WWW = Weird, Weird Web

My first experiment with the IndieWeb, broadly speaking, was to catalog as many websites as I could. And to my surprise, thanks to a well-organized Linkding setup, I had thousands of them by early 2025.

At the time, I didn't know much about the tools used in the IndieWeb. I was figuring things out on my own. You know how it is, this isn't very common in Brazil. And while the concept was broad, it was still pretty vague to me.

What makes something part of the IndieWeb?

Being small? Decentralized? Using microformats?

I'd say it's none of those things in particular. It's the possibility of connecting and customizing things that makes something part of the IndieWeb.

In the end, it's anything you can take and reshape. Anything you can make your own. And that goes beyond the idea of something being personal, because even Facebook is personal. But how much of it can you actually customize?

Anyway, I see it as tools shaped closely around the needs of the person who created them. Thinking about it that way makes the idea of the IndieWeb a little more concrete and less abstract.

Another thing worth considering is what people learn as they explore this ocean of projects, and how they eventually end up creating something of their own.

Since I knew nothing about what was, to me, still an abstract idea, I started cataloging every site I'd collected. Later, I automated part of the process with a few Python scripts to make it easier. And from that catalog, weirdnet.org was born.

It turned out really well, but I wanted to share it with the world. So I started letting people send me websites, which I'd review and add. I eventually stopped doing the reviewing, though. I'm not a judge. As long as someone had something personal, something of their own, I'd add it. All you had to do was be yourself and feel comfortable doing so.

I was surprised to see in the Nginx logs that people were visiting. Quite a lot of people, actually. Even without Search Console or Analytics, and even if I hadn't checked the logs, I could tell from the number of emails I was getting every day.

I'm telling you all this because weirdnet.org is going through a refactor. I need to make it easier to add links to the directory, something that's still done manually to this day. Not that the manual part is going away, because that's part of its charm. It'll stay, but I need to be able to accept more submissions and review them gradually. And, of course, stop relying on email.

We're one step away from having a CMS. And I also want to say that Weirdfind.org is still in development.

I hope to share more by the end of December about the crawler we've built and how it will work.

Cheers.