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Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

indieweb.org

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Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#121

Post by superkuh »

Receiving webmentions can be as simple as making a custom log in nginx and just having it save all POST to the webmention URL endpoint. I love it. And sending can be done with curl or whatever you want (ie html forms without JS).

Or, you can use any of the many community projects which handle all this backend stuff and provide it as a service.

Either extreme works. I love the indieweb set of protocols for this. Other things like ActivityPub require active interaction for the cryptographic handshake at a minimum and make simple solutions infeasible despite other benefits. Indieweb can be as complex or as simple as you want.

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#122

Post by 0xis »

Uplifting to see indieweb.org on HN!

However, I suffer from a lack of high-quality news sources, no matter whether they support RSS. They no longer publish online these days. And, realistically, I am not interested in most post from people I am interested in. So I just manually poll some times a month in my browser.

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#123

Post by askvictor »

What blog systems (either self hosted or easy to move) do folks recommend nowadays? I'm not interested in spending much time tinkering and updating, but have enough sysadmin experience to host one myself. Was last using blogger, though trying to de-googlify my life slowly

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#124

Post by ketzo »

askvictor wrote: post #123

What blog systems (either self hosted or easy to move) do folks recommend nowadays? I'm not interested in spending much time tinkering and updating, but have enough sysadmin experience to host one myself. Was last using blogger, though trying to de-googlify my life slowly

if you're cool just writing markdown files, I really like Astro for self-hosting static content.

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#125

Post by alabut »

ketzo wrote: post #124
askvictor wrote: post #123

What blog systems (either self hosted or easy to move) do folks recommend nowadays? I'm not interested in spending much time tinkering and updating, but have enough sysadmin experience to host one myself. Was last using blogger, though trying to de-googlify my life slowly

if you're cool just writing markdown files, I really like Astro for self-hosting static content.

I’ve been an Astro user for the last two years and I can’t recommend it. RSS support isn’t native, doesn’t support anything other than plain markdown, and all of the extra magic of MDX and their custom .Astro templates is wasted without feed syndication.

My big project for sometime this year is to switch to Eleventy.

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#126

Post by pastel8739 »

askvictor wrote: post #123

What blog systems (either self hosted or easy to move) do folks recommend nowadays? I'm not interested in spending much time tinkering and updating, but have enough sysadmin experience to host one myself. Was last using blogger, though trying to de-googlify my life slowly

Definitely recommend any Static Site Generator like Jekyll, Hugo, Eleventy, Astro, rolling your own, etc. it’s easy to deploy the resulting bundle on various hosting services and set up builds on git pushes.

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#127

Post by victorbjorklund »

vasco wrote: post #39
susam wrote: post #37

Also, don't forget to set up an RSS or Atom feed for your website. Contrary to the recurring claim that RSS is dead, most of the traffic to my website still comes from RSS feeds, even in 2̶0̶2̶5̶ 2026! In fact, one of my silly little games became moderately popular because someone found it in my RSS feed and shared it on HN. [1] From the referer (sic) data in my web server logs (which is not completely reliable but s…

The question is, do you have this traffic because of RSS client crawlers that pre-loaded the content or from real users. I'm not pro killing RSS by the way, but genuinely doubtful.

Same argument can be made about all podcasts.

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#128

Post by alabut »

echelon wrote: post #23
simonw wrote: post #9

I really like this philosophy. I've been using it for a couple of years now - everything goes on my personal site, then I post links on Mastodon, Bluesky and Twitter and sometimes (if I remember to do so) LinkedIn, plus copy and paste it all into a Substack email every week or so. I really need to automate it though - hard on Twitter and LinkedIn but still pretty easy for Bluesky and Mastodon.

If we had stuck with standard semantic web microformats, RSS/Atom syndication, FOAF-ish graphs, URIs for identity but also anonymous pubkey identities with reputation graphs - we could have built an entirely distributed social media graph that worked like email. But alas, Facebook pushed forward too fast to counter. There's still a chance, but the software needs to focus on simplicity and ease of use. Publishing blob…

I wish that were true but if ease of use is all that mattered, then micro.blog and other “Indieweb in a box” services would be as big as Bluesky, or maybe even at least as big as Mastodon.

The truth is that we’re social creatures and for social products, that means hanging out where other friends are already hanging out. It’s my personal thesis that no matter how matter how much we lower the bar to participate in the indieweb, fediverse, or other non-corporate platforms, it’s going to be inherently niche.

Which is fine. Small is beautiful.

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#129

Post by pastel8739 »

Fiveplus wrote: post #112

The concept is sound, but the syndicate part is becoming increasingly hostile to maintain. I used to have scripts that auto-posted to twitter, facebook and reddit. Over the last two years, almost all of those broke due to API paywalls or aggressive bot detection. I've found that "POSSE" is shifting more toward "Publish on Own Site, Manually Link Elsewhere." Paradoxically, ActivityPub (mastodon/fediverse) is the only…

I wish there was a way to plug in Fedi hosting with a static site generator, but iirc the protocol currently doesn’t allow that

Re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

#130

Post by alabut »

softwaredoug wrote: post #36

I am not so sure. You need to speak in the native voice of each community. A LinkedIn post vs Tweet vs E-Mail are different. You need to get value from the network directly without expecting a click thru. A lot of engagement + authority happens via the network itself I think it's more accurate to see blogging as a distinct channel from other types of social media + content marketing

That’s a good take and is underrated. It’s what has kept me from completely automating everything in favor of a semi-automated approach instead of doing the “spray and pray” approach of blasting everywhere.

Follow-up comments and engaging with others after posting is big too. People that “syndicate” without actually engaging on each platform are like some weird proselytizers that show up to a house party and hand out flyers to their own weird shindig without talking to anyone there.

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