[majika]

The web is a decentralized social network; everyone should have their own website, owning their data and content. Feeds (authenticated and public) can replicate the explicit social graphs of Twitter, Facebook et al.

Regrettably, setting up a website is still too hard for most people - but it's never been easier, too. If you're reading Hacker News, you should be able to do it.

Read the IndieWebCamp website for more: https://indiewebcamp.com/

[krapp]

I used to run my own website and blog all the time. Then I stopped and jumped onto the whole social media bandwagon, because i thought it would be easier and I lost my domain. Now i've gone completely in the opposite direction and decided to write my own framework for my own site and as a result I still don't blog but at least I have my very own half-baked framework.

Meanwhile i'm still surprised the 'independent web' is a thing. Like people 'rediscovering' static html sites. Makes me feel old.

[majika]

If you look at the projects from IndieWebCamp people, you'll see they're about much more than just static HTML sites. They're working on tools that enable social networking based on simple standards-based websites - similar to your framework, perhaps?

IMHO, the ideas of the IndieWebCamp people will last far longer than those of the other so-called "decentralized" social networking projects. I'm confident that (1) my kid(s) will have a HTML website, and (2) they'll never have heard of Diaspora or Pump.io. I hope that, by that time, Twitter and Facebook will only be used by Granny and Granddad, if at all.

[krapp]

>They're working on tools that enable social networking based on simple standards-based websites - similar to your framework, perhaps?

I wrote my own thin API[0] for livejournal and a page scraper[1] to manage crossposting to livejournal and profiling links (like facebook) without wordpress or third party services, so I definitely get the 'IndieWeb' ethos. I like the idea of having your own site and broadcasting to social media rather than the other way around. Writing your own code and being able to do things yourself is very liberating. It just seems weird to me to think of owning your own content on the web as a progressive, pseudo-revolutionary movement because it seems like only yesterday that's just the way things were.

[0](https://github.com/kennethrapp/journalist)

[1](https://github.com/kennethrapp/embedbug) -- beware if you play around with this one because it's messy and the documentation is practically nonexistent. Because i'm lazy.