As stated in my first article of this website, I want my data to belong to me and not depend on third party platforms.
I quote myself:
"And there, one thing was certain, my content had to be my content. It's so obvious you're going to tell me. Yes, but with blogging platforms, we are at the mercy of companies which could close their service or modify their terms of use. At their own will. Our content may therefore no longer be our content."
-- Me - June 2022
This clearly referred to not use a platform to have a blog, but I didn’t think a situation would quickly echo this quote.
With the Twitter case and Elon Musk’s takeover, I figured even the content I share on social media should belong to me. Indeed, the way he ran this company made me want to leave this service. So I looked for a way to recover my content, hoping that this would be possible.
Fortunately, Twitter itself has made available a way to retrieve it.
Since then, I’ve migrated to Mastodon but that’s not enough for me. This is one part of the Fediverse. Its principle, the fact that everything is decentralized, is very interesting. But, who tells me that in the future, companies will not come to gangrenize this system (hello Elon 👋).
I saw a toot comparing the Fediverse to email, which was also open in its early days and is now managed by only a few very large companies. Okay, this is extreme but it made me think.
After this phase, I thought I had to take back control of my data. And what could be better than my website to gather them all, whatever they are.
To that end, I have been researching the IndieWeb. I started to implement the markup recommended in some of my content but I still have a lot left to get what I want.
With the Twitter case and my move to Mastodon, I want to speed things up. I like social media but not the fact that I am at their mercy. That’s why, I decided that my site would become my social network. Ok, not really my social network but I want it to become a central part of my actions on the Web and the concept of POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) that the IndieWeb advocates seems to fit my expectations. I saw the IndieKit which I think is pretty good for implementing all these concepts.
As I searched, I also came across the indiewebring. Many of the sites that are part of it have pages that share their bookmarks, their likes, their checkins, their photos, their reading tracking and many more. It gives me ideas and I really want to be inspired by them.
The advantage of having a personal website is that you can make it evolve as you want, so I know what I have to do 😄.
In any case, it’s decided, 2023 will be the year when I take back control of my data.