I Own My Stuff Now. Sort Of. (POSSE and theaardvark.co.uk)

This all started because I wanted to make a button.

Not an important button. Just an 88x31 pixel rectangle, the kind you used to see all over early personal sites. People used them to link to things they liked, show off their browser, or just say they existed online. I’d noticed some sites still have a row of these at the bottom. I wanted one too. More specifically, I wanted a POSSE button. I’d been thinking about adding POSSE here, and having a button to put at the bottom seemed like enough reason to finally do it.

This is, I am aware, a slightly backwards way to decide to implement a web standard. I stand by it.

I’ve been on the internet long enough to remember when owning your content was just called “having a website.” Then social media came along, and we all handed our stuff over to various corporations in exchange for the ability to argue with strangers. A fair trade, most people seemed to think. It wasn’t.

I’ve always kept a personal site. This one, in various forms, goes back further than I care to calculate. But for years, the actual writing was happening on platforms I don’t control, in formats I can’t export cleanly, owned by people whose priorities are demonstrably not mine. So I’ve been quietly fixing that.

What POSSE Actually Is

POSSE stands for Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. It’s an IndieWeb principle, and it’s about as simple as it sounds: you write something here first, then you push copies out to wherever your audience actually is. The canonical version lives here. The syndicated copies point back.

If Mastodon disappears tomorrow, or Bluesky pivots to something awful, or LinkedIn finally becomes legally sentient and starts invoicing people, your content is still here. You still have it. The platforms were always just distribution, not storage.

This is not a new idea. It’s arguably just how the web was supposed to work. We collectively forgot for about fifteen years.

What I’ve Actually Done

theaardvark.co.uk now has a working IndieWeb stack:

microformats2: Posts here now have machine-readable class names like h-entry, e-content, dt-published and so on. These tell IndieWeb tools what’s what. The site is basically its own API now. I find this more satisfying than it probably deserves.

webmention.io: This handles incoming webmentions for me. A webmention is what you get when another IndieWeb site links to one of your posts and sends a notification. It’s like a pingback, except it actually works and doesn’t get hijacked by spammers right away. So I'm led to believe. I guess I'll find out.

Bridgy: This sits between my Mastodon account and the webmention endpoint. When I POSSE a post to Mastodon and someone likes, boosts, or replies, Bridgy picks that up and sends it back to me as a webmention. Social interactions on a platform I don’t own, coming back to a site I do. That’s the loop.

rel="me" links: Just a few links that create a closed verification loop between this site and my other profiles. Boring to set up, but it’s satisfying when indiewebify.me turns green.

Representative h-card: A hidden block of structured data on every page that says who owns the site. My name, handle, location, a photo, and a short bio. Hidden from readers but readable by internet services. It’s the IndieWeb version of a business card at the end of every post.

What’s Still to Come

Outbound webmentions aren’t automated. When I link to another IndieWeb site in a post, I should send them a webmention, a notification that I’ve mentioned them. Right now I have to do that manually with a tool called Telegraph. It’s not hard, just another manual step I’d rather not have to remember. Automating it needs a build pipeline, which is on the list for when this site moves to Hugo.

Displaying received webmentions on post pages is possible. There’s a JavaScript library that can query the webmention.io API and show them as comments. I haven’t set that up yet. I want to see if I actually get any before I bother building a place for them. (Who am I kidding.... I’ll build it whether I get any or not, and then it’ll sit there as empty as an abandoned American shopping mall.)

WriteFreely: For longer posts, I’d like a fediverse syndication service  where the full text goes out, not just a link and an excerpt. Write.as the hosted version of WriteFreely, is the plan. That’s also a job for after the Hugo migration.

Bluesky is connected, but Bridgy’s feed from there is a bit sketchy apparently. I’ll get to it.

Why Bother

Honestly? Because it’s interesting. The IndieWeb is a bunch of small, well-defined protocols that make the web work the way it was meant to. Sometimes it’s fiddly and reminds me of setting up my ZX Spectrum as a kid. I like both of those things.

The more serious answer is that I’ve been writing things online for a long time. I’d like to still have them in twenty years. Platforms don’t last that long. Personal sites do, if you’re stubborn enough.

I’m stubborn enough.

The Button

Anyway. The button. Here it is.

Made using a website thingy. Teal and amber background in keeping with the current colour scheme of the site (so probably out of date in a few months). “POSSE” in white, “publish own site” in black. 88 pixels wide, 31 pixels tall. Links to the IndieWeb POSSE page. Exactly what it needs to be, nothing more.

You’ll find it at the bottom of the site, next to whatever other buttons end up there. Turns out this is a rabbit hole. There are a lot of 88x31 buttons out there. I may be some time.

syndicated to Mastodon

syndicated to BlueSky