projects

From IndieWeb
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There are many projects you can use to get your site on the IndieWeb, improve your IndieWeb support, or browse for inspiration for your own project; please note, some development ability and familiarity with command line tools will likely be required for you to use and improve these projects.

For simpler services you can use to get on the IndieWeb without using a command line, see:

Most projects are open source (AKA free software, F/OSS, FLOSS or FOSS), if you’re looking for starting points in a particular programming language, see:

Get On The IndieWeb

These projects are:

  • IndieWeb friendly
  • Actively in use by many
  • Typically in use by their creators (embodying the use what you make principle)
  • Can be installed on a website to get you on the IndieWeb
  • Open source

In rough order of adoption and active use by the IndieWeb community:

Known

Main article: Known

Known (formerly idno) is open source publishing software that supports a great degree of IndieWeb technologies and principles by default and is used by many IndieWeb for their primary site.

Notable examples:

See Known#IndieWeb_Examples for more!

Known has an active IndieWeb development community:

WordPress

Main article: WordPress

WordPress is open source software you can use to create a website or blog. Many IndieWebCamp participants use WordPress on their primary site with a set of plugins developed by members of this community to provide IndieWeb functionality.

Notable IndieWeb community examples, all plug-in authors, all eat what they cook:

See WordPress Examples for more!

WordPress has an active IndieWeb development community:

micro.blog

Main article: micro.blog

micro.blog is a hosted microblogging service that lets you publish content on the web and interact with other community members who use the site in their custom platform.

micro.blog implements various IndieWeb features such as rel=me links, offering support for adding a personal domain to your site, and syndication features.

IndieWeb participants who use micro.blog for their main site include:

Many more community members syndicate their sites to micro.blog, too.

Jekyll

Main article: Jekyll

Jekyll is a blog-aware, static site generator.

IndieWebCamp participants who are using it on their primary self-identifying site:

Drupal

Main article: Drupal

Drupal is a popular open source content management system. It needs better documentation for how to install and set it up as an IndieWeb friendly personal site.

Notable examples:

Hugo

Main article: Hugo

Hugo is a blog-aware, static site generator.

IndieWebCamp participants who are using it on their primary self-identifying site:

Statiq

Statiq Web is a static web site generation toolkit built with .NET suitable for most use cases. It's built on top of Statiq Framework so you can always extend or customize it beyond those base capabilities as well.

Connect With Services

The following projects are actively being used by both their creators (following the use what you make principle) and many others in the IndieWeb community as additions to or services to enhance their personal sites with connections to and interactions with other content sites.

Bridgy

Main article: Bridgy

Bridgy is a service that backfeeds replies to your POSSE copies to your site, and publishes POSSE copies to your silo profiles.

IndieWebCamp participants that are using it with their primary site:

Webmention.io

Main article: webmention.io

webmention.io is an open-source project written in Ruby and a hosted service for receiving webmentions and pingbacks on behalf of your IndieWeb site.

IndieWebCamp participants who are using it on their own site:


Get Inspired

These projects are:

  • IndieWeb friendly
  • Actively in use only by one or a few
  • Their creator(s) are using what they make
  • Sometimes can be installed on a website to get you on the IndieWeb.
  • At least partially open source

The following projects are actively being used at a minimum by their creators for their own personal sites (using what they make) and have excellent examples of IndieWeb sites both in design, and IndieWeb feature support.

These projects may not yet be easily installable by someone other than the creator(s).

These projects often provide building blocks functionality or more in the form of open source shared libraries or functions which can help bootstrap anyone looking to build their own IndieWeb solution.

Alphabetically ordered:

Dobrado

Main article: dobrado

dobrado is a multi user content management system written in PHP and Javascript. It's designed to make it easy to create and edit pages without any technical knowledge. Installation can be done using Git or downloading the latest zip archive (to install software onto your server) and editing one configuration file.

IndieWeb community examples:

Falcon

Main article: Falcon

Falcon is a personal publishing and content presentation system written in PHP and CASSIS.

