But I feel like the whole indie web thing hasn’t taken off because of discoverability issues. RSS and Atom are nice, but they aren’t mainstream enough. Also, adding support for them is difficult for non-technical or even semi-technical people.

My blog does support RSS, and I use a reader to keep tabs on people I find interesting. But personally, I’m not a great fan of the protocol itself. It’s old, written in XML. There is JSON RSS, but that’s not widely supported and is fragmented as hell. Also, most RSS readers are just firehose feeds and don’t offer much in terms of organization.

I’m yet to find a solution for this that I genuinely like.

[1]: https://rednafi.com/

Yes, there’s an ecosystem, but it’s neither extensive nor mainstream. Feed readers are hit or miss, and I haven’t found one I like. Subscribing to 50 people is enough to make the feed unusable since there’s little to no organization.

While this isn’t entirely the protocol’s fault, its poor state is largely due to its lack of mainstream adoption—too few people care about it. The protocol itself might also be part of the problem.

So discoverability is still a problem because not enough people care about the existing solutions.

What kind of organization do you want? Every feed reader I've ever used let me categorize/organize feeds in whatever way I wanted, but it's a manual process.

I'm also not sure what fragmentation has to do with anything. I don't think I've used a feed reader that didn't understand all current flavors of RSS and Atom, so it makes absolutely no difference what the webmaster decided to use, my news reader can figure it out.

It is a little bit annoying when the webmaster doesn't put the full text of the article in the news feed, and instead wants you to actually visit their site to read their stuff. I'd guess that they do that to make sure that you actually visit the site once in a while and might accidentally view an ad so they can make a few cents or they hope that you might see something else on their site you might be interested in or whatever. It also saves some bandwidth by not downloading the full text of an article if it turns out that I wasn't interested in it.

I can't speak for others, but as someone who hand codes my HTML, it is a non-trivial amount of work to convert the entire text of a page into an RSS feed, whereas it is easy to add the headline, datetime, and summary.

I get that it is pretty cool to read stuff inside an RSS feed reader, but doesn't fit with my current workflow. My site has no ads, tracking, cookies (aside from the ones imported by the odd embedded youtube video).

It rather depends on the amount of content the RSS _author_ includes in the RSS feed. There's nothing in the RSS/Atom protocol that prevents you from reading the entire article, but some website creators decide to truncate the feed content.

My RSS reader of choice, InoReader, has the option to download the original website which solves the problem. However, I have over 200 feeds and it's rare to find one without the entire content being included.

Anyway, services like Feedbin have been going strong for a long time, have a rock solid syncing system with great tools for things like seeing frequency of posting and abandoned or moved feeds, folders, automatic filters, and broad support in the app ecosystem if you don't like their apps or web experience (which is very good).

RSS is absolutely extensive and has millions of users. It's at least as mainstream as Mastodon/ActivityPub, it's just not talked about as such, and that's _excluding_ Podcasts as a use case.

I’ve emailed many technical writers whose work I liked, asking them to add feed support, and most didn’t bother. One possible reason could be the protocol itself and the fragmentation between RSS, Atom, JSON RSS, etc.—or it could be something else entirely.

Consolidating most of the web into giant content silos is one of the worst things to happen to it

I'm not sure that "giant content silos," alone, is the harm.

But as soon as you start adding "algorithmic feeds," and "supported by advertising," then all the dark "engagement hacks" start showing up, and it turns toxic in a heartbeat.

To use a specific example, I don't think LiveJournal, despite being a "giant content silo" back in the early 2000s, was particularly harmful. It was a chronological feed, with pagination - you had to decide, at the bottom of the page, to click next. You didn't have "endless scrolling." And because it was purely chronological, if you refreshed, and there was no new content, well, go do something else. Nobody has posted anything new. If it got too much to manage, there was the ever-popular "LJ Friends Cut" - trimming who you follow to people you actually get value out of.

It was a useful ecosystem, but didn't have any of the nasty dark corners of our modern content silos. But it was also not ad-funded - it was funded by premium memberships, and IIRC some merchandise sales, and in general, "funded by the people who got value out of it," so the goals of those funding it were generally aligned with the goals of those running and using it.

