Welcome to IndieForums!

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!

⚠️ 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:

• 11ty to build the site
• Github to host the repository
• Netlify to host the site
• Webmention.io to receive webmentions