Indie Weba people focussed alternative to the "corporate web"

1. As a content creator, you can reclaim your content from big corporate silos and self-host it. This way your content is your content and you don’t lose anything when Mega Surveillance Media Co decides to kick you off their platform or goes bust. You get to do simple things like edit your content after it’s published and you won’t inadvertently lure people into the clutches of nazi propagandists sharing the same contaminated space.
2. Just because you publish independently, doesn't mean you have to be isolated. You can syndicate your content with technologies like RSS, and invite engagement by implementing a backfeed using standards like Webmentions.
3. As a consumer of content, do not engage with awful people saying awful things. Engaging with them, even to condemn them, only legitimates them and normalizes their bullshit.
4. And finally: the man who entered the Capitol building and had a fatal heart attack did not do so by accidentally electrocuting his own dick with a taser. He just got himself overexcited from all the anger he was being told he should be feeling. Don’t believe everything you read.

From Why The Indieweb

[00:00:05] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome. Today we're talking about Indie Web, a people-focused alternative to the corporate web. We're asking ourselves what is it, and assuming it's a good thing, how can we get involved? We'd appreciate any input by those who know more than we do, either as a future guest on this show or with comments on our YouTube post.

Speaking of which. Apologies to anybody who is audio only listening. They might be expecting something more on building 11 static sites. But yeah, we did two episodes on that, but they were only suitable for the YouTube channel. So we're gonna be talking about the indie web today, and as always. David Waumsley.

How are you doing, David?

[00:00:46] David Waumsley: Yeah, I'm really good. I'm pleased to be doing this one because, for the last couple, it's been on me to try and bluff my way through how to use this kind of new platform. And now this is something where, you introduced me to most things with the D web, but I'm still trying to.

Grapple with what that is and how I can employ that in my work, particularly with client work. But yeah. Yeah, so it's nice. I can just hand much of this over to you, but we have got some show notes, which I've prepared.

[00:01:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'll show the show notes in a minute, but I want to be very careful to caveat mTOR, make the case that I don't really.

Practice what I preach here. I follow the indie web stuff from a distance. and where I can, I, I participate not in terms of, time, but in terms of the, things that are out there. I try to use some of those things, but I am no means an expert in this. But it's a fascinating thing and it'd be interesting to see how it, grows or otherwise in the future and what the incentives are and how it might be more aligned with, I don't know, a people first approach to the, internet, that kind of thing.

Shall I share our show notes?

[00:01:55] David Waumsley: Yeah, absolutely. For me it's just that most of the things that come up here are things that you've been onto ahead of me or pointed me to, so it's quite interesting this, yeah. So

[00:02:05] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, and, I get my information from a really broad range of sources. So some of them, really not very well aligned to the indie web, so proprietary social media platforms where these kind of bits of information commonly, but also from listening to.

An eclectic range of podcasts around the, internet space. So obviously I primarily do WordPress based content, but listening to podcasts, more about the internet as a whole and what's going on out there. There's loads of information, and I think this is a really interesting topic, a topic of our time really, if you're involved in the internet, but you have a slight suspicion that.

The corporations have taken over and made it into a place which isn't incentivized for humans, but for algorithms and profit.

[00:02:53] David Waumsley: Yeah, exactly. So I guess discovering what it is, we'd have to go first to indie web.org. And for those who are viewing, I'm just gonna go over to their site over here, and that's a title really of our show, is that it's a people focused alternative to the corporate web.

There's a lot more here. it is. Still a very active thing. As we can see down here, there are still meetups and camps that go on with that. I can see this one here. I can see Jen Simmons here. Yeah. attending one of these, to me it feels like when I. I really haven't gone through this site, but when I was looking through, how to get started with it, a lot of the resources to get you going were ironically, I guess in the same way we're doing this on YouTube, but there were YouTube videos, from sort of 10 years ago.

But I guess the, point behind this hasn't changed. It's just hard to judge how active this kind of thing is.

[00:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And also geographically, it's interesting as well. 'cause I, I dunno if you can just scroll down once more, and just pause there. If you just hover there for a minute, you'll see that quite a lot of it is based in, seems to be based at the minute, at least anyway in, in Europe.

And, but I don't know if that's the case. It may be that this is more broadly spread out, but also it does seem to be underpinned by some kind of principle. Again, if you scroll to the top of the page, there's a link out right to the very, very top. There's a link to, where it says we are, a community of independent and personal websites, based on principles.

And that obviously is a link. and the principles are owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity. Something I think most people in the WordPress space would align with publishing on your own site first, optionally elsewhere, and owning your own content. So it's this idea of, just you are the, gatekeeper of it all.

