Discovering the indieweb with calm tech

12/7/2025 at 12:14:35 PM

I've been messing with and collecting stuff like this for many years. Some links:

- On building kind, sustainable software: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/kind-software/

- Example projects (toys instead of blogs): https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/projects-and-apps-i-built-f...

- Wishlist: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/things-to-support-my-own-we...

- List of places to find indie content (something I used for my weekly newsletter): https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/places-to-find-indie-web-co...

Nowadays my current approach is:

1) meeting folks via Say Hi (unoffice hours)

2) keeping a separate RSS feed in NetNewsWire called People - this feed contains only the people I've met online or in person

EDIT: I almost forgot, but my partner wrote a cool intro to Indieweb for less techie folks: https://newpublic.substack.com/p/the-handmade-internet-is-ma...

It includes interviews with some of the people you might know from here :)

by rpastuszak

12/7/2025 at 1:43:45 PM

Nice! You might add Prezi as inspiration for zooming and panning across the live dynamic environments, islands on your everything canvas in: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/an-everything-canvas/

by rapnie

12/8/2025 at 5:08:55 PM

Ha, it's been ages since I heard about Prezi, thanks!

Related to Prezi, but not my earlier comment: I'm actually messing with a little toy project: a Playdate (http://play.date) remote to control presentations/media/Claude Code

It would be (useless, but) fun to be able to control the animation transitions (like those in Prezi) using the crank!

by rpastuszak

12/7/2025 at 1:51:26 PM

Hey, author for Blog Quest here, thanks for the kind words! I give a huge thanks to tvler for StreetPass for Mastodon, which did the heavy lifting and inspired me.

Please send along any feature requests, I know there are rough edges and more eyes will help find them. I'm also trying to decide if the RSS feature should be pushed upstream to StreetPass, or if the extensions are best staying separate. Thanks all :)

by 8organicbits

12/7/2025 at 8:40:10 AM

That is great. I didn't know I needed this.

After browsing for a few minutes I found that it really needs to have some kind of filter mechanism. For example, on old.reddit.com each post has its individual feed, while on blogspot you have both RSS and Atom feed.

by qWoodpecker

12/7/2025 at 1:12:11 PM

It's incredible. I don't know the guy and I'm not being paid to say this, but I really think Blog Quest is a stroke of genius.

The article totally buries the lead, so for anyone who misses it: this is a browser extension which simply keeps track of a list of the RSS feeds of websites you've browsed, so that later you can subscribe to them if you want to. It was forked from an extension which does the same for Mastodon.

It solves a very simple problem, which is that when I'm browsing a website I'm usually not thinking about subscribing to it, but later on when I'm reading my feeds, I wish I could add some more.

Blog Quest does what Mozilla was supposed to do with their hundreds of millions of dollars. From the moment that they declared their mission was to promote the open Web and negotiated an annual nine figure check out of Google. This is where the money should have gone: easy UX for people to subscribe to websites through an open standard, laying the groundwork for a free social graph on top of it one day. If they had done it at the right time they might have changed the course of history (again?).

Sadly they didn't. For 15 years they gradually buried RSS and then one day some random dude just throws a browser extension out there better than anything they ever did in the space. Extension of the year. Massive kudos to this guy.

by safety1st

12/7/2025 at 1:41:52 PM

Author of Blog Quest here, good point, I'll track that as a feature request. I'm open to ideas on how the filtering should work. I could roll-up feeds for each domain (hello public suffix list), but I don't think that works well for home-dir style hosting (example.com/username). Maybe the user can set a policy to filter out or roll-up certain domains?

Deduplicating RSS and Atom makes a lot of sense too.

Thanks for trying it out!

by 8organicbits

12/7/2025 at 4:19:55 PM

Yeah - for a lot of people deduplication would probably make sense. I have - for example - four feeds on my private page (blog posts, quotes, photo-galleries and a roll-up feed containing everything). So whenever I post anything, two of those feeds get populated. But I wanted to give people the option to only subscribe to the categories of content, they are interested in.

by sdoering

12/7/2025 at 8:57:58 AM

My experience to a T.

The "calm tech" concept works really well with the fediverse identities because it's such a niche concept that at the end of a day of browsing you'll get a handful of entries, but for something as ubiquitous as RSS you get a ton of useless feeds that are just. But I really, really like the basic idea, I'll see if I can apply it to the things I'm building. :)

by mariusor

12/7/2025 at 1:04:43 PM

Yeah after some refinement, this seems like a really cool tool. Needs to work on Firefox for Android :)

by coldpie

12/7/2025 at 5:44:03 AM

It's surprising that it took this long for such a simple extension to appear. What a brilliant way to passively crawl high-signal content

by mvkel

12/7/2025 at 2:53:25 PM

The best tool for significantly reducing noise across social media while remaining connected is the News Feed Eradicator. LinkedIn is a particularly important tool for me, as I use this social media network a lot for work, but I can't allow myself to be distracted by it. With this little tool, I can set exactly how many minutes a day I want to spend on the feed without losing the ability to contact others directly via LinkedIn. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/news-feed-eradicato...

by protontypes

12/7/2025 at 6:32:39 AM

Source post: https://indieweb.social/@robalex/115675680018007724

by DavideNL

12/7/2025 at 9:13:39 AM

ironically, the blog lacks a rel=me link that would make streetpass work on it :)

by riffraff

12/7/2025 at 1:33:29 PM

Oops, added. Thanks :)

by 8organicbits

12/7/2025 at 7:24:55 AM

Surely the blog post itself comes before the social post linking to the blog post. The blog post is the source.

by ChrisArchitect

12/7/2025 at 7:28:49 AM

Obviously;

"Eugene" [1] boosted the post, which is how it gained attention i believe. That's what i meant with "source" ;-)

[1] https://mastodon.social/@Gargron

by DavideNL

12/7/2025 at 4:57:29 AM

This is excellent UX for feed discovery. I always found the feed subscription thing distracting- usually I am reading blogs to solve a problem or research and not collect/socialize. That is something I am in the mood for later.

by philips

12/9/2025 at 2:07:00 PM

Learned so many things from this post -- calm tech, StreetPass, and BlogQuest. Thank you!

by rampatra

12/8/2025 at 8:04:41 AM

What I love about this post is that it highlights something we rarely talk about: most of the “indie web” isn’t missing — it’s just quiet.

Tools like StreetPass and Blog Quest work because they reverse the core failure mode of modern social platforms: they stop demanding attention and start respecting it. Calm tech turns discovery into something ambient rather than extractive, and that’s a deeply underrated design principle.

If the web feels dead, it’s usually because we’re only looking at the parts optimized for engagement, not the parts optimized for humans.

by kaluga

12/8/2025 at 3:15:57 PM

ai spam comment about why the web feels dead, lol, ironic?

by dematz