DreamWidth, today, is a fork of LJ that seems to be doing just fine with the same approach LJ had. It is a "moderate sized content silo," at least, and it doesn't have any of the dark patterns of modern ad-based platforms that I've seen.

I'm still a fan of webrings, hosting a personal website is now easier and cheaper than ever, but it's not the norm anymore. Back then it was, as you had nowhere else to go, more people were browsing the directories, weblinks, links on personal pages, than now.

And the people that want big communities generally want things that federated networkscan't offer (ie, no ability to be authoritive, gather enough attention to make money, transfer money). And because of government interference in such things no non-incorporated network will ever be able to provide those things. Attempts to cater to the masses is a waste of time.

But I’ll be honest: I came to the game way later than most of the veterans here (circa 2018). I don’t understand how webrings work, what problem they solve, or how to add one to my Hugo-generated static site.

It's almost like it's impossible to start a platform without algorithmic curation nowadays and not have it turn into a place of repetitive low-effort content.

I just don't think of all of indie web as mass media. Blogs can be for friends and colleagues, they don't necessarily want to maximize 'reach'.

I hope part of this movement manages to reset the whole dynamic of social media. Imagine if instead of always writing for the panopticon, you were just writing to people you cared about. Maybe not even publicly available by default.

Perhaps most people just never went back to thinking of blogging as something you do for the sake of it instead of for some expectation of financial compensation in the future?

In the early days when 90% of bloggers were doing it for passion it seemed like most blogs were good. There was an inflection point around the MySpace & LiveJournal days where it became very easy to be a blogger and some really good writers who otherwise wouldn't have set up a server were part of blogging.. but it went as you say, riding the commercialization train, until 90% of bloggers are doing it for income (or link-farming or whatever). But that doesn't mean all the passionate bloggers became commercially-biased, they are just harder to find.

That's my reading of it, though. I'm sure it's biased by nostalgia. And I'm sure there were people who got caught up in the commercialization and maybe it went as you say, that they never went back to doing it for non-commercial reasons. Like when a hobby becomes an occupation becomes a source of stress. But I've also seen quite a few old blogs that still don't run ads and still post occasionally.

- It forces me to finish things. I was, prior to having a blog, fairly prone to "90% done, I'll finish it later..." sort of stuff, which led to a lot of mental clutter from "having to keep track of what was still inflight."

- I can, after a project is done, confidently flush all details of it from my brain, because anything I found odd or notable that would be worth remembering is noted in my blog posts.

And often enough, I'll end up down a weird research rabbit hole I wouldn't have otherwise gone down, learning about new subjects, so I can write something up with what I feel is enough understanding to competently write about it.

That's a feature, not a bug. "Mainstream" is where the corporate shills and spammers you want to avoid are.

It's like saying that gardening hasn't taken off because most people buy their vegetables at the supermarket. It doesn't need to "take off" to be valuable to those who participate. Maintaining a personal website is about owning your digital presence, creative freedom, and self-expression! It's not about appealing to the masses!

I remember in the early 2000s how I used to spend my leisure time learning HTML and writing my website, one HTML tag at a time. Writing a few lines of code in a text editor and then watching the browser render that code into a vibrant web page full of colours and images felt like an art form. It was doubly fun to find other netizens who shared that same joy of maintaining and publishing their websites. The IndieWeb is about preserving that hacker culture where websites are crafted and hosted not for mass appeal but for the sheer joy of creation and sharing with like-minded individuals.

The IndieWeb doesn't need to go mainstream to be meaningful. It's a celebration of a more personal, decentralised, and creative world wide web. And for those of us who still care about these values, it is already meaningful.

So thanks!

Unfortunately they fixed the set of allowed parameters, the lowest-volume option is 5 per week. Probably good for some people but more than I was looking for.

Discoverability remains the one great problem of online self-publishing. A history of how solutions have changed over the years would make for a fun history of the web.