And you don't first lean into some third party service like Facebook or Twitter. You do all of the publishing on your own content, which then you have control over. And if you choose to do anything, you would then cross post or what have you. from there, and obviously platforms like Mastodon and Activity Pub, the protocol behind it are enabling it so that your website can become a first ci, first citizen on the internet as well.

So yeah, there we go. That's roughly it. And also

[00:05:24] David Waumsley: something I didn't pick up on before until I went to Wikipedia. It actually lists out their 10 core principles, which I don't think we'll go through them all 'cause I don't know if I understand them all. But, It was interesting. Just before we press record, you were saying, oh, one of the guys who lives quite locally to you?

[00:05:41] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, not, really know so much, but I've had a few interactions with him on social media. So a guy called Kevin Marks and he appeared. The, only reason I know Kevin is I don't know him, I've never met him. I've only had literally two or three exchanges on Twitter, but he, he used to appear regularly on a, podcast.

It's a video podcast that I watch and listen to called, it used to be called this Week in Google, and now it's changed to intelligent machines. But the, point is, it's the same thing. And so I heard of him and he, regularly came on that show and outlined a lot of the different bits and pieces that were going on in the indie website.

I think that was my first point of contact. but there's Tanex, Selleck, Amber Case, Aaron I dunno how you pronounce that. KY or something like that. Yeah. crystal Beasley and, Kevin there, they seems to be the main proponents, but it seems to be a very human centered, approach, which aligns with what I think.

So it's nice. I.

[00:06:40] David Waumsley: I think my, apart from some of the things that you mentioned, which really didn't click in as being part of the indie web, my first real introduction was, and I really didn't know about Hayden Pickering, but he did this video once, going back to 2021 called Why The Indie Web?

Yeah. And it is, his videos are all hilarious and he gets, he makes so many points in a very short video. They're usually only about seven, nearly eight minutes long on this one. And there's a transcript definitely worth watching. It's hilarious. It really goes through the whole history of the web and how we are where we are now.

and highlights this with, the need to. Take the web, which was something free that we all became accustomed to, to make this into something profitable. So you can sell barbecue sets in his case video. But yeah, and he also has some main points about the indie web, about taking control of that.

But

[00:07:37] Nathan Wrigley: it's I think we need to be forgiving of ourselves. Like that video is really well done, by the way. It's a perfect encapsulation of the whole thing, but, it's. I don't think anybody knew what was gonna happen on the internet. I, don't think there was like this cabal of people robbing their hands together, aha, it's gonna go perfectly in this direction.

It just ended up the way it ended up, because it just did platforms like. Facebook and what have you. Came along and offered us something, which apparently we wanted, and then once it was established that we wanted it, the profit margin and, the incalculable easy for me to say, incalculable wealth that could be made from a platform which had no boundaries of geography, seemingly no ceiling on the number of users that were prepared to spend hours of their day involved in that platform.

And is it any wonder that. It became a corporate thing and billions of dollars were generated and that whole profit motive then seems to have a life of its own. And it gets worse. And it gets worse. And we are where we are.

[00:08:47] David Waumsley: Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of talks on it, and I think possibly in that video of Hayden, he says, and now to introduce the villain capitalism.

in some ways we didn't really see it. We, see it now retrospectively as that because we realize that when you put something like the internet and what it's become over time, that obviously it's gonna get distorted by the, current mode of capitalism. people need to earn money from it.

So it's distorted this kind of essentially free web that we were given, to use for our own communication. It's got lost, In these big Yeah. Big giants who own the algorithms and obviously, change the way that all of us behave and the types of communication we have each other with each other.

Yeah. And

[00:09:38] Nathan Wrigley: I

think, we've slowly but surely given over our perception of what's normal on the internet. if you rewind right to the beginning when it was CERN and The, really going right back up on it and things like that where people were just academically.

Curiously. Oh hyperlinks. Tim Burners Lee. Oh, look at that. I can put a link behind this word and that will open up a page somewhere else on this diaspora of servers. And it, that was just faab fabulously philanthropic. It felt like, there's, there was no profit motive. And then. People discovered, oh, you can set cookies.

Oh, that's interesting. cookies I think probably were in initially just for state maintaining are you logged in? Are you not logged in? And then clever people thought, oh, we can do a little bit more with that. We can, we can track you across things and suddenly there's a profit motive for capturing your attention and keeping you on there longer.

And, we are where we are, but luckily. The underpinnings haven't changed. The tech, the technologies, the stack behind the internet may is the same. Yes. So we don't have to keep going in the direction that the corporations are pulling us. We can just reign it back and go back to it just being a bunch of links without cookies and without tracking and without, the millions of dollars generated.

