IndieNews

From IndieWeb

This article is a stub. You can help the IndieWeb wiki by expanding it with relevant information.


IndieNews is an indieweb-specific news aggregator which only accepts submissions via webmention, and is for syndicating posts relevant to the indieweb.

What’s relevant to the indieweb? The guidance for relevance to this wiki also may serve as guidance about for IndieNews-relevance.

Is IndieNews for syndicating any article posted to an indieweb site?

I'm not sure if my post is IndieNews-relevant, what should I do?

How to use IndieNews

  • submit a post - post something on your own site and send webmention
  • Bookmark a post - To submit someone else's post, you can post a bookmark on your site and submit that URL to IndieNews! Post an h-entry as normal, and include a u-bookmark-of property linking to the actual URL you want to submit.

Submissions to IndieNews are included in the this-week newsletter, which is one of the reasons it’s preferred that submissions are relevant to the indieweb.

Source:

Issues:

WordPress Plugin

Brainstorming

Enforcing relevance

As of Apr 2026, Ryan Barrett feels like the topicality of IndieNews posts has degraded a bit. Recent examples:

What to do?

Apart from user education, it's a moderation question, and those rarely have easy answers. The two most obvious ones here are human pre-moderation and AI, neither of which are ideal...but IndieNews is pretty low volume, and these are one-off, individual public posts, so maybe both could be ok?

  • I think one option that's been suggested was similar to the old Twitter retweet method, requiring two votes from meta chat. It could be used to approve every submission, though that still feels heavy-handed to me. Perhaps votes to remove a submission instead? Related: this github issue suggesting an admin delete function. gRegor Morrill 13:21, 20 April 2026 (PDT)
  • I like the "two votes" method as an "easy" way to avoid random blogs who syndicate everything to IndieNews that they post on their independent website. It also feels vaguely Reddit/HN-like which while not ideal, does serve to filter rudimentary noise. I suspect this is (socially) easier than "votes to remove a submission" which may feel like they’re "mean" when a post is innocuous (e.g. Record Store day) and not some clear attempt to spam or broadcast indiscriminately, which can be quietly ignored, and then no one is the blame but the spammer/broadcaster. Tantek Çelik 15:46, 20 April 2026 (PDT)
  • I also like the two votes approach. I would upvote posts to help keep the quality high. Maybe we hide the number of upvotes in the UI? I think visible upvotes would change the dynamic of the website quite a bit. On the AI suggestion, I don't think we need AI for this. capjamesg 21 April 2026
  • I think there are two separate problems, having just commented on a post in the Indieweb Slack channel that was posted by Loqi from indienews. One would be Loqi echoing everything and the other would be upvoting before Loqi even sees things. I don't know how that could work. If Loqi posts to the channel, a failure to get two votes within, say, 24 hours deletes Loqi's post? Does it also delete from indienews itself? I think I probably need to know more about the implementation. Jeremy Cherfas 2026-04-21
    • For clarity, the "two votes" method we're referring to is similar to the old retweet syntax (on Loqi). It doesn't strictly rely on the Loqi preview in chat. An example command might be: !news https://example.com/indieweb-post If two people did that, it would be approved. gRegor Morrill 15:05, 21 April 2026 (PDT)
  • I made an edit to the top of this page around this. I think the IndieNews site needs some messaging as to the purpose of IndieNews. I don't think affirmative votes are what we need. I think a curatorial step of "this doesn't seem like IndieNews" in chat makes sense - whatever form that may take. I don't want to rubber stamp every post. And this further will necessitate the addition of language on the submission page, and perhaps in api response in the case of webmention submissions that "posts may be subject to secondary moderation." I also think that the more kindness and benefit of the doubt we can muster when making votes to remove the better. This isn't personal, it's about working together to create a valuable resource from the folks who want to share posts. -- Artlung.com (talk) 07:01, 21 April 2026 (PDT)
  • A middle ground option is to treat the public version of IndieNews (and subsequent inclusion in the newsletter) with a higher bar than submitting to IndieNews at all. It's subtle, but what this could look like is if you are logged in you see what you see now, but only if 2+ people "upvote" an article will it bubble out to the public feeds. So it's not quite as strong of a gate as requiring 2+ approvals, but would stop a flood of posts in the public feeds. An alternative could be treating it more like hackernews/reddit where every post can get upvotes and downvotes, and after some number of downvotes it gets hidden entirely. (IndieNews actually used to have a feature like this, but voting was done via webmention and nobody used it). Aaron Parecki 15:13, 21 April 2026 (PDT)

See Also

Retrieved from "https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=IndieNews&oldid=110261"