In a moment of madness – proved by the spelling mistake – I tweeted that 2018 would be the year I go full IndieWeb.
But what is it? Basically, IndieWeb is a movement of people who want to own their own data, not have it wholly controlled by corporations. So rather than posting updates to Big Corp Social Media Website, you’d post to your own site and syndicate out to other places. If the social media site goes down, goes bust, or goes evil, you still have all your content. After all, you wrote it – it should be yours.
The syndication part is possible thanks to various clever technical bits (Jeremy Keith has a great video explaning of the building blocks of IndieWeb). So you can still participate in social media sites, for example, but still own your own content.
It’s a “have your cake and eat it” situation. And I like cake.
I, over the course of this year I intend to become independent of Twitter, Pocket and GMail. That’s not to say I’ll stop using those services – I find them all valuable – but my data won’t be owned by them. Fortunately all my websites have their own self-hosted CMS systems (mainly WordPress) which makes the job a lot easier.
And who knows, I may find that this IndieWeb thing allows me to start syndicating to new places such as this Mastadon thing I keep hearing about. The choice will be, for the first time, all mine.