Yeah,

[00:11:02] David Waumsley: we

[00:11:03] Nathan Wrigley: found

[00:11:03] David Waumsley: the need to do that. And big corporations like Google, Microsoft, Adobe, all of them are involved in. The building and, and working together on browsers, the building of CSS. And, in some ways, the, web is stronger than it's ever been because we all realize that it is what it was intended to be.

Something for everybody on everything, this one, standard that we all use. So I think in some ways that's backing forth. So I think, it. In some ways the next question I put on the notes here, which we might as well move into, is this was my sense of it when going to the indie web.

So I hear about it. I, for me, it was Hayden's video. I go and look up the site of what's this indie web people are talking of, and then I don't really get a sense of whether it's growing and it's still very difficult to know that as a sort of movement, but. You said this, and I wrote it as exactly the same notes when we were talking earlier, that I don't think it can be measured as a sort of movement of the numbers of people or the meetings that they have there.

It shows itself through different reactions.

[00:12:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and I, my, my end. Expectation is that it, might be growing, but I, would imagine it's growing at a fairly slow rate. And what I mean by that is you don't really hear the mainstream talking about any of this stuff. It does seem to be, a collection, a small collection of people who are interested in this.

And honestly, if you ask me to give you any commentary about. Almost any subject that humans talk about. I've got no interest in 99.9% of those subjects. There's a handful of things that I'm interested in, and I love those and I talk about 'em. the same's true about this, isn't it? Most people, you switch on your phone or you switch on the computer.

The only thing they care about is does it work and not, what's the moral basis for it or what is the, underlying protocol and where's the data going? It's if I click this, can I buy it? Okay, that works. Who cares? I don't because it, there's no, there's no violence associated with this.

There's no impediment to it working the fact that your data's being consumed here, there, and everywhere. I honestly think most people do not care so long as it works, and they're very happy with the trade off of you. Show me a ton of ads and I'll try to be inoculated against them. I'll try to ignore them, but if it's free, you show me ads.

That's fine. I think most people have that impression. But you and I are slightly different, I think.

[00:13:34] David Waumsley: Yeah, I think you are ahead of me on that one because I didn't care too much about that kind of stuff. And there is a kind of irony. I mean it's slightly off the point here, we don't have the same kind of high streets that you would have certainly in the uk, that there was in the old days.

And you think. You don't know at the time, do you? You, work at a shop, you're busy, you want to buy other stuff from other shops, but you are busy working and stuff, so you buy from Amazon. Amazon then slowly starts to put. That shop outta business eventually. You are all outta business and you are only all buying from Amazon, But it's also, it's, you don't know you're destroying your own

[00:14:10] Nathan Wrigley: industry yourself if you, yeah, but we're also in a curious time, like if you think about it, mass communication, I guess really you could begin that with something like the telephone, but the telephone was very much a one-to-one and it didn't have a, like a, it wasn't recording anything.

It really is only in the last 15 or so years. That, yes, people have been able to s have some sort of global conversation, like normal people. Obviously if you're the prime minister of the UK or the president of the us you've been able to have those conversations, but most of us don't. And now we're thrust into this scenario where you can, message people.

Anywhere in the world. And, I'm not sure as a species, we're quite ready for it, frankly, in rewind the clock, I don't know, a hundred years, 200 years, something like that, which in the, in, in the history of. Our species is not that long. You probably didn't really get much further than your front door.

On a typical year, you might wander a few hundred yards here, there and everywhere. There's no trains, there's no cars. Would've been an effort to own a horse and get anywhere on that would, it's still taken days, but the point is your world was. Much smaller. Yes. And we, have this impression that because it's now bigger and we're involved in global things, and I can, you are in Goa, I'm in Yorkshire, north Yorkshire, and yet here we are talking as if we're next door to, literally you could be sat next to me.

I can hear every word you're saying and every breath and everything. It's, yeah. Is that normal? I, don't know if that's. I don't know if that's a good idea in the end,

[00:15:49] David Waumsley: but for us it feels like, I feel like I'm in the UK anyway when I'm talking to you because culturally I'm still Yeah, very much in the UK and that so full of that kind of news.

But anyways, yeah, so what's a couple? I was trying to get a few of the things where I think maybe the movement is shifting and I put some things down here. Which I think is quite interesting is, these kinda shifts that we've seen to say Blue Sky using the AT Protocol and Mastodon, which again, you were really early on in using Mastodon, where I thought, what is this?

Which is using Activity Pope, which is a standard, isn't it? It's a W three C standard.

[00:16:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So this is the idea of replacing platforms with protocols. So instead of using Twitter or X, you use. Activity pub. so you know, anybody can use the activity pub protocol and build their own thing on top of it.

