during a pandemic.
Massive thanks to all I met at IndieWebCampEast and the knowledge I learned and can now share.
After the first one I attended in Berlin, it seemed like a good time to attend. Especially as I’m at home locked down like all of the UK right now.
When I first saw east, I did worry if it would mean a early morning start but of course its east as in America (GMT+5), meaning I still get my nice long sleep in. Whats not to love?
I have been wondering about the Indieweb community, especially with the increasing use of the fediverse and what decentralised models can provide to the public & civic space. Its also perfect timing as I had planned to have a play with Yunohost on my new Raspberry Pi4 on the weekend anyway.
Looking forward to seeing whats changed and meeting the new adventurers in the web space. Ian Forrester
When I first saw this last year, I instantly thought about small pieces loosely joined
Last year I went to IndieWebCampBerlin, I learned a lot and really enjoyed it. One of the things I found most interesting is the indieweb ecosystem and in the indieweb way, how people were creating parts of the ecosystem. This is quite a different to the way existing social networks are built, dare I mentioned protocols not platforms again.
There was an app which was mentioned a few times as a example of how it could work. Indigenous, which supports micropub (publishing) and microsub (subscription) across the different pub/sub supporting services. It was neat but I couldn’t get it working on my Android phone. Mainly down to the Indieauth which didn’t work well with this blog. So I kinda left it till this week.
Indigenous allows you to engage with the internet as you do on social media sites, and post on your IndieWeb powered website or a federated instance like Mastodon, Pleroma or Pixelfed
Unlike last time, there is a better more user-friendly introduction to the app. It seems to set up a default user for you and allows you add other accounts to it. I assume once you finally add a indieweb account it will release the default user and move the added accounts.
I did try and post it via Pixelfed but it didn’t seem to work, so I used Mastodon instead. So far so good, but I hoped to still get IndieAuth working but still no dice unfortunately.
It was only a day ago when I realised there was a desktop version, a electron app for Linux, so I gave it a try.
Its a bit different but I recognise parts. Although I couldn’t find the account part s wasn’t able to try the indieauth.
Expect more posting as I explore more, of course if anyone has pointers…? Do jump into the comments/web mentions or drop me something on Mastodon or Twitter.
I was mentioning webmentions to someone the other day and wondering if there was other places webmentions could work beyond the typical scenarios. So when I saw Whim (a command-line utility for sending, receiving, and working with webmentions) with these features
Daemon to receive and store incoming webmentions
Webmention verifier, suitable for scheduled operation
A tool for sending webmentions, individually or en masse (given a source URL)
Commands to query a local database of received webmentions
Simple webserver to display webmention-powered comment sections as HTML, suitable for JavaScript-driven insertion into an otherwise static webpage
Talking about indieweb and fediverse software, I’m impressed the long list of other software projects. Theres some neat projects there including
dokieli looks good as its hits so many of the standards I’m interested in, especially the web annotations.
reel2bits looks like funkwhale but maybe more webby
gath.io is a quick and easy way to make and share events. Events are public with the special link, its like what doodle.com does.
bookwyrm is a federated book reviewing system, aka a fedi-goodreads
Lastly a couple of things, although loosely indieweb/fediverse related.
I was interested to hear Kaliya Young on Floss weekly recently. Kaliya I have met a few times at the Mydata conference. Self-sovereign identity and the use of verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers is a interesting area. I get the concept but haven’t had the chance to set one up yet. Last year after going to the Indiewebcamp, I setup indieauth which works in a similar way? In actual fact, it finally worked for me on retrying it.
I felt Kaliya did a reasonable job of explaining it but you can tell by the questions she was getting, people were not following. I recommend the Mydata 2018 talk although its moved on quite a bit. Don’t get me wrong its a very difficult thing to get, especially with audio only.
However I did catch Kaliya saying how important standards are and some kind of implementation. I very much agree, this is why I love what the indieweb community do. It also reminded me of something I heard on the twit podcast network too. Protocols not platforms – Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech.
Lets also not forget the experiment I’m part of with Web Monitization. So far its pretty good without having to block access to my postings. I’m sure there will be an update in a future blog post.
It was a while ago now since I was in Berlin for both IndieWebCampBerlin and Republica19. As I needed to report back to BBC R&D, I created a slide deck which I finally gave today at work. It would have been earlier in the month if I wasn’t sick when it was arranged.
I posted a modified version of the slide deck on slideshare, but its pretty much there. Of course like most of my presentations, its better with me delivering it but you can get a sense of what I found interesting and why.
The slides are divided into 2 parts. Indiewebcamp is slides 4-23 and Republica is slides 24-73.
Just RSVP’ed (did it via this post and via a webform) to IndieWebCamp Berlin. Its the first one I’ve been to and I have massive professional and personal interest in Indieweb technologies. Its such a big thing I added it to my new years resolutions.
Explore the future of decentralised and distributed systems
This one is a combination of 2 of my previous resolutions. Exploring the future of online dating with decentralise more. So more mastodon and more exploring Indie web technologies like Bridgy and Kinds. I’ve been really interested in these things for a long while.
