I think I first heard of the IndieWeb movement in 2016 sometime. It’s a bit hazy now, but I’ve a memory that I stumbled on it through a trail of links starting on Wikity.
I’ve tinkered with web sites in some form or another for a long time, and I have happy memories of various weird Geocities experiments, sadly lost to the sands of time it seems.
As far as independently hosting goes, I appear to have had a self-hosted blog since 2006 at my old domain noodlemaps.net – thanks Wayback Machine for that! My first self-hosted post is seemingly on the topic of data sonification and playing non-audio files through /dev/dsp on Linux. Excellent.
I’ve had a self-hosted blog up at doubleloop.net since around 2013 (thanks again Internet Archive). I went through a through static site generators. I actually really like how my old Hexo-based site looked. Better than my current site…
My first documented attendance of HWC London looks to be December 2016, hosted by Calum and Barry who were really welcoming. Around then, I fiddled about with various platforms before switching over to WordPress.
I’ve really enjoyed being part of the IndieWeb community. My active involvement (at events, on IRC, etc) has peaked and waned over the years, but I’ve still always felt part of the bigger whole. That’s another post, though.
How did you find out about the IndieWeb community?
I’ve been aware of Indieweb probably a couple of years, but just in the last month I got a round tuit and configured by blog with the various doodads. Not sure if I got it right. Certainly I want to tweak the SVGs in my profile links block (upper right), as one of them is kind of stealing the spotlight at beginning of page load.
I first heard of IndieWeb in late 2014 or early 2015 on one of Leo Laporte’s podcasts: Ben Werdmüller and Erin Jo Richey were the guests and presented the then-newly-launched Known platform. Kevin Marks was also there, and I believe it was his pitch that had me sold on the whole concept. By the end of April 2015 I had a Known site, then started self-hosting when the hosted version got abandoned, and then it all continued downhill to the point where I now have migrated to a static site, prototyped IndieWeb-glue, and am planning to write my own webmention endpoint. I’ve been blogging on and off since 2003, and almost all of it is on my site now (I lost about a year worth of posts during all the migrations).
During the 2020 lockdowns I discovered the Russian-speaking Indieweb community and we did an online HWC meeting that was my first (and only, so far) “in-person” IndieWeb community experience. At the moment, I’m having a very extensive “life happens” period but I’m very much looking forward to more community interaction once I have more time on my hands.
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