A presentation at Loop Conf in in London, UK by Ana Rodrigues
Today I am going to ramble about what a safe personal online space focused on creativity, community, and self-expression could look like.
In sociology, the third space refers to the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home, the first place, and the workplace, second place.
As someone who codes for a living but also as a hobby, attending meet-ups and conferences is my third-space. Frequent attendance can build relationships and community. My understanding is that the folks behind LoopConf also strive for that. You may be here for training for work but there’s also people here who want to gather, interact, and build relationships. You may be looking at familiar faces you’ve seen in previous events.
So I want to share about how my personal website became my online third-space. Not a social media account, not a discord server, not a private slack channel, not a forum, not a Facebook group. Just my website. And by extension, how other people’s personal websites are the same for me.
Hello everyone! My name is Ana Rodrigues and I work as a front-end developer at the tech-for-good agency Hactar and I built my first personal website over 20 years ago.
Unfortunately, for me, I have no hobbies other than coding. I learned to code by building fan sites as a pre-teen in the early 2000s and that carried on as a career.
My home on the web is my blog. This website was originally created sometime in 2014 but in the past I’ve had multiple websites and blogs which thankfully are not online anymore because I was a child then and we know how mature and wise children are!
When I first began to draft this talk, I realised that I was stuck on how to build the story because I knew the end of it. The start is so muddy and long and my cognitive dissonance wasn’t helping. So, in a slightly unorthodox strategy, I will start by sharing what one of my main takeaways is.
So I’m going to attempt to start with the basics. What does it mean to have an online presence nowadays?
For the majority of people, to be online, or to have an online presence, is to have an account on a website owned by a corporation or by someone with too much money.
We will have a personal account somewhere, a professional account elsewhere and perhaps a silly account in another place. Most people may rarely open their browser anymore.
We don’t go “online” anymore or “surf the web”. We’re always on. Always on hold for a push notification.
We go from the big screen on our desks to the little screen on our phones and open the same four websites. In most of them, you can’t even access the content of unless you have an account!
Websites that have give you no transparency on how they use your data, no ownership, no privacy and no safeguards. The landlords of the internet.
But still, what does an online third space look like? To most people, it may be one of those websites. Most likely a group that they are part of inside of those internet walled gardens.
What does an online third space look like in 2025? Discord? Slack? A Facebook group? A Twitch stream?
What did an online third space look like in the past? A phpbb forum? A live journal account? An old chatroom?
Regardless of the tools/companies mentioned when answering these questions, they all seem to have something in common: A community to participate in. But the other thing that kept coming to my head was also a place to wander around. Like we would do physically. A park, a community centre, a library.
In 2017, I was feeling a frustration that I couldn’t explain. Tech twitter was at his peak and my interest in Facebook was long gone. Instagram was still bearable, snapchat was the king and I had forgotten I had a LinkedIn account. I remember feeling stressed that I wasn’t keeping up with all the tech posts from the cool people in twitter.
Tech fomo was real.
I had a blog but who the hell was I to even dare to blog something technical, I thought. I missed the old web. The web I experienced when I knew I could exist as myself in peace without worrying if that’s employable or cringe. I had nostalgia. I missed how I would share fun CSS tricks and GIFs for other people to use without fear. The current web experience gave me anxiety and brought up all my insecurities.
I went to a conference that year and I learned about the IndieWeb community from a talk by Jeremy Keith called “Building Blocks of the Indie Web”. And at the time it spoke to me on a deep level because I had always been the type of person who was keen on learning and sharing in public about code during my teenage years but had stopped ever since I started to work professionally as a developer. And in 2017, my new blog was only 3 years old.
From that talk I learned about the HWC, under the IndieWeb umbrella, is a regular meet-up of people passionate about or interested in creating, improving, building, designing their own website. And one evening, sometime in either 2017 or 2018, I turned up to one meet-up and I’m so glad I did because I wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t. Later on, I became one of the organisers.
