I thought it would be fun to revisit Known, the open source publishing platform that powers my site.

How it works

Known allows a team or community to publish news on any topic to a single, searchable stream of content that’s easily accessible from any device. It is not a full CMS, and nor is it designed for independent publishers to sell subscriptions; instead, it’s optimized for publishing to a single feed.

Every Known site is a single feed of content that any number of users can publish to. You can have one user, as my site does; you could have thousands, if you wanted.

The stream can also be filtered by hashtag, author, or content type — so you can choose to only view content on a certain topic, or only photos, or some combination thereof.

Each stream, filtered or not, is shown as a standard web page by default. These can be themed, but it’s also easy to view different interfaces. RSS and JSON are available for every screen you can view as a web page, and it would be easy to add low bandwidth HTML, for example. (I once added an interface type that displayed everything as a Star Wars crawl. It got old fast.)

When you log in, you get a little menu bar that lets you publish different kinds of content. It’s a little bit like Tumblr’s bar, but here, every type of content is powered by a plugin. You can download new content types created by other people, or you can write your own. On my site I’ve created a kind of blog post called an “aside”, which I’ve decided to make a distinct content type.

Hit the button, and you can compose right on the page.

Known supports an idea called POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. You can elect to syndicate a post to a third-party site by enabling the toggle for that site below the compose window. In this illustration I have two example webhooks, but people have written plugins for Mastodon, etc. (In the beginning, Known had plugins for Twitter, Facebook, and so on, but all those APIs locked down over time. The promo image, which you can see above, includes Foursquare and Flickr as options, which is a clue about the era it originated from.)

You can also compose using any application that supports the Micropub standard. I tend to write all my blog posts in iA Writer.

Known supports Webmention, so when you publish a post that links to a site, that site will be notified. You can even use webmention to respond to someone else’s post elsewhere and have a conversation across the web.

It’s free and open source, and intentionally runs on the same LAMP stack as WordPress. Be warned though; as the screenshots suggest, it’s now a little old.

A little history

Known was originally called Idno. (“What does it stand for?” someone once asked me. “I d’no,” I replied. This is the level of humor you can generally expect from me.)

I wrote the first version of it when my mother was recovering from a double lung transplant: she was in need of community but absolutely didn’t want to discuss her condition on Facebook. I’d previously written Elgg, an older open source social networking platform, so I decided to think about what a social community platform might look like in the era of the mobile, ubiquitous web. What would it look like for a community to publish to a place where it could continue to own its own content, on its own domain? (It seems like a quaint exploration now, but remember that this was 2013.)

I became friends with the indieweb folks, and met Erin Richey at an IndieWebCamp. We decided to collaborate on the project. It was her idea to submit it to Matter, where we took part in the third accelerator class. Along the way, we did some focus group testing (Erin’s instigation) and chose Known as a permanent name.

It was a startup for a couple of years; there was a paid, hosted version; a Known-powered site even won an award for KQED. But it wasn’t the kind of thing that excited investors, and we weren’t making enough money for it to be sustainable. Ultimately, I allowed myself to be acquihired by Medium, which allowed us to pay Matter back, and we both settled into new jobs. The day before my first Medium paycheck, I spent my last five dollars on gas. (Erin and I welcomed our actual child — a human one — two years ago. So there’s a coda.)

But there are still users out there, myself included, and the open source project is still alive. It’s been slower over the last few years, because I haven’t had much time to devote to it. (The main thing I’ve been looking at is a command line exporter to allow people to more easily take their content into WordPress, as well as some experiments with ActivityPub.) But it remains a core part of the operating system that powers my identity online, and the identity of others.

Lately I’ve been thinking that there’s a place for this model of publishing. The internal architecture needs to be overhauled; the Bootstrap-driven default template needs to go; but I think there’s really something to the model of letting communities publish to a simple, queryable feed of content that syndicates out to the world.

Perhaps it’s finally time for Known 2, with an easy upgrade path from the original? If you’re intrigued by the idea — or if you’re a Known user — I’d love to hear your thoughts.