Own Your Content on Social Media Using the IndieWeb

Originally presented at JAMstack_conf_sf in San Francisco, CA USA 🇺🇸 on October 17, 2019. Based on the blog post I’m Taking Ownership of my Tweets on this very web site.

For this talk I built a social media platform: MySpaceBook.​info, the only social media site exclusively for astronauts. Unfortunately midway through the presentation an investor called me up to make an offer on the site and I was left with no choice but to sell it, taking all of the user data down with it. If you use the principles I outline in this talk, you would have been able to take agency over your data, preserving it on your own terms.

Abstract #

You’ve been posting to Medium, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. The gardens are walled. The silos are tall.

Inevitably when we are beholden to social media, the terms of service for these sites are subject to change. What can we do to protect our stuff and take back our digital social interactions out of these silo’d spaces and move them to places that we control?

With the IndieWeb and JAMStack, this is not only possible but pretty approachable too.

Video #

This video is hosted on YouTube.

Slides #

Download a locally hosted PDF copy of the slides.

This talk is also on Not.ist, which you can preview below:

Twitter Archive #

Update November 28, 2022: The Twitter Archive project shown in this talk has now been open sourced as Tweetback.