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Show HN: Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time (indieblog.page)

241 points by splitbrain ↗ HN
Inspired by the "Ask HN: Share your personal site" last week, I finally came around and built a thing I wanted for a long time: a simple website to randomly explore all the awesome personal blogs without having to subscribe to them all.

So this is what I built over the weekend. You click a button and indieblog.page will redirect you to a random page from a personal page...

I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.

75 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] thread
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csw-001
This is cool! I read almost all my web content via RSS - I’d love an RSS feed of random posts from these sources, just to get a daily sample and see what’s worth following.
splitbrain
That's an interesting idea. Would you expect one RSS item with let's say 5 links in the item body? Or 5 RSS items directly linking to the original post?
jrruethe
I agreee that RSS would be awesome. I would prefer 5 RSS items with direct links to the original post.
kevincox
I definitely would prefer the second. That way I can read and dismiss them one-by-one.

Maybe an option would be to pick a update rate and have something like hourly, daily, weekly and monthly feeds. It would be a cool way to trickle possibly interesting new blogs into my feed reader.

mawise
This would be really cool! A great way to add some discoverability to the feed-reader modus operandi.
splitbrain
RSS Feeds added. I may tweak this in the coming days.
csw-001
5 items with direct links for sure.
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b3nji
Amazing, I was just thinking, how would I be able to find all these wonderful personal sites?

It's like Stumbleupon has been reborn!

And now you have gone and done it. Thank you.

flobosg
> It's like Stumbleupon has been reborn!

My thoughts exactly.

rodolphoarruda
I have submitted my website's URL but didn't get any confirmation afterwards. Maybe it's just me and my browser, but it would be nice to have something like "ok, got that link! Thanks!" somewhere.
splitbrain
You should get exactly that. It might take a few seconds as I try to find the RSS feed right away... Just try submitting again, it will tell you if the link is already in the submissions.
q-base
Now that explains it. I was just looking at the stats from my WordPress site and found traffic from a indieblog.page - I thought it was some shady marketing page and ignored it. Here 10 minutes later I am on HN and see this.

Great idea and probs for shipping!

jmmv
Same here. Impressive to see this referral making a dent on my site stats considering that, in theory, my pages were surfaced randomly among many, many others.
mrzool
Clicked several times on that button and this is what I've got:

- Performant A/B Testing with Cloudflare Workers

- 12 Useful Tools for DevOps

- Simplest alternative IDs with Rails

- How do I update my website using the iPad

- Certified Blockchain Professional - Module 03: Blockchain Mining

- Principles for the Metaverse

- Overloading & Creating New Operators In Swift 5

- Is Agility Related to Commitment? – Money Flows Part II

Is the "IndieWeb" basically just English-written personal blogs from HN folks now? I'd have hoped to find a bit more of a diverse landscape.

splitbrain
Unfortunatly, it's currently heavily biased towards the HN crowd because of the sources I used to initially seed the list.
mawise
I really like a lot of what the IndieWeb community has come up with. There is a big focus on building things yourself within that community which means a lot of the members of the community are very dev-heavy. https://micro.blog seems to be the public-facing, easy-to-use platform that adopts most of the IndieWeb technology but for a non-tech crowd--very different community that you might also enjoy perusing.
rodolphoarruda
Just for the records. I have added mine, which is written mainly in Brazilian Portuguese and has low tech content that derives from my day to day observations of this crazy world.
weird-eye-issue
Is that good though? This seems to be for an English speaking audience
Shared404
I appreciate it - I know a little Portuguese, but even other languages I would support being added.

Google translate is usually good enough, and there's a lot of content that is worth getting further perspectives from.

manuelmoreale
I share your sentiment. I maintain a similar project (https://theforest.link) and the vast, vast majority of the submissions I get are dev blogs, written in English.

Why is that the case, that I don't know. I have two theories though.

Theory one is that these are niche projects, and niche projects are discovered by people who browse the web in "unique" ways and those people tend to be, for the most part, developers.