And found myself the following year, on the same stage as Jeremy Keith, sharing my frustration on how I wished the front-end community would blog more and tried to encourage people to do it. My arguments were simple: if you only post on places like Twitter, the moment it is is gone, all your content is gone. If it isn’t gone, it isn’t ndable. You should own it. You can have both. Little did I know at the time that I was going to be proven right. Twitter as we knew it is now dead, the front-end community is now split and went to places like BlueSky and Mastodon.
I was ranting about how we blog so little nowadays, but in 2018 I had less than 20 posts in a four year old blog.
That’s five blog posts a year roughly. Better than zero, but a subtle sign that something wasn’t right for me.
So what is this IndieWeb?
Things like your articles, status, images, likes, comments etc would forever be in your ownership, with a permanent link and you can keep a record of it forever in case any platform/social media is deleted or you’re banned.
And it can look something like this. Imagine you have a blog. It shows the latest content published. In this case, Ana’s blog posted an article called “My new article”. It also has a post of type RSVP, a post of type “liked” where she liked and linked to an article in another blog and also a post of type “reply” or “comment” where she replies in her own website to a post called “hello world” from another website.
Then, on a random social media platform, Ana can post as normal sharing the “new article”. It gets 4 likes and one reply.
This is what we mean when we say “post on your website first, then post elsewhere”. There are ways to automate this but I will not be talking about them in this talk, come chat to me after.
Then, in the actual article “my new article”, you can backfeed the interactions received on that social media, and show them and own them on your website. This means that anyone, even if they don’t use that social media platform, can see all the interactions.
But the bridge also can exist to other websites. Imagine Jasper, reads Ana’s article and has an opinion on it. So they create a blog post on their own website. A post of type “reply” and they own that response. And using web mentions, that response can also appear on your own article.
I’ve previously done a slightly more detailed version of this flow.
And it is available on this article I wrote for Smashing Magazine. In it, I went a bit into more detail especially with technical pointers.
All that flow was probably overwhelming but the good news is that Wordpress users may have a little bit less to worry about. The IndieWeb community members have worked on some plug-ins to facilitate that interactive flow - but these may not work with the recent stuff (e.g. Block themes). I was told that in particular the Webmention plug-in has some nice fallbacks. So visit the indie web Wordpress profile to check these out.
So maybe also have a look at indieblocks.xyz as it may suit your current setup better? All this information was available in our wiki but I was also able get some clarity in our dedicated Wordpress channel.
This is my profile in the IndieWeb wiki, which is quite a shy one. My contributions pale in comparison to other members but that’s okay. You do what you can.
We know that it is overwhelming for anyone who isn’t familiar with tech jargon to start - but the community tries in their free time to bridge that gap by suggesting services like Wordpress or Micro.blog that support the IndieWeb.
People in the community share what, why and how they build almost any feature on their websites. We do that because we simply want to make everyone’s life easier. In this example, here’s a list of folks, myself included sharing how they built their privacy policy pages.
It’s 2020, the cursed year, and I am writing more frequently on my blog. I wasn’t necessarily producing a lot of original content, but creating round-up of links, small meta posts and writing and talking about the IndieWeb which made me happy.
It took me a while to figure out.
No one was putting pressure on me but my blog felt like a chore. I wanted to do all the things my IndieWeb peers had on their websites. I wanted to blog more but didn’t know what about. At the time, the landing page of my blog was just a list of blog posts.
Remember the cool flow I showed before? Yeah, I wrote about it but I haven’t actually implemented the majority of it. When I first started to participate in the community and attend their meet-ups and camps, I created this unnecessary pressure on myself to do and use all the protocols and apis suggested in order to create a full “social” experience from my website to corporate silos. So I had to take a big step back.
You don’t have to over-engineer. I’ve been saying since 2018 that “my goal is to create my own micropub endpoint” and I end up only focusing on that and doing nothing else - to little success to this date. And I believe this is what stops a few people from fully embracing the fact that they too are keen on the community. Like myself in the past, there’s a lot of people who may fear that you’re only a real IndieWeb person if you build it all. As lame as it is, I’m going to quote myself:
And wow, took me an embarrassing amount of years to realise, accept and believe in his.
