IndieForums is a proof-of-concept site built around the IndieWeb. All content on this site (with the exception of /self/ posts) is generated through webmentions.

Quick Start

📝 New Thread

Send a webmention from your post to www.indieforums.net. That's it. The cleanest way to do this is an empty a tag with class="u-syndication".

<a href="https://www.indieforums.net" class="u-syndication"></a>

↩️ Reply to a thread

Send a webmention to the URL of said thread:

<a href="https://www.indieforums.net/threads/7de25018ef5fdcbf.html" class="u-syndication</a>

You should include a reply-to webmention back to the original authors site, too. To make this easy, just click reply on any post and the links for that post will be ready for you!

Example of reply

⚠️ Report a post

Click the Report link at the bottom of each post to open a new email (please leave the subject as-is). The body of the email should contain the issue you see with that post.

❓ I don't have a site

Check out the Getting Started section of the IndieWeb wiki. Micro.blog is probably your quickest choice.

But why?

The IndieWeb is a decentralized way of interacting on the internet. Through webmentions, one site (or person, organization, etc) can tell another that it was linked to, that they replied to a post, liked a page, RSVP'd to an event, bookmarked a page, etc. You can also syndicate your post to other sites, and that is the mechanism for publishing to IndieForums. Using the IndieWeb to run a forum means the forum needs no database, usernames, passwords, forms, etc. All content is independently archived somewhere else on the internet.

In my random reading about IndieWeb things, I ran across IndieWeb News, a news aggregator built by Aaron Parecki, one of the founders of the IndieWeb. It looked like an awesome idea and I thought it would be cool to add comments and I thought "I could build that"...so I did!

And why a forum? Who doesn't like old-school forums? You want threaded comments? Not here! Just plain old sort-by-new, single threads.

More site details

This site is statically generated every time a webmention is sent. It doesn't use any client-side javascript. It doesn't track you (well, Netlify does to some degree).

This site is built using the following tools: