indieweb.org and Fediverse are based on the same idea, right? But they are not the same.
So far I think I understand that in Fediverse ActivityPub is mandatory. Not in the Indieweb.
What are the differences, advantages and/or disadvantages?
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Not entirely the same idea, IMO.
- Fediverse is about software implementations and services being able to talk to each other.
- IndieWeb is about owning your online presence via your own domain name.
The core idea of the fediverse is that you have some software running on some domain, providing a service. The focus is less on having a website, and more on providing a way to talk to people on other services. Just like email is a service, and you can talk to people on other email services. Everything is a message. Messages are delivered over a special protocol in a special format.
The core idea of the IndieWeb is that you are identified by some URL. You are in control of a website or web presence specifically. You make posts to that website, and those posts live on a permalink. Other people can subscribe to feeds of your website and web posts. Everything is a web page. You add some extra markup to your HTML to provide identity, publishing, and subscribing endpoints.
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@trwnh Thank you very much for your opinion, which made the terms a bit clearer for me.
Would you agree with me if I said that the common idea is to decentralise things. In addition, both approaches want to bring together information about a post in one place.
The difference is that IndieWeb focuses on authentication and you need your own domain.
The Fediverse focuses on standardisation of information exchange. There is ActivityPub, but this is not mandatory.
More or less, sure. It depends on what you mean by “decentralize”, though.
Really what it comes down to is that the IndieWeb is, y’know, the Web. It’s HTML files that make up a website. There’s not really a “service” aspect to it, although you can set up microservices to do things like IndieAuth, Micropub, etc.
On the other hand, the fediverse expects that there will be a service running at all times , similar to a web server or email server.
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Welcome to SocialHub @astrid !
This blog piece by CWebber explains the differences in approach from the POV of standardizing social web protocols.
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link’s broken btw
(20 characters)
Yes, the link is broken. Would you please correct it?
The indieweb is strongly individualism, where the Fediverse is more community based, though says it’s individualism to get #mainstreaming outreach (white lie).
- indieweb is a good fit for capitalism
- Fediverse is (as of now) a bad fit for capitalism
So it depends on your (mostly unspoken) view on politics. In this they use overlapping tech but for different use, they are both #openweb native.
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The IndieWeb is “a community of independent & personal websites”, as stated on the IndieWeb homepage website. That makes it both something one can use for themselves, like I do at my website or something people work around in a shared, federated way like how micro.blog, indieweb.xyz and other projects in the space work. In fact, it tends to be more communal since it’s up to people who are also using it to define how things work.
Right now, that’s a bit more tricky for people to do with ActivityPub software like Mastodon or Pixelfed (which isn’t a fault of those projects - it helped them grow and be used a lot) but I have seen others do it with things like microblog.pub and the like.
If there’s a political undertone to take, one could say that any form of federation that isn’t user-local makes them a form of digital feudalism (which is good or bad, depending on your relationship with people and land). The IndieWeb does have a more self-liberty-driven vanguard, but I’ve seen newer folks come to nudge that in a different direction. I would even go as far as to say that the IndieWeb wants YOU to have the final say over what you do with what you have, versus needing to wait for some random software changes or protocol update to enable it.
Happy to edit/correct anything.
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