Earlier, I mentioned the IndieWeb in a post that was at least ostensibly about security. Since then, I’ve done more poking about and have found that this is a fairly well organized movement. The IndieWeb concept actually has several components.

• Identity – both having one’s own domain and using it, via rel=”me” attributes on links, as a source if identity on the web, (think OpenID – The Next Generation)
• POSSE (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere).  The idea is to have the site you control be where everything is published first.  Then you push that content wherever else you want it to go (particularly silos like Facebook or Twitter),  Replies and comments are pulled back to the original site via webmentions and backlinks.. Known is an  in-development out of the box solution for all of this, but I want to see what I can do with the tools (like WordPress) that I already have deployed.

On a similar front, Mike Caulfield has been posting up a storm about Smallest Federated Wiki and wondering what happens when a wiki becomes an individual repository, linked to other wikis via federation and forking rather than as a shared space.

Let’s face it, the big silos (Twitter, Facebook, G+) aren’t going away anytime soon. The advantages they have over the open web in terms of network effects and discovery will protect their position.  Projects like IndieWebCamp and SFW show how the silos can be routed around.