Open source:

IndieWebCamp participants who are using it on their primary site:

FrancisCMS

Main article: FrancisCMS

FrancisCMS is an IndieWeb-friendly open source content management system built with Ruby on Rails. Installation is of moderate difficulty for someone familiar with Rails. The documentation is pretty thorough but does require some specific knowledge.[1]

Examples:

Indiekit

Main article: Indiekit

Indiekit is a self-hosted Node.js server that uses the Micropub API to publish content to a content store, be that a local file system destination, an FTP server or Git repository. A high degree of customisation is provided, and a plug-in API enables integration with other services and protocols.

IndieWebCamp participants that are using it on their primary site:

kaku

Main article: kaku

kaku is a personal publishing static site toolset.

IndieWebCamp participants that are using it on their primary site:

Publ

Main article: Publ CMS

Publ is fluffy's blogging and content management platform which uses category-based templates that provide content-appropriate presentation to different kinds of content (blogs, music, comics, art, and many more).

p3k

Main article: p3k

p3k is personal publishing platform.

IndieWebCamp participants that are using it on their primary site:

Twyne

A blogging system in which everything is a post. Supports syndications, replies, and a bunch of other indieweb ideas. User manual: https://twyne.readthedocs.io/

In use at:

WWWTech

Main article: WWWTech

WWWTech is open source personal publishing software written in Phoenix. See its Github repo. IndieWebCamp participants that are using it on their primary site:

Additional Site Options

These projects are:

  • Not IndieWeb friendly by default (require additional work to interoperate)
  • Actively in use by some (or on major sites)
  • Sometimes their creator(s) use what they make
  • Sometimes can be installed on a website to get you on the IndieWeb.
  • Sometimes open source, or source available to paid users

The following projects either may be production quality or have IndieWeb community members using them on their own domains, however likely require non-trivial additional work (possibly coding) to add IndieWeb support, and are often are not actively used by their creators.

If you like challenges and helping people at the same time, these might be for you.

Try one out with your own site, and if you like it, jump in with code contributions to make it IndieWeb friendly (either by default or by following easy setup/plugin instructions), become an active developer on the project, and help elevate it up to use what you make status!

MediaWiki

Main article: MediaWiki

MediaWiki is software you can install to create a wiki website.

Perch

Main article: Perch

Perch and Perch Runway are a content management systems based on PHP+MySQL. Offered in two flavors, Perch is for smaller sites and Perch Runway geared for sites which have large collections of content. Webmention is supported via plugin and the developers behind Perch have shown active interest in adding additional IndieWeb functionality.

ProcessWire

Main article: ProcessWire

ProcessWire is an open source content management system/content management framework.

IndieWeb participants that are using it on their personal site:

WikiSuite

Main article: WikiSuite

WikiSuite is open source software that can be used to run a website.

Notable users:

Side Projects

The following projects may add some independent / decentralized functionality to an existing IndieWeb site. Consider them only after you have your personal site setup to post content etc.

Libravatar

Main article: libravatar

libravatar is software that can provide independent avatar hosting (like Gravatar, but decentralized)

IndieWebCamp participants who are using it:

Other Projects

Have you found another project that claims to be IndieWeb, or federated, or decentralized, or distributed and think it should be listed here or are not sure if it should be? Then:

Ask Questions

There are two pretty simple questions you can ask that will help you sift through perhaps 99% of the other projects out there.

  1. Are there human names of project creators on the project home page?
    • Does the project have actual humans behind it who are proud enough of it to put their names on it?
      • If the creators of the project are so unsure of it that they do not want to put their names on the home page, then you should likely also be skeptical about it. You can stop here.
  2. Are the creators using what they make?
    • If you found the names of the actual humans behind the project, then you should be able to find their personal sites. If not, you can also stop here, because if the creators themselves do not have personal sites, it is unlikely that they (or their project) will empathize with those with personal sites.
    • Do their personal websites use their own project? This is perhaps the most important question for determining whether a project is real and usable or not. If the creators of the project themselves are not confident enough in their project to use it on their own personal sites, why should you?
      • Note the emphasis on personal website which is key to use what you make. It’s nice (but not necessary, nor sufficient) that the project website (if any) uses the project itself.

If you have answered a firm YES to these two questions about a project, you may add that project to this page (like to the end of the Get Inspired section) with names, personal sites, and citations of how those sites are using the project.



below this line is...

Under Construction

This page is being simplified and focused on providing a quickly usable list of projects to help you get on the IndieWeb and improve your IndieMark. For details about this page and the in-progress transition, see About This Page.