I re-designed it. I imagined what I would like my digital home to look like. I wanted sections to enter and explore. Like a digital garden. They are unfinished but the intention is there.
I wrote a blog post called “in defence of unpolished personal websites” as a kind letter to myself where I believe that my imperfect and unpolished code on my personal website isn’t the full reflection of my technical abilities or knowledge of web development standards.
I was still stuck doom scrolling on places like Twitter. And to be fair, nowadays mostly Mastodon and bluesky but still, I was going back to the same handful of hell websites.
I carved out time to add websites to my RSS reader. Reading posts not limited by character limits, posts not engineered to be promoted by a algo (LinkedIn is guilty of this), reading their long thoughts without hashtags. What a joy having to go beyond my bookmarks and blogrolls. What a joy it is to click links!
Either via webrings, blogrolls etc. Admiring other people’s homes makes me want to work on mine. Not to keep up with them but because they inspired me. They made me admire humans. Admire their craft. Website making is a digital craft. Explore little easter eggs. Truly pass time.
I took the time to tell someone that I thought their website was beautiful and it had brightened my day. And slowly I built “online friends”. We started to respond to each other whenever we posted. Sometimes via email which is now the equivalent of receiving a nice postcard.
But there was still an itch. Many of my past decisions were based on trying to have a professional online persona. I had this rule of sandwiching a personal post in the middle of technical posts. This is caused my our horrible capitalist landscape where you make yourself a product. I wasn’t happy. Not everyone has this choice but it wasn’t working for me. So I had to x this.
I listened to a great podcast called “Hurry Slowly” which asked the question: “who are you without the doing?” and I couldn’t answer. My personal life took turns in recent years that made me wish I could just run to a cabin in the woods. So I knew that part of the answer to my happiness was to live authentically and to me that meant not to be de ned by my job title. And applied these changes all over my website and social media bios. Well, not on LinkedIn of course!
I stopped perusing my own archive from a tech gaze point of view.
These led to more deep connections, more caring emails from readers and new friendships blossoming. Things like my miscarriage, my dad passing away, the brutality of the pandemic and brexit etc.
Do it - it cements your expertise but don’t overthink it.
Come hang out with me. Look at my bookshelf. Come read this bookmark I shared. Let’s talk about it!
I don’t need to see analytics, engagement (or lack of), number of likes, comments or whatever I don’t want to.
No longer feels like a chore. Just something to look forward to. Like gardening, cooking, baking, drawing, reading.
I now have a better understanding of my goals with it and I can change those goals too. If in 2015 I had deleted the whole thing I wouldn’t have appreciated it. You couldn’t make me delete it now.
I have dozens of tabs open at once and they don’t feel like a chore.
And we can reduce it to this. I don’t mind it. But my website exists alongside my first space (home) and my workplace (the second place) without belonging to either.
I now find it playful, relaxing and allows me to transition into my personal focus mode.
Well, let me show you my favourite gem from one of those hell websites.
The goal of a personal website is to be reachable. Your content might just be your name and your contact information. And that’s fine. And you can change your mind anytime. The things I’ve shared might not apply to you today. That’s okay too.
Recently, Paul Robert Lloyd shared a presentation that is a beginner’s guide to the IndieWeb and made it all available on his website - truly living the IndieWeb spirit! And I really recommend it.
The indie/small/cosy/fun/ personal/whimsical web isn’t gone. You’re just not going to find it on Instagram/X/LinkedIn/Facebook/Reddit etc.
But if you want a starting point:
We would love to see any of you pop by our chat and say hi - but it’s okay if you don’t feel like it. I know I am biassed. Join whatever community or safe place that feels better for you - all we can wish for is that you find some time to embrace creating your personal website. This is an audience of engineers, you have the perfect tool to start and the knowledge. Most people can’t even get to that stage.
By having your own personal website you are as indie web as it gets. Whether you participate in the IndieWeb community or not: by having your own personal website you are as indie web as it gets.
for free. You
can too.