So Mastodon isn't what's powering the technology, it's the activity pub protocol. And you've seen moves in the WordPress space. We have the activity pub protocol, sorry, plugin. You have things like pixel fed and various things built on top. And so the idea is there's this interoperable layer.

and it's standards based. Anybody can, work with it. you can own your own instance of Mastodon, but the protocol is the thing that you're interested in, not the platform. And at the at, or I think it's at Protocol, which is the one that Blue Sky's using is, is similar but different.

the, one of the things that it hasn't yet done as of recording this, it hasn't, it hasn't gone. All in, in the same way that Activity Pub has, for example, I don't think you can move your account yet from one platform to another. so you don't own your data in that way. But the intention is that it will happen, but it hasn't happened yet.

I think they're trying to get their docs in a row, but this is, these two are moves to open up social, interactions. and any interaction, really any kind of activity on the internet and it to be built upon an open platform, which anybody can use. And so you can go to Mastodon and you won't be bombarded with ads.

There's no algorithm there trying to game your feed. You basically get a chronological feed of content produced by people in the order in which they produced it. So if you follow no people, your timeline is empty. If you follow 12 people, it will be fairly quiet. If you follow a thousand people, it'll be noisy.

but there won't be an algorithm trying to insert an ad or trying to say, this post will capture your attention. Let's put that in front of you 'cause you'll stay on for a bit longer. None of that. The thing is you could build that on top of activity pop, you could build that platform, but I expect not too many people would want to use it.

But anyway,

[00:18:47] David Waumsley: yeah. And I suspect all the big moves to Masteron and Blue Sky. Blue sky particularly, I think coming so quickly is, due to the way that Twitter had gone, and the direction with that. And I think, it's. Perhaps the same. we'll look to those big players, but rather than being something that the indie web people think, no, I shouldn't have these algorithms affected me.

It really comes down to a sort of breaking point. The politics or really, or the disagree. for, me,

[00:19:16] Nathan Wrigley: the break, that I needed was just realizing that my attention, I was not able to compete against the algorithm. I literally was unable to stop. Using the phone. I've, decided to call the phone from now on the rectangle.

That's what I'm gonna refer to it as. So I, refer to people staring at the rectangle. 'cause it gives it that

[00:19:43] David Waumsley: what the heck

[00:19:44] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know, like very third party It's bleak and it's a bit like something at the obelisk of 2001, a Space Odyssey or something like that. But, I was unable to stop doing it and I would be doing it at all times of the day, which I knew four in the morning.

Why the heck am I doing this? And I realized that it was because these algorithms had completely captured me and it was not in my interest to be staring at the, rectangle at four in the morning.

[00:20:11] David Waumsley: And I think something which I certainly became aware of, I lost my Facebook. Access. so it was hacked in some way.

Somebody managed to do something, there was a security issue there, and, there was no way I could really convince them to put me back. And I had, a group which was growing there, so they, suddenly I couldn't communicate to this group that. I've gone, the person running this group and that, that was the thing that really attracted me to things like Facebook was only the groups and a special collection of people.

But I realized as I think more people do, as we see them come and go, that we know these platforms will eventually die. I. and others will take over. and if it's important for you to own your content, then you probably need to be looking. If it's disposable, then that's fine, isn't it? But if you, feel there's some value in keeping it and having an ownership over it, you do need to.

Find alternatives.

[00:21:11] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. It's a really, peculiar trade off though, isn't it? because the platforms like Facebook, for example, have captured all the audience. I, my intuition is that Facebook might be in decline, but that is purely intuition. It's not based upon any data. but if you have your congregation for want of a better word, over on Facebook and like you, something happens and you lose access, that's gone.

it's completely gone. Growing an audience outside of Facebook, I think is really hard because Yeah. Or or YouTube or TikTok or whatever it may be. Because they do such a great job of if you are producing content, which their algorithm says, look, this is making, waves, therefore it's making our platform money.

They will then push the audience for you. They will make the audience for you. Yes. And so it's a real trade off. Trying to do it yourself is much harder. But obviously you own it, and if TikTok decides to shut you down, it doesn't matter.

[00:22:12] David Waumsley: Yeah, there's a point actually later on that we'll get to that.

If there's any other points that we put on, whether it's growing or that, I put in maybe, state, sorry. the state interventions, the things that we're seeing with the eu with data protection, accessibility, and certainly with the US getting, having monopoly concerns over the likes of what Apple and Google do as well.

is that part of the, in some ways it's legislating against monopolies, which is what we're. I, guess everybody's worried about,

[00:22:43] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I don't really know, actually. obviously the things like the GDPR and the concern about where your data is held, if you are, typing on a keyboard in Germany, but the, result of that typing in gets saved to some server in the us.

I, think, that seems to be a topic of growing concern. It's so ephemeral though for most people to like, how do you capture that in the minds of most people? How do you get people to care about that? Because all that you care about is that the next time you go in, the pixels come back. I. Onto your screen and so okay, who did what When I wrote to John six months ago, let me just go back to that conversation with Jeff.