Experimental

Stuff that you've at least got running on your own site, but is perhaps not stable/reliable enough for general sharing / use by others. Still useful to document what you *do* have running and use, share some of the code/design/UX, and lessons learned. Roughly ordered first by how "complete" the blogging/posting functionality is with known (URL required) attendee users, then other content tools, and other building blocks.

Experimental blogging / content hosting projects sorted by number of IndieWeb community members actively using them on their own primary personal site (and then alphabetically).

Bundle

Main article: Bundle

Bundle is a set of publishing tools for the IndieWeb built using Python and Django.

Depends on:

Status:

  • Experimental. Some parts are open source installable by others e.g. Connection.

Useage by IndieWeb community members:

gopost

Main article: gopost

gopost is a simple tool to make posts to several social networks and also generate a webtemplate-snippet to embed in your (static) website. It is written in Go and runs as single Application. It is work in progress.

gopost can be found on GitHub and is developed by Alexander Kulbartsch.

Hakkan

Main article: Hakkan

Hakkan is a personal publishing toolkit. It is being used to generate and aggregate content for Bear's Log.

IndieWeb related functions shared in Ronkyuu

  • WebMention
  • Rel=me

IndieWebCamp participants who are using it on their primary site:

pump.io

Main article: pump.io

Pump.io is "a stream server that does most of what people really want from a social network."

IndieWebCamp participants who are using it on their own site:

sadlittlewebjournal

sadlittlewebjournal is a Weblog written in Perl that uses PostgreSQL or MySQL and a straightforward ASCII interface. Site maintenance is done via an intuitive backend that allows one to add, delete, and modify previous entries. Other features include an integrated guestbook, a Web stat chart complete with ASCII bar graphs, and various other modularized features.

Current POSSE feature include publishing news posts to an external Twitter or StatusNet feed, but the PESOS alternative is also supported: republishing posts syndicated from such a feed. On the roadmap are comments using webmentions and microformats.

IndieWeb enthusiasts currently using it on their own site:

Taproot

Main article: Taproot

Taproot is Barnaby Walters’ publishing software. It’s written in PHP 5.4 and drives most of waterpigs.co.uk. It is not currently released to the public, although parts of it are.

IndieWebCamp participants who are using it on their own site:

Transformative

Main article: Transformative

Transformative is  Barry Frost's open source IndieWeb personal website software, in use at barryfrost.com since 2016-11-10. All Ruby source code is available on GitHub.

IndieWebCamp participants who are using it on their own site:

Postly

Main article: Postly

Postly is Ben Roberts' blogging platform. Based in PHP and MySQL it aims to be a platform for easy creation of experimental features. The source code is available on GitHub.

IndieWeb enthusiasts currently using it on their own site:

Voto

Main article: Voto

Voto is Vasilis van Gemert's personal photo gallery. He's written about the ideas behind it on his blog.

IndieWeb enthusiasts currently using it on their own site:

triki

triki is semantic web server used to publish blogs, recommendations, photos, albums and really any sort of content. Supports groups to control sharing with groups/friends. Written in Java with Apache JENA triplestore back-end. Supports IndieAuth and Activity Streams 2.0. Next up is Microblog.

IndieWebCamp participants that are using it on their own site:

neopub

Main article: neopub

The blogging software that runs micro.geheimesite.nl. It is written in PHP and saves posts in a large JSON file that is reset every year. It has a built-in micropub endpoint that sends webmentions. Supports notes, replies, bookmarks, likes and reposts.

Other Experimental Projects

Other projects which are experimental quality but are not primary blogging / content hosting projects (the heart of an IndieWeb site).

IndieAuth and RelMeAuth

Main article: IndieAuth

IndieAuth is a way to use your own domain name to sign in to websites. It works by linking your website to one or more authentication providers such as Twitter or Google, then entering your domain name in the login form on websites that support it.

IndieWebCamp participants' sites using IndieAuth:

IndieWebCamp participants' sites using RelMeAuth:

  • Tantek: http://tantek.com/falcon/ - for posting to tantek.com, or for others to post to Twitter.
    • See also: http://tantek.com/relmeauth/ for testing your site's RelMeAuth support (though signing into IndieWebCamp with IndieAuth currently provides better feedback, you may find this also useful for testing. - Tantek 15:46, 23 March 2013 (PDT) )
  • ...

