Thinking about Bridging

I am writing this post on my phone, which is a challenge in itself.

But at Indiewebcamp Austin this past weekend, I was trying to explain the realization that I had back at the Summit in June.

Bridgy, the prime example of that, was launched in Indieweb form in December 2013. It creates a bridge between Indieweb protocols and proprietary APIs. So you can post on your site, post the same on another site like Twitter(or ask Bridgy to do it for you). And any responses are sent back using Indieweb protocols.

This philosophy encourages inclusivity. It connects those trying to adopt Indieweb principles to those who don’t know what that is seamlessly.

Building these connections between the Indieweb and other systems means you don’t have to give up those systems to join the Indieweb.

Other similar initiatives cannot say that they place such a priority on this. It is a better way to build. It has brought people to the community in my opinion.

The Indieweb principles of modularity suggests you build your platform on pieces that can be swapped out. This was referring to devices, storage methods, etc.

Several large companies are collaborating on the Data Transfer Project, to allow you to move your data from one platform to another with one click.. but they aren’t necessarily thinking about syncing to keep usable backups in multiple places.

But between it and plurality, which suggests we encourage a variety of approaches and implementations, we didn’t as a community explain our principles of connecting things even if they don’t follow these principles. We have just done it.

I have come across this in trying to help implement a Microsub endpoint, which turns any input into the same format, so you can read it in a client that doesn’t have to know about the original format.

Trying to turn RSS, Jsonfeed, Microformats, etc into a single type of output is a challenge I am still working on. But I could go farther with that.

If you make everything interoperate, you don’t have to cut yourself off from one group, one data source, etc. You can bring everything together and the part of it that is yours is still under your control.