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Johan Bové

My IndieWeb timeline

2 min read

Going to list up how I got to join the - pecha kucha style* - ish... - presentation to follow 🤞

  • 2017 - Got fed up with ad-revenue supported social media silos being commercially exploited and digitally tracked and followed.
  • 2017 / 2018 - Tested Mastodon, but getting overwhelmed by an overload of uninteresting posts and I couldn't decide which Mastodon instance to join. Also had some concerns over how the open-source project is managed. And setting up an own instance required a more expensive web host service and the setup is something I couldn't do on my, otherwise excellent, web host company Antagonist. (https://www.antagonist.nl)
  • 2018 / 2019 - Finding out about SOLID by thé Tim Berner's Lee - got involved (a little) by looking at the current source-code for the SOLID (beta) user interface and tried to fix a bug. Contributed to testing and writing some docs together with Melvin. Was a tough cookie to swallow because of lots of old code and a funky user-interface which has a bit of a learning curve. Tried my best to wrap my head around RDF and Linked-Data. Was a bit set back by academic talk on how Solid is going forward. Impressed by all the cool JavaScript demos and got to know some amazingly smart and clever people. (Melvin, Ruben, Lieven, ...) Plus the project has an important source in my birthplace Ghent, Belgium. But I am currently not following up the project so much any more... Mostly because I cannot run Node.JS servers on my web host.
  • 2019 - Found out about the IndieWeb movement in a podcast by Mozilla and decided to start using Known. Impressed by Tantek and Aaron's work. Got a lot of welcome help by Greg and other Indieweb "gurus". Was happy to see that Known was running nicely on Apache2 with PHP and MySQL, but it was a little concerning to see that Ben and the Idno project went through really tough times. Luckily Marcus is doing an excellent job in keeping the open-source Known project alive-and-kicking.

Learning about webmention, microsub and micropub and getting to try out all Aaron's and other talented developer's apps, gave me hope and motivation that this could be how the - personal - Web should continue to evolve into.

 

The Indieweb principles rock! https://indieweb.org/principles

 

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PechaKucha