IndieWeb Reply

A cross-browser extension which hijacks social sharing buttons across the web and reply, favourite and retweet buttons on twitter.com to redirect to your own site whilst retaining metadata like profiled text for you to use in your own UIs. Available on GitHub.

Own Your Comments

An experimental cross-browser extension to help people retain ownership of the comments they leave on the web by hijacking existing comment UIs and injecting customised ones. Available on GitHub.

phubb

Main article: phubb

Self hosted PHP PubSubHubbub server

People who are using it on their own site:

Pingback2hook

Self hosted Pingback/Webmention middleware (written in PHP, inspired by Webmention.io) that takes pings, stores them, and fires off webhooks. Provides a query API.

People who are using it on their own site:

Code
https://github.com/mapkyca/pingback2hook

stapibas

Main article: stapibas

Standalone pingback server written in PHP, storing data in MySQL.

  • Features:
    • Receive webmentions and pingbacks
    • Send out webmentions/pingbacks to each link on an HTML page

IndieWeb enthusiasts using it on their primary site:

Similar to #Pingback2hook and #Webmention.io.

Whistle

Whistle is an algorithmically reversible personal URL shortener. There is an instance of Whistle running at ttk.me.

IndieWebCamp participants who are using it on their own site:

WhisperFollow

Main article: Whisperfollow

WhisperFollow is a WordPress based social aggregator that currently supports RSS, Atom and PubSubHubbub.

IRC

Aaron Parecki uses a private IRC server with several channels as a personal communications hub. This project has no specific name, and has no single code base, and is highly experimental. However, he has been using and developing it for almost three years.

The bot in the IRC channel can control lights in the house, do text to speech on computers inside the house, shows Twitter mentions and wiki edits, do unit conversion and other calculations, manage a "todo" list, and sometimes makes snarky remarks.

Its modular structure has made it extremely easy to quickly add new functionality, and as such, has probably slowed Aaron's development on other more accessible web-based equivalents.

ostatus-unofficial

Unhosted

  • The idea here is to use statically hosted MVC apps and projects like remotestorage.io + local browser storage as a way to write applications that can work offline and edit data stored on the web.
  • Michiel B. de Jong uses a webserver pointed at his remotestorage files to host his website.

DiSo Actionstream for WordPress

DiSo Actionstream for WordPress enables syndication of content from other sites to your own or writing a bit of code to insert local items. This powers both the full actionstream at singpolyma.net and also the self-hosted microblog at µ.singpolyma.net

IndieWebCamp participants who are using it on their primary self-identifying site:

  • ...

Other independents that are using it on their primary self-identifying site:

static site checker

The static site checker, an opinionated HTML nitpicker, is a linter intended to verify static, hand-coded websites. It's a pre-alpha command line tool for those who prefer to be free of CMS design limitations. It's used by its author, dylan harris, on arts & ego and corrupt press. It verifies most published versions of HTML, schema.org and microformats semantic data, links, etc.. It's written in C++ and requires recent versions of cmake, boost, and clang / gcc / msvc. The source, and executables for Windows 10 x64, macOS and Centos, can be found on arts & ego and github.

Pushl

Main article: Pushl

Pushl is a tool for pushing out WebSub/Webmention pings from sites in a consistent, automated manner. It's intended to be used with anything that presents an RSS/Atom feed.

Authl

Main article: Authl

Authl is a Python library for adding federated identity (IndieAuth/OAuth/email magic links/etc.) to applications, including Flask bindings, primarily for supporting private posts but could be used for other login flows as well.


owl-blogs

Owl-blogs is a blogging software written in Go. It supports Webmention and ActivityPub.

Hacks

Stuff that you've hacked on, perhaps you intend to run on your own site, sometimes run on your own site (i.e. for testing rather than as a part of your day-to-day real world usage), used to run on your own site, or in development plugins.

We hope to see stuff here migrate up to experimental!

Alphabetical by project name:

ownCloud

Main article: ownCloud

Self-hosted personal web services: ownCloud has file manager, music, calendar, contacts and much more!