There it is. There's the conversation I had with John. I remember what we said. Now it's like, where was that data? I don't care. I care, but I don't think most people care. but that does seem to be a part. And, we're in a fairly fractured time in terms of inter international diplomacy and politics and things.

So it'd be interesting to see how these lines get drawn and whether. Whether we will be siloing our data inside of our own national boundaries more and more. But I don't know if it's a part of it. It feels like it is a part of it. Anybody that's watching this can tell us.

[00:24:00] David Waumsley: And I think definitely what seems a part of it to me was, at the same time there was a lot of, confidence chats that I saw with a, a renewed interest and an encouragement by many to get creative again, as we did in the early web with HTML and CSS, and make your own personal sites, have your own ownership there. And, again, I something that you put me on to first. there was a newsletter Own your web. I'm just gonna Oh yeah, that's right on the screen.

Yeah. By met, Matt Ott there and yeah, I like this. That's, yeah, it's great. it just. It just encourages people that they can just build these websites together, as we did in the early days. And people have forgotten about it now. It's been taken over by everybody feels the easiest way is a, web builder or something.

So yeah, it's a really good series. and that led me on to realizing there were other services I wasn't aware of. Things like, glitch here, which is a little bit like, GitHub pages or, Netlify, which we use, but it's really a bit more aimed at free hosting for people who want to do their own basic sites.

Get started with HDML, maybe start with some templates, levity, which we've been talking around is, on the remix here for easy blogging with Eleventy is in here. So again, it's something that's been around for a while, but. Not hugely taken off though.

[00:25:28] Nathan Wrigley: It's interesting how, like how we've entered this era I, and you keep calling it the subscription economy where you just pay a little bit and you have access to all this stuff, but you don't own any of it.

So in the case of music, you might pay Spotify $10 a month or something and once that elapses, the music's all gone. Whereas when you were a child and I, was a child, you, purchased the music and it was yours forever. And sure enough, you didn't have access to all the music and you thought long and hard about which CDs you were going to buy.

But thinking about it, in my childhood growing up, we, rented nothing. We had a mortgage on the house that we lived in, but everything, all transactions were a case of you pay for the thing and you get the thing and it's now yours to own. Whereas now we've definitely, there's a shift to, okay, I'll pay you a small amount on a monthly basis or an annual basis, or what have you.

And the trade off is that you won't ever own it, but it'll be yours during the period in which you are paying me. Of course the problem is when that, when you no longer can pay it, like you either choose not to pay it or you run outta money or you retire and suddenly realize that all these bills that you've been able to service for all this time are no longer possible, and suddenly all your access to the music is gone and you probably would've been better off building up a record collection all those years.

it's interesting.

[00:26:56] David Waumsley: Yeah, absolutely. I, must, the other thing that I linked to on there, which I think is great 'cause it won't come up in search very Oh yeah. For people, which again, is fairly new and it's somebody just putting a starter for people who just wanna get back to those early days when you just wanna build something that you own yourself.

So I feel there is a big. Encouragement if you like. It's almost, it almost feels a little bit like the seventies just when punk came in. This idea that people could just get back and make music with three chords themselves with a bit of attitude rather than having to know all the sophisticated stuff.

And it feels a little bit like it's encouraging that, and for people to be a little bit more, as they were the websites. Most of the designs we do them to a formula. We've read something like StoryBrand and we know we need to write a certain type of headline and have this in a certain order.

our three benefits need to be listed after our value proposition. And in the early days when people had, geo cities and even MySpace to a certain degree, they were a bit wacky with their designs. so there's that going on. The idea of, showing your creativity through your own personal site and owning the data and sharing with the world, just any.

Interests and thoughts that you have. Yeah, and I think that's a loss, the idea that people, will go and set up Facebook 'cause it's easier to communicate with their friends. But there are less people now who, without any commercial reason, will set it up just as a way of self-expression.

[00:28:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It really is.

Honestly, the internet is such a power for good, isn't it? It's such a, yeah. It's an amazing resource that humanity has. And it does seem a, shame, honestly. Looking back, I suppose to some extent it was inevitable that money was gonna get involved and take over the whole thing.

But it will be interesting to see if a proportion of the people can, can wrestle that maybe this isn't a situation where we're trying to, we're trying to make it either or. Yeah, it's more a situation of, okay, those that wanna roll their own and do the indie web thing, they, yes, they can do that. And the corporate stuff that can carry on as well.

And we can have a bit of both. Maybe that's the, sort of ideal, yeah. Seesaw of it all.

