2020-04-05

Nadia Eghbal, someone who obviously loves writing, writes about writing a book. It sounds less… enjoyable than you might think.

What I hated most about this past year was feeling unable to seriously think about anything besides this one thing. Everything I read or talked about was in service to the thing. There was nothing but the thing.

Afterwards, I expected to feel a satisfying sense of completion, but mostly I just felt relieved. I didn't think of it as having finished a manuscript so much as having expelled a virus from my body.

Some nice quotes on what the IndieWeb is about, from Desmond's article Your Website Is Your Castle.

At the heart of the IndieWeb is an attempt to unify the ideas behind personal websites, blogs and social networks, but in a manner consistent with how the world wide web operates.

Your website acts much like your wall on Facebook or your timeline on Twitter - it's your personal soapbox, your castle on the web.

[…]one recreates, in a decentralized manner, the kinds of online interactions one has come to expect from private social networks.

I fixed a small issue in my theme that I'd noticed, where other people's sites weren't picking up my author details. The problem? My author info wasn't included in the entries. I had a site-wide h-card but I hadn't got it in the entries themselves.

The process for figuring out who has written a post is referred to as authorship, and the IndieWeb wiki page on it is very helpful. Also thanks to Sven for the help.

– Your Website Is Your Passport - Desmond Rivet

I found this a very helpful discussion of IndieAuth from Desmond, touching on web sign-in, RelMeAuth, OAuth and OIDC along the way. It's one of those things that I know exists, and just works for me (e.g. everytime I use a Micropub client), but it's nice to get a bit of a handle on how it works.

In a nutshell the purpose is this:

your domain should function as a kind of universal online passport, allowing you to sign in to various services and applications simply by entering your personal URL

Desmond does a great job of explaining the nitty-gritty of how it works, too. The two bits I bolded below jumped out at me - a decentralised authentication mechanism leveraging DNS as a user registration system. It's very elegant.

The process of using your domain to log in to sites and services is called web sign-in and is implemented via a protocol called IndieAuth, an extension of OAuth used for decentralized authentication.

It's entire reason for being is to answer the simple question: does the person behind the browser have control over the URL that they are claiming as their own?

If your goal is to make a social network out of the world wide web, there is a certain elegance to the idea of leveraging DNS as a user registration system.