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Indie microblogging uses blogs to build a more open and decentralized social web. It avoids big social networks by connecting independent blogs with simple, web-based tools. This approach helps keep control with users and encourages more varied, community-focused conversations.
Highlights
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Massive centralized platforms create problems for society. By posting to your own site, you control your content, distributing it more evenly across the web and minimizing the power of big tech companies.
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Blogs are websites with reverse-chronological posts written by people. The newest posts are always at the top of the web site.
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They are often personal, with an individual’s voice. Readers want to keep visiting a blog because there’s a story, unfolding with each post. The passing of time is a fundamental element to what defines a blog.
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This emphasis on time is even more obvious for microblogs. Microblogs are blogs with very short posts. Because short posts are easy to write, there are usually more of them.
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Indie microblogging is about taking ownership of our microblog post content. It’s about reclaiming the definition of what a microblog is from Twitter. Microblogs and social networks are big components of the web — too important to be contained in such a small number of closed, centralized platforms.
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An indie microblog is a blog that contains short posts at your own domain name. It can be hosted by multiple providers, but it is conceptually independent of any one platform. It’s portable and you control it.
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to flip the iceberg, we must start with a simpler goal: encourage more people to blog. We must play the long game, building deliberately so that the foundation will last for years. It’s not about leaving Twitter and moving to the next platform. It’s about redistributing microblog posts across the web, with a diverse set of platforms.
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Blogging at a personal domain name is a kind of investment in the future of the web. It’s a statement that you value your own writing and are ready to contribute to making the web better.
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While the open web still exists, we dropped the ball protecting and strengthening it. Fewer people’s first choice for publishing is to start a web site hosted at their own domain.
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Twitter had over 300 million monthly active users at its height. Centralized platforms had become a winner-take-all game because you can’t move your followers. Leaving Twitter or Facebook meant starting over.
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After a domain name, the most important glue that holds blogging together is the feed. The feed takes all the variety in websites — custom designs, navigation, URL formats — and strips it away to the essentials: a list of posts and some simple structured data for each post.
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The great thing about a personal blog is that if you stick with it, your blog will very likely span multiple jobs and even major life changes. You don’t need to know where you’re going to be in 20 years to start a blog today and post to it regularly. Writing about the journey — and looking back on the posts later to reflect on where you’ve been — is part of why blogging is still so special.
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The IndieWeb documents several characteristics of a silo, such as requiring an account, only allowing interaction with other silo members, and limiting the type of content you can post.