[00:29:10] David Waumsley: And I think it's, it is in there. I think it's with the indie web, an alternative. And I think everybody needs an alternative. We, and that's it, isn't there? I think, we always need, I think commercialism has pushed forward the web to being what?

We couldn't imagine it being initially to what it is now, so it's needed there. But there is this point where it feels like if you're only on the web to server, a corporate, it's lost a lot. yeah. So what can we do? Let's have a, have I covered the points there? Oh, I did want to mention here, I'll bring it up here to the.

Humane Human Web. Hu

[00:29:48] Nathan Wrigley: Humane. Sorry. Yeah,

[00:29:49] David Waumsley: apologies. Humane Web

[00:29:50] Nathan Wrigley: yesterday. There you go.

[00:29:51] David Waumsley: Yeah, there's a lot of things like this. So this comes from Michelle Barker Set this up. she writes a lot on CSS and does some talks and that she's, I love that website by the way. You did. It's funny, you really like some bold stuff.

You see your, you, I laugh that. Yeah. Funny enough, I think you've a heart, you this personal expression stuff that you see with the insight. So you, always react to those. yeah. Yeah. yeah, so I, I think there's an overlap with lots of people doing these kind of various different things.

So her point is her point on the top there, what it's becoming, that the web is becoming hostile to humans, that people have been tracked and that their privacy is routinely violated. that search is just gonna giving you ads and everything. So her kind of take on it, is also from. Not just where the data goes, but also the eco-friendliness of stuff, and I think.

That's one of her big things. To make lighter websites that don't burn the planet is one of her big things on that, but made for humans again. And similarly, there are other things, let me just bring these up. People are wearing, taking badges and things like the people pledge. I, dunno if this is a good thing or not, whether it's just helping this particular domain to get a lot of attention or whether it's this kind of nice idea that you put a badge on your site, which is saying that.

You stand for these things, you're not gonna discriminate it or devalue anyone on the basis of their age, gender, identity, and other things. Like one, which I'm tempted to put on any site that I do, which is not by ai. yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you can have little badges like that. I don't know if that's connected with the, in a way it seems the same sort of move.

It's like positioning against a corporate direction, if you like.

[00:31:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's hard to encapsulate, isn't it? Because this whole movement isn't summed up in one trite little sentence. there's just some feeling in the back of my head about what it is, and. I can't encapsulate it perfectly.

if you, showed me a website and, and you asked me, does this align, I'm not sure does it, I'm not entirely sure, but there's a feeling and it, feels a little bit. philanthropic. It feels a little bit, I don't know, left-leaning for want of a better word. It seems to be more all embracing.

It's definitely not about making loads of money. I'm wondering secretly if we got all of the people involved in the indie web on a deep and profound level and, ask them, would you like to live in a commune? I wa I wonder what the answer would be.

[00:32:34] David Waumsley: so yeah, so we've got, we're back to some Hi hippie 60 times up.

Yeah, that's right. Hugging trees. Yeah. It is a

[00:32:41] Nathan Wrigley: bit, don't, it is a bit of that though. There is some of that sprinkled over the top of this without a doubt. Yeah. Okay. what can we do? Oh, sorry. Carry on.

[00:32:50] David Waumsley: Yeah, no, it's the same thing. I, won't read out. it is. Fascinating Hayden Picker In's conclusion, but it's a lot to read out there what he says we should do.

But, I'll leave that on the site there. there was something which I was introduced to, actually it was by LA Zach Leatherman, the author of 11 two. We've been talking about. He did a talk, I think about five years ago or something on this, and he introduced me to this concept of Posse, which stands for Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere.

I love that. Which. Yeah, and I think that's something that you can start to do, can't you? With these protocols where you can start to say, okay, the, canonical. Link, the URL is yours and then your content goes out to all these other services to attract things. And yeah, he cites an example actually, Jeremy, Keith and his site, he's very good at being able to set these things up.

So almost he talks about it as well a lot. He's a big, Defender of the indie web. Of course, as you might expect with him, I can't really show you any examples of it, but basically, no, it's very much tied up with a band in a pub at the moment, isn't it? Yeah. Yes. But that's really how he's running his site.

He, he, it, always stays with him on his domain and it gets sent everywhere else.

[00:34:13] Nathan Wrigley: there is a. I was just gonna say there's a lot of moves in WordPress at the moment to make this possible. So the PO protocol, which is built by a chap called Mattias Fle, he, he's building it. He's been, he now works for Automatic, but the idea is very much of that, it's that you publish on your own website and then.

It. Your website is the account on an activity pub related platform like Mastodon or Pixel Fed. So you publish it there and it's not cross posting, so it's not when you hit publish, it's not then pushing it out to Mastodon. It is. The Mastodon account. The website? Yes. The account. And that's hard to get your head around 'cause we're not used to that.

