Follow a feed by its address
Any RSS, Atom or JSON feed — a blog, a newsletter, a podcast, somebody who has never heard of interdream. It does not have to be in the directory, and it does not have to be carrying the card.
The page is read once, now, to check it is carrying the card.
That is six ordinary tags in its <head> —
only the first is ours, and the rest are the ones search engines and
chat windows already read:
<meta name="interdream" content="site">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/">
<title>What your page is called</title>
<meta name="description" content="A line about it.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/me.jpg">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="/notifications.xml">
A title and an address are required. The rest is optional, though a page with no notifications feed is one nobody can follow. Pages made at interdream.studio come with all of it already.
the short version
interdream is two things. interdream.studio is somewhere to make a web page, and to learn how one works while you make it. This is the other half: a list of the pages people have made, so they can be found and followed.
There is no account, no algorithm, and no feed that decides what you see. You follow who you choose, and you see what they posted, newest first. That is the whole product.
why it works like this
The places most people post now are built to keep them there. What you see is chosen for you, by something measured on how long it can hold your attention rather than on whether the time was well spent. Outrage travels because outrage performs. None of that is anybody's personal failing — it is what happens when the thing showing you the world is paid by the hour you spend looking at it.
And what you make there is not really yours. Your posts live inside somebody else's design, under rules that change without you, on a site that can shut, sell, or quietly stop showing your work to the people who asked to see it.
It was not always like that. People had pages — odd, personal, hand-made, hosted anywhere, linked to each other. You could read them in whatever order you liked. interdream is an attempt at that again, with the awkward parts made easy.
you own the page
A page made here is HTML, CSS and JavaScript in files with your name on them. Not a template you rent, and not a post inside an app: the actual code, which you can read, change, export as a folder, and put on any host in the world. Nothing here can hold it, because there is nothing to hold it in.
The same goes for being followed. Your notifications feed is a file
called notifications.xml
sitting beside your page, in a format twenty years old that any reader
can already read. If you leave, your followers do not: the feed goes
with the page.
learning, as a side effect
You do not have to know how to code to start — pick a template, press the plus, and post. But the code is there the whole time, one tab away, and everything you add is written into it in plain sight. Hover anything you do not recognise and it will explain itself.
That is the quiet idea behind all of it. Making a place of your own on the internet used to teach you how the internet works. It can again.
the whole of the rules
Carry six ordinary tags in your page's head and you can be in this list, wherever the page is hosted. Have a feed and you can be followed. Who you follow is kept in your own browser and never sent anywhere — there is no account here, so there is nothing to log in to and nothing about you to leak or sell.
Make a page. It takes about a minute, and it is yours.