It's a little deeper than that. For short the end goal would be for everyone to have their own domain - a website - and that domain should be the centrum & origin of their activity on the intenet.
This means that the website would be the tool to send and receive interactions; it would be the storage for all one's content.
This is to avoid those situations when content is removed, censored, etc. on a silo/social network; to have control over your own data and to have a mesh-network-like layout of individual sites that are more not single point of failures in opposition of gigantic monoculture that currently rule the internet.
The reference for the 'like it was all along' is a reminder that a very long time ago the internet was a network of individual websites and you were not bound to use centralized services from corporations.
I find the up-front focus on microformats off-putting. The general vibe of microformats is "Hey look! You can do a lot of work to explain things very patiently to a computer program that nobody you know is running, and in return, you get nothing!"
What's the selling point there?
I like the idea of the IndieWeb, but can you tell people how to get started without such nitty-gritty details?
I'm curious about this too. If anyone can shed some light, I'd appreciate it. Does it provide any value right now? Or is it something that will have value if enough people do it?
Is one of the goals that people should be able to participate in the indieweb without having to reveal their identity? That is, people can participate pseudonymously?
Diaspora is one product, whereas the indie web is a set of really lightweight technologies that allow you to join in from virtually any website. It's not dependent on any one vendor or project.
I think the coolest bit is that each of the pieces is so simple that a coder can get up and running from scratch in an afternoon. That's very different to a lot of the federated social web technologies to date.
This means that the website would be the tool to send and receive interactions; it would be the storage for all one's content.
This is to avoid those situations when content is removed, censored, etc. on a silo/social network; to have control over your own data and to have a mesh-network-like layout of individual sites that are more not single point of failures in opposition of gigantic monoculture that currently rule the internet.
The reference for the 'like it was all along' is a reminder that a very long time ago the internet was a network of individual websites and you were not bound to use centralized services from corporations.