And then in the future, the, it's, built or being built. The idea is that if somebody comments on Mastodon or pixeled from that or any other platform on the, activity pod protocol, those comments come back into your WordPress post or page. And then if you reply that all gets sent out and it's all happening.

You, you've got that conversation on your own. Yes, your own website. It's fascinating.

[00:35:26] David Waumsley: Yeah, I had a little look at that I was interested in. 'cause it wasn't high numbers for the plugin that goes that No, That allows you to do that easy. And I'm also looking at it because we've decided to not go the WordPress route and do it with 11 for us.

Yeah. I want to see if we can do this very same thing as well with us to have it. As a kind of comedy system to make sure that, there's this whole

[00:35:45] Nathan Wrigley: thing called web mentions, but Exactly, that's as far as I can take you with that. I don't really know how that would be implemented or what that really encapsulates, but I know that in this community, in the sort of indie web, community web mentions is, that.

Yes. Yep.

[00:36:00] David Waumsley: And then there are methods as well. I saw one for being able to, it doesn't matter what platform you're using, as long as you've got the control where you can use the at protocol from Blue Sky to use Blue Sky as your kind of commenting system,

[00:36:14] Nathan Wrigley: I guess that would have a very similar endeavor and that's.

Some, and I know now there's a ton of, work being done for people bridging those two protocols, so literal bridges, so that one connects perfectly with the other so that the two. Protocols bind together so that you could, I don't know, have something that links over to Mastodon and Blue Sky and can publish onto them both at the same time.

That kind of thing.

[00:36:40] David Waumsley: just news here, I, it's very hard when we talk about a lot of these things, so there's usually a question. It's a bit like SEO where there'll be articles saying it's dead, and no it isn't. It's very much alive and stuff, and it's things like, web rings. We, they were there in the early days of the war.

The web before we had Google and the, we would find those connections. I think some of the bigger corporations run some of these, web rings, but that's something we can do in blogging communities. They still exist out there and I started to find a bit of a few of those, but. To be honest, I was so used to just going to search to find all my information from the web that

[00:37:22] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

[00:37:22] David Waumsley: unless I knew about this, it's unlikely I'd find it.

And I think it has been. And something I'm quite keen, I think, to do myself a little bit more with this is to make sure you create genuine links with people so you can use things like web mentions and stuff by. just naturally mentioning, why you are writing about something comes from somebody else's work.

So you mentioned them. yep. They become aware of it. You promote them and somebody takes from yours and it's this nice circle. Of self-promotion, if you like, that doesn't rely on gaming,

[00:37:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's like robbing one another's backs in a way, isn't it? Yes. It feels a little bit more like that.

Yeah. Yeah. And you're not doing it because of, because you'll get a search result boost out of it. You're doing it 'cause it's the right thing to do.

[00:38:11] David Waumsley: Yes, exactly. And it, also helped, you, you don't have to explain from the start again. if you're working on somebody else's work, you want to lead them to that so they can see where you started from.

And I think it just seems a much more. Sensible way to communicate with each other. So anyway, we've been going off for some time, so I'll probably speed up,

[00:38:30] Nathan Wrigley: aren't I? Okay. Yeah. I mean we, yeah, probably we should wrap it up fairly soon, but, just, one quick thing. Apropos of nothing.

Yeah. And that is to say that you were talking about search engines just now I have, I've I. Ditched Google, as my search engine of choice and I've gone over to using, oh, you've got it there. yeah, cgi, I dunno if that's how you pronounce it. I believe that this was started by somebody who used to create a WordPress plugin, and I've forgotten which one it was, but it's probably one that you and I have both heard of and they moved out the WordPress space and, and.

So the, trade off here is that I have to pay for it, but the good thing about it is that I'm, not hoping to keep my search engine results for any length of time. So I don't feel like I want to own, any of the data that I put into this. But the, benefit is that you get a, an unsponsored set of search results.

They don't keep track on what you do, and you can prioritize certain domains. So say for example, I was searching for, oh, I don't know, like socks or something, I might be able to put in a bunch of local websites to me and say, actually, when you're giving the search resource, only select those websites to, to search through so you can curate the search.

And, in that way it inoculates CGI. From, from that bias, which we have no doubt is in the Google search results. you can, definitely get a sense that promoted content, sponsored content comes out at the top, which it always does. You can see that right at the beginning.

And so I'm gonna try this out for a little bit and we'll see how we go. I can't say I can't endorse it 'cause I've not used it for long enough. I only been using it for two or three weeks, but I'm gonna give it a go. Yeah, and I think it's $120 a year. I think they've got a 30 day trial or something if you wanna give it a go.

But I, I think it's a good thing for me to be doing.