IndieWebCamp participants who are/were using it:

  • Johannes Ernst (2013) and his family are running it for our family calendar, contacts and shared files (e.g. to-do-lists)
  • cweiske (2014) is running it for file sync and calendars

Publify

Main article: Publify

Publify is a Ruby on Rails blogging engine with extended publishing capacities that's recently been taking a turn as an IndieWeb project. Publify and supported plugins are free software released under the MIT licence. Publify needs a database like MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite.

Master currently supports the following IndieWeb features:

  • Classic blogging engine with API, plugins, RSS/Atom...
  • POSSE to Twitter with short messages
  • H-review on default themes
  • Self hosted URL shortener
  • PESOS for formerly posted tweets

Current IndieWeb users that are actively using it on their primary self-identifying site:

  • none

Past IndieWeb users:

  • Frédéric de Villamil (neuro`) (2006 - 2016-04-28): t37.net
  • Don Park (donpdonp) (~2008-2015?) on donpark.org
    • currently donpark.org looks like a single static HTML page

Smallest Federated Wiki

Other Hacks

Hacks that are not primary blogging / content hosting projects.

Explorations

These aren't even experiments yet - more like concepts in progress and being developed

Related explorations:

Other

Here's where all other IndieWeb/FSW related projects go, including / especially those which are:

  • not used by any IndieWebCamp participants
  • or maybe just a spec (no code)

Despite their disused or theoretical nature, we may still be able to learn from the strengths and weaknesses of other approaches, document formats/protocols, etc. and try to merge efforts.

Diaspora

Main article: Diaspora

Diaspora is an open source project for hosting a social network on your own server that federates with other Diaspora instances, which are called "pods".

IndieWeb community members who are using it on their own site:

  • Élie Michel tries to use it on its own pod, although the federation system does not completely convince him.

Ghost

Main article: Ghost

Ghost is a simple and powerful blogging platform that was first written about by John O'Nolan, the former lead for Wordpress's UI team.

He described Ghost as an "idealistic and fictional concept for a WordPress-lite fork"[2]. During a 29 day Kickstarter campaign, Nolan raised £196,362 [3].

After two years, John O'Nolan released an article that described "How we Spent The Kickstarter Money, where we are now, and what's next for Ghost".[4]

Ghost is an open source application available for free self-hosting and offers Ghost(Pro), upon a premium managed-SaaS service hosted with Digital Ocean. Ghost boasts a large community of contributors, and runs as a npm module ontop of NodeJS and Express.

GNU social

Main article: GNU social

GNU social is an open source project that "will be a decentralized social network that you can install on your own server".

No IndieWeb community members are using it on their own site.

OStatus for WordPress

OStatus for WordPress is a collection of plugins to make WordPress blogs followable by status.net and other OStatus instances.

No IndieWeb community members are using it on their own site.

If we could get IndieWeb participation by some folks using OStatus, it would be great to understand how well it works today.

Postcard

Postcard is an iOS app that allows you to post content on multiple social networks. It lets one network serve as the 'host' and the remaining networks share a link back to it.

The Postcard API Protocol also allows the app to communicate with your own site. A WordPress plugin that implements this API has been released along with the iOS app.

  • Aaron Parecki commented to the developer on 2014-02-19, inviting him to join the IndieWeb conversation.
  • No IndieWeb community members are currently using it on their own site.

Shaarli

Main article: Shaarli

Shaarli is a minimalist delicious clone you can install on your own website. It is designed to be personal (single-user), fast, and handy.

It is primarily a bookmarking application, but the feature list indicates you can also ". . . use it for micro-blogging (like Twitter), a pastebin, an online notepad, a snippet repository, etc."

IndieWeb community members who are using it on their own site:


UBOS (Indie Box Project)

http://ubos.net/ management software that allows the simple administration of IndieWeb sites on cheap Linux devices and plug computers.

UBOS is the successor to the former IndieBox project.

Used by:

  • Johannes Ernst is using it at home for web applications used by his family. Those include OwnCloud, Shaarli, Selfoss, Wordpress, and some home-grown ones.

Squiso

Main article: Squiso

Squiso wants to create a decentralized open social web, by allowing users to host their own social data or trust a service provider of their choice.

Used and primary developed by:

Services

These services are not projects that you can install and don't belong on the projects page, need to find a better place for them.