The other theory is that in 2022 web, it's developer that for the most part still run personal indie blogs. The majority of people have moved over social media or more recently on things like substack.

EDIT: to add an extra bit of detail from my experience. While running projects like this one it's hard to decide what to do with sites that are written not in a language that you speak because you risk "promoting" all sorts of random stuff that maybe you don't want to help promoting. So it's safer to stick with content you understand and that ends up being English

mrzool
Hey man! Been following your blog for years. Always enjoy your writing.
naravara
I had the same observation. And I suspect the answer may be "yes." These are the only people remaining with the skillsets and inclination to maintain a personal website. The rest, if the mood strikes them to start a blog, will go for a Medium or Substack page. And even those are probably the 90th percentile users. The rest are just going to make big Facebook or Reddit posts.
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aendruk
The sources of this database are largely outlets of self-promotion. I’d consider my own site part of the IndieWeb—I literally developed it at an IndieWebCamp—but you won’t find it listed here due to that sampling bias.
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byteski
cool idea! i like to explore someone's websites sometimes.
mediocregopher
Love this, reminds me quite a bit of stumbleupon.

In putting together my own RSS feed recently, and trying to figure out the best way to sync it with all my devices, I realized the simplest way was to just turn the aggregated links into a webpage and publish that publicly. There's no reason not to, and now others can use it as well!

It's at https://news.cryptic.io, if anyone wants to see the output. I recommend others do the same if you like.

The difficult part of using RSS is the actual curation part, so it's cool to see a trend (2 datapoints is a trend?) of folks doing that work up front and sharing it with others.

mhitza
> and trying to figure out the best way to sync it with all my devices

Store it as an email?

I generate a daily digest for my subscriptions and have them emailed in my inbox.

marginalia_nu
I've been dabbling in this general field as well, I do think there's new things to be made here. StumbleUpon was great, but I think it can be greater still.

I started with <https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random> but then I made <https://explore.marginalia.nu/> which I feel is the superior version.

Etheryte
As a heads up, it isn't compliant with the ePrivacy Directive (aka "the EU cookie law") that the site can't be used without giving consent. Consent must be given freely. If the cookie is purely functional and the site can't function without it, then consent is not required. If the cookie is optional then consent is required but it can't be forced.
marginalia_nu
The cookie is purely functional and necessary to the functionality, but I'll still ask for consent even if is not required.
Etheryte
It is not consent if the only option is to say yes.
marginalia_nu
I want the visitor to be informed that clicking the button places a cookie on their computer and why that is so that clicking the button is an informed choice. The other option is to not click the button.
Etheryte
To try and perhaps explain a different way, that's exactly what's not legal. According to the directive, consent must be free, and sites must also be usable if no consent is given. The setup where you either accept cookies or you can't use the site at all is exactly what's disallowed.
marginalia_nu
Right, but the site can't be used without the cookie since it's required for the functionality. Am I really not allowed to inform my visitors of this fact (even though I'm not required to)?
mhitza
If you'd like you can replace the "Cookie Consent" text with "Cookie Notice", and "Consent To The Cookie And Begin" with a single "Begin".

I'm not a lawyer to understand the implication of asking consent on something that doesn't require consent. Sounds like a non-issue to me, and yak shaving. I would doubt that anyone would bat an eye at that.

However, you that notice also states that "and which websites you would like to see more of.". I'm not sure how that information is stored in the backend and how often is deleted, but that could be considered profiling.

You could have users consent to the preference information only, standard history cookies being implicit/essential functionality.

Alternatively 2, just change the text to ~ "this functionality essentially requires cookie to avoid repetition, and drilling down based on preferences", with a "sounds good to me" button. Might want to have cookies expire on browser close.

TL;DR don't sweat it.

