Calling For More IndieWeb in WordPress

This is a very interesting post by Mr. Ton Zijlstra at Interdependent Thoughts. He explains how WordPress, in conjunction with two IndieWeb standards (Microformats2 and Webmentions) have the potential to be the operating system of an Open Social Web. The idea is that people can run their own sites (see my digital home concept, which was informed in small part by the IndieWeb project) and interact with each other from their own homes, cutting out the need for big tech creepy proprietary social media. However, WordPress does not natively support most IndieWeb features, and only are only a few fully IndieWeb-compliant themes available. While we support Webmentions, I cannot display most of them without enabling comments (not going to happen, but you can see them in our comments feed) and I have had some issues implementing Microformats since our theme, while excellent, does not support them. I would love to see full Webmention and microformat integration in WordPress in order to make this sort of social functionality more available to site owners regardless of whether they know about or participate in the IndieWeb project. A healthy foundation for a new social media begins with individuals owning their online presences. I am working on a social project and look forward to sharing more about it in the future.