WordPress.com

WordPress.com is a hosted blog service that runs on WordPress. It includes microformats v1 by default, and you can author microformats2 by editing your template's HTML. You can also use Bridgy to send and receive webmentions. That combination makes WordPress.com a first-class (if limited) IndieWeb platform.

Tumblr

Main article: Tumblr

Tumblr is a hosted blog service. You can author microformats by editing your template's HTML, and you can use Bridgy to send and receive webmentions. That combination makes Tumblr a first-class (if limited) IndieWeb platform.

Blogger

Main article: Blogger

Blogger is a hosted blog service. It includes microformats v1 by default, and you can author microformats2 by editing your template's HTML. You can also use Bridgy to send and receive webmentions. That combination makes Blogger a first-class (if limited) IndieWeb platform.

Abandoned

See: former_projects#Abandoned

About This Page

The projects page is focused on providing a clear flat list of projects you can set up on your own site to join the IndieWeb.

(new!) Even more focus being considered on:

  • curating it to be specifically about: "Projects incubated by and also actively in use by the IndieWeb Community" (and moving any other projects to subpages) per https://chat.indieweb.org/meta/2018-06-19/1529430532439600
    • ... (please provide feedback +1/0/-1 with name and preferably reasoning too) ...
    • ...

Help Update This Page With

Some design thinking for this page.

  • Project inclusion requirements:
    • IndieWeb community adoption and active use
      • MUST have 1+ active user who is active in the community
      • MUST support 1+ key indieweb building blocks (microformats2, Webmention, Micropub, what else?)
        • Can we rephrase this as an IndieMark level requirement? E.g. IndieMark Level 2+ only?
    • use what you make
  • Project ordering criteria:
    • 1. What can I setup right now to get on the IndieWeb?
      • Prefer community member maintained projects over general tools
    • 2. What projects have inspiring IndieWeb examples? For example,
      • Have a reasonably nice looking home page and permalinks
        • Must provide 1-3 real world live examples with thumbnail screenshots
      • Then ordered by apparent (actual in use) IndieMark level
  • Each project listing should:
    • list a few (1-3 max) IndieWeb examples actively using the project that are:
      • "tour-worthy" - sites you'd want to show someone new to the IndieWeb as clear examples of appealing / useful / empowering IndieWeb sites.
      • The nicest looking home page and permalinks (should have at least decent visual design / usability)
      • preferably exemplary - i.e. be of high IndieMark
      • at least 1 eat what they cook example of (most) primary project developer
    • link to complete list of active users on the actual project page "IndieWeb Examples" section
  • Sections
    • Get rid of release vs experimental vs. etc. This distinction was useful originally, but now # of active IndieWeb users acts as a better evaluation of project usability/usefulness. Many "experimental" projects are more useful/usable and advancing faster than officially released/stable projects.
    1. Primary IndieWeb site software (e.g. Known, p3k, Publify, Taproot, Ferocity, Falcon)
    2. Service hubs / proxies (e.g. webmention.io, brid.gy)
    3. Open source frameworks, libraries used by the above, also using what they make, helpful building blocks for those who wish to build their own site software. See related mention in ideas for active projects.

+1 to this --Bret Comnes 15:25, 18 June 2014 (PDT)

  • Former Projects
    • Move projects that fail inclusion requirements noted above to a separate page
    • former projects

Avoid Cluttering This Page With

Please avoid cluttering this page with:

  • "random crap I'm working on" - wikify that to your User page instead
  • "random crap I found other people working on" - either:
    • ask about it on IRC to see if anyone cares - if no one responds/cares - then don't add it to the wiki
    • OR install such things yourself on your personal site, and document your experience on your User page
  • Other directories of open source projects
    • instead: look at specific projects in such directories and then see "random crap I found other people working on" above.

Formerly

Formerly this page was split into various categories as follows:

Split into production, experimental, hacks, and explorations as well as other for projects that are or appear to be IndieWeb related but are either not in use by any attendee or status is unknown.

Within each quality level the projects are listed by:

  • Primary blogging / content hosting systems listed first, additional content hosting systems (e.g. for a specific content type only), and then other useful IndieWeb building block projects.
  • Then by # of IndieWebCamp participants + other independents using each project.

Sorted within each quality level by number of IndieWebCamp participants actively using it on their primary self-identity site (thus you can quickly see which projects are the most "real", in-use, and likely well supported).

See Also