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ancientsofmumu
Random drive-by user feedback: I like Random density better - the number of sites I don't want to visit is greater than the number which I'm interested in, Explore is too modal/singular at a time. The 20x density of the Random page is quicker to scan and discard results within seconds to try and find something I'm willing to click into that piques my curiosity, as I may reload the Random page a few times to get a hit I like.
marginalia_nu
Yeah I'm not planning on retiring any of the services. They require virtually no resources or maintenance, odds are I'll make even more attempts at exploring this domain in the future.

Having both an exhaustive link database from the search engine, as well as 300,000 screenshots makes for a lot of opportunities to experiment.

soco
The moment the dev.to nonsense* folk discover you, it's gonna be useless.

*Newly dev.to RSS feed is 90% either pill promotion or zero value "my first post" notifications. Or posts in languages I don't speak and have no way to filter out.

AndrewStephens
I love stuff like this. I just went to add my own site only to be told that somehow my feed was there already. I guess I am officially part of the IndieWeb!
legrande
Anyone feel amazed at how many blogs are under a {user}.github.io domain? Github is not just about open source, it's a blogging platform too. People forget that.
mxuribe
I feel somewhat torn on folks having a blog hosted on {user}.github.io; well, at least an indie blog. One of the fun points of having an indie website is not depending/nor hosting it on a centralized service...though, i can totally acknowledge that sometimes cost is a factor. So for some folks - to avoid hosting/tech. costs - leveraging a free, though central platform might be one of the few ways to have a web presence. Then again, i would miuch rather live in a world where there are tons of indie websites, even if they have to live on github's infrastructure; the more indie, the better!
jmmv
Does it count if we host on GitHub Pages but use a custom domain? I do that to have the freedom to move out, which is what I’m about to do to gain some features elsewhere.
mxuribe
I am by no means an arbiter of what counts or does not. :-) That being said, whatever freedoms you can exercise is always a great thing! If you leverage github underneath as a platform via a custom domain to run your indie blog, then i say go for it! At least that is better than an alternative like living as a sharecropper on someone else's digital land like Medium.com, etc.
MaxLeiter
I did some scraping of the same post as OP and found that 146 (21%) of the HN comments on the “share your personal site” were github pages. It’s popular!
EamonnMR
Must have scraped the 'show me your blog' thread from last week, since my blog is already in there.
KaoruAoiShiho
We used to call this a "blog-ring"
aendruk
It still is; [1] is listed as a source in the FAQ.

[1] I typed <spider web emoji><ring emoji> but HN ate it. Apparently the name of this webring is unspeakable here.

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BaseballPhysics
Oh man, it's StumbleUpon for the indieweb! I love it! I'll definitely using this in my spare time. My own site is part of the webring but I do love just being able to click a button and land on something surprising.

Thanks for sharing!

devmunchies
I’d love something like HN for a curated list of blog posts, but it’s just technical or tech business (e.g. team dynamics, leadership, finance, product management, etc) blogs. No news or tweets or blurbs, just good high quality writings. Do I just need to start curating my own RSS feed?

“Indie” is cool but I just care if it’s good. But I guess this is just more for fun and child-like exploration, for the love of indie

zdunn
https://indieweb.xyz is a reddit-like link aggregator and https://www.indieforums.net/ is a forum for independent blogs. Neither is curated since theyre user submitted content, but still might be of interest to you. I think the "indie" in both of these is less directly about being IndieWeb and more about being small, independent blogs, so hopefully more likely to be "No news or tweets or blurbs, just good high quality writings"
mattrighetti
I will try this and see if I discover something nice, cool idea!

Not a long time ago I wanted to build something where users could share their favorite RSS feeds/blogs (like Julia Evans does [0]) so that others could, maybe, find something new and interesting. This is a similar concept.

[0]: https://jvns.ca/blogroll/

floren
Looks great, look forward to poking around some more. Hope it doesn't get destroyed by spammers!
MisterSandman
This could do with a language setting, but not a huge deal.
teucris
This is such a great idea. My only feedback is to try and add non-technical stuff too.

How are you collecting sites to include in this?