[00:40:28] David Waumsley: Yeah, no, I think it's fascinating. I think with Google, as we, realized, obviously they did it with things like encouraging us to use schema and rich snippets, which they don't need so much now with ai, but in some ways we realize now it's to keep them.

To keep us all on their domain rather than the original deal, which is, we'll do what you want Google, to make our sites, search friendly. Absolutely. And you send us the traffic, Yeah. Let's go in.

[00:40:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. give it a go. cgi.com. See what you think. Yeah,

[00:40:58] David Waumsley: I'll mention another one, which I put down here.

'cause I, in fact, I put it down as a note there, as web users, we can try different search engines. You were already ahead of me, but I saw somebody else mention talking about new web. Marginalia Now, it's probably not that useful, but it's, you can search and I can't because honestly I've, I don't know it very well to be able to demonstrate it and plus we're on audio, so I won't, but it basically, it will give you a totally, you can.

You can search, by the sort of topic that you want. And I think I, I'm not quite sure how it works, but it's, the person who was recommending this as an approach said and they really summed up for me, what I feel about Google these days is often the sort of stuff I'm interested in. I have to work through loads and loads of stuff, so I was trying to find that site I was promoting earlier, which is the HTML.

Is for people. Couldn't remember what it was exactly called the domain, tried Google Search, knew it was a fairly recent thing, couldn't find it. And what everything I was listed really was a good SEO article by a, big corporation. So it would be GoDaddies, article on HDML, or something like that.

And pretty much everything was a corporate thing. So I think. Marginality. What was Margin

[00:42:16] Nathan Wrigley: or margin? Margin. Marginal margin. Yeah.

[00:42:19] David Waumsley: Yeah. Marginal. Yeah. Yeah, I've got it. I had it up here, didn't I? A moment ago. There we are. Yeah. It doesn't look particularly friendly, but I think it just allows you to, I.

Search for sites. it's built really for the indie web type thing. It's where

[00:42:34] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:42:34] David Waumsley: in the same way. So yeah. I didn't know it existed, but I just think that's quite fascinating. yeah, that is. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:42:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:42:41] David Waumsley: Gosh, the other thing is something I'm. If I'm gonna ask a client, actually I'm gonna speak to a client the day after tomorrow about their new site in there.

I'm gonna ask 'em if they want me to block ai.

[00:42:53] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. whether or not you'll be successful in that endeavor is, up for question because I dunno how honorable the, the robot stop text, is yes, but certainly it's worth a shot. What's the, what's your intuition there?

Do you get the feeling that most people don't want to contribute their own content into an AI LLM?

[00:43:15] David Waumsley: Yeah, I don't know. I don't, it is the first time I'm gonna ask. It's just crossed my mind. I realize there's a beautiful list that I found of, various ways of blocking somebody from the WordPress

[00:43:25] Nathan Wrigley: community.

I, haven't done anything about that. my content is just out there and presumably it gets scraped. it's not gonna be scraped or have a great authority, but I, haven't really. I've drawn a conclusion about that, but it feels to me that certainly if you are a content creator, the voices are getting louder about that not being, especially if you are a creative, you're a musician or something.

It does seem like a bit of a shame that. As a species, we've decided that, something that you can get, for one us sense, a song created by a website that socked up all the songs that are out there in existence, that doesn't seem, particularly well aligned with humanity. no, I would be very surprised if the indie web movement is particularly well aligned with the AI movement, but I could be wrong about that.

[00:44:18] David Waumsley: Yeah. Oh, I think, most will not. Yes. Yes. It will not want a lot of people. I think the people I follow now are not keen. They're very keen to, to say that we haven't used AI with this one. Or they're very keen as well to point out that the cost of an AI search is so much greater than a normal search.

Which led me to the other point that I thought about what we could do. And I think, when it comes to our site, content site, we hadn't even talked about it before. And I was reminded by Bob Monor from the 11 two community that you can, on static sites have a fairly good search these days.

So I think this is a topic for us later to see how we could maybe implement some of these kind of indie web techniques. Things like, oh yeah, I'd

[00:45:02] Nathan Wrigley: that, I, would love to know how to implement those. So if, we can do that would be. Wonderful. Yeah. and you never know, the indie web community might, might be able to get something out of that as well.

Great. Yeah, I think we've come to the end. I think So let me, find my mouse and, put us back on the screen like that. So that's it. this one's going out as an audio as well as we'll stick it on the, is it going on the YouTube as well? Yes it is. Yeah, everything all there isn't that ironic. I know the irony.

We're gonna, we're gonna use YouTube, but we're gonna slight rain on a wedding day. Slack them off at the same time, so there we go. That's it. We'll see you next time. Thanks David. That was really interesting. Yeah, enjoyed that. Bye bye-Bye.