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In reply to: Perhaps I'm not quite reading your meaning properly, but I'm curious about the portion about your having turned off comments. I also notice your link

When I rebooted the blog last year I aspired to the goals of the indieweb but wasn't yet familiar with the #indieweb movement. I knew I wanted ownership of what I was doing but hadn't filled in the fine details.

Consequently, the site is in transition as I adopt different ideas and find how I've previously done things may have to change accordingly.

But, not all parts of the indieweb are for everyone and no one should feel they need to implement everything.

The core principles are enough.

My initial desire was to take full control of what I was doing, that's what was important to (and for) me and that's why I didn't mind outsourcing replies to Medium.

While opening things up to webmentions on all posts (not just the microblog) I still don't want the aggravation of handling local comments so that won't happen.

Those that want to can own their replies, for everyone else Medium is still a service that I support, especially in light of the decision to scrap advertising for membership.

One of the biggest issues facing us on the web is identity. Who are we or, perhaps more accurately, who does the web think we are?

We have become an amalgam of usernames, email addresses and profiles, and who we appear to be depends on which instance is being viewed.

You may say that this is no different to offline life where we are "different people" when interacting with family, friends or work colleagues - and you'd be right. But, even against this backdrop, we have our birth certificate, driving license and passport: officially sanctioned ways to say "this is me."

We need this for the web.

Half way house?

I'll admit I am conflicted about different aspects of the #indieweb like comments, replies and other cross-site actions.

When relaunching the blog last year I deliberately removed all commenting functionality as I didn't want the hassle of handling them at my own site. I did have to re-add a simple comment loop to account for webmentions (how Micro.blog will let you know if replies to posts) but still don't really want to go beyond that in order to support additional elements.

Without the various cross-site actions is it a bit pointless going the #indieweb route if I'm not all in?

I don't believe so and here's why.

The most important aspect of the Indieweb is owning your identity, your proper identity as mentioned above. Everything else stems from that. And, the most stable way of creating an identity is by owning your own domain and all that's connected to it.

Owning your content is a key part of this but that is not entirely possible without your own site.

Controlling who you are and having a fixed identity (not one framed in the context of a social network) is liberating.

Being able to sign in as you on another web property - literally as your domain - rather than as an external and fragmented instance of you, e.g. your Twitter account, is fundamental to what the Indieweb is all about.

We may be able to associate our domain based identity with these external aspects of ourselves by way of rel="me" links but, what if everywhere allowed you to sign in with a single account.

Truly you

What if you were truly you on Twitter or Facebook, if accounts on disparate services were actually all the same identity. Everything related back to a single point. Your single point.

No confusion, no ambiguity.

It won't happen as these silos want to control this identity, have it feed back and work for them.

So, we should support those services that, in turn, support this ideal. Beyond that, we can always dream.

More domain providers & hosting companies need to actively support the #indieweb like iwantmyname. Brilliant post that perfectly articulates why I've made the shift.