Today is Independence Day in the US: happy 4th of July. There will be fireworks and BBQs in the offline world, but let’s also take a couple seconds to think about what independent means on the web.
It’s now fairly obvious that the giant silos that we use have a strong tendency to share a bit more of our data than what we’d want. We’ve trust them with our pictures, our statuses and relationships. They’re in control and it’s not always easy to even take our very own data out of their grips: let’s take our independence!
This starts with owning your presence online: a domain name is cheaper than a phone number, easier to remember and will stay with you for as long as you renew it. It also works from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet access: buy yours today.
Once you have a domain, you need to put something behind it. The level 0 is to setup a redirect to another of your social presences, be it a twitter account, a facebook page… etc. Most registrars will alllow you to do that.
The next level is to configure about.me or tumblr or any other platform that allows it to use your domain directly. You’ll benefit from the the platform’s features, while still own the urls.
If you’re brave enough, you can then think about deploying your own software: a wordpress.org blog, a storytlr, or an Idno, and XMPP server, your own email server… etc.
Don’t be ashmed that it does not look as nice as some silos: golden jails are still jails, mine is ugly!
If you have any of these, think about adding a SubToMe button to make sure people can follow you easily It’s an open and decentralized solution that builds on giants’s shoulders (RSS).
If you’re looking for help, feel free to ask here, or join the IndieWeb community.
Comments