The indieweb doesn't need to “take off”
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I have a different viewpoint on this.
The non-independent web which is largely controlled by faceless corporations has never been bigger or more able to hurt the average person. Someone who gets locked out of their Google account today is at risk of getting their entire life turned upside down -- and they don't even get to argue their case via phone call!
Thus, fostering an independent web and making sure more and more people can build their presence outside of the BigCorp stranglehold can be said to be more like growing vegetables in wartime, similar to a victory garden [1]. It's more of a necessity than something that's great to have.
Sure, no one from the IndieWeb organization signed up for this mission. But they, along with things like RSS, Matrix, Mastodon, and the Bluesky protocol are the nearest glimpses we have of an open web that exists outside regulation-capturing trillion-dollar corporations. So I would entreat their leaders to be a bit more forgiving if critics express frustration at the difficult user interfaces.
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I disagree with this one pretty strongly because it's important to consider it in relation to the amount of internet users.
The early web was less corporate largely just due to its small size. If you take into account the number of users I'd argue that the corporate web peaked about 10 - 15 years ago, ever since then there's been a gradual shift towards more diversity. If you grew up in the AOL messenger and Yahoo news era not only was it corporate, but there was one corporation for like, everything. In 2010 you had effectively 1 social network, Facebook. Internet Explorer had a marketshare of 95% at its peak.
Today it's still heavily commercial but that's not the same as corporate. There's a lot of alternatives now, Signal, Telegram, niche decentralized alternatives, direct consumer facing creator focused platforms like substack, patreon, onlyfans etc. Even Amazon to me seems way less central and with more alternatives than it did 5-7 years ago. Netflix has more competitors, as a software developer you have a much healthier open source and linux ecosystem, and so on.
You have to have some pretty heavy rose tinted glasses on if you think creators, devs or endusers had more choice on the internet 20 years ago than they do now.
Twenty years ago, the norm was to maintain a bookmark list of personally maintained websites you might visit in your online time, using a completely standardized protocol distributed across hosts ranging from home PC's to closet racks to countless disparate ISP's, universities, and hosting providers.
Twenty years ago, the norm was to have topical conversations with strangers using completely standardized protocols using decentralized or federated networks (NNTP and IRC).
Twenty years ago, the norm was to trade with and organize within your community on minimalist bulletin boards that took no fees and had almost no rules.
Twenty years ago, the norm was still that you kept most of your purchases in your local economy, but when you chose to remove money from your local economy (a certain kind of travesty, now become the norm), you did so with nearly unmediated relationship with far away merchants, with only a few points in fees being absorbed by agencies situated in between.
Twenty years ago, the norm was that when you bought digital media, you received a commodity copy of it that you could duplicate and access and re-encode as you saw fit.
Twenty years ago, the (illicit) norm was to digitize your own physical media and share it freely with others using numerous clever protocols to overcome bandwidth and accountability concerns, all decentralized.
True, twenty years ago, you did not get to have trivial access to trivial interactions with celebrities. You did not get endless streams of trivial headlines about trivial things. You did not get to drone out to endless autoplay of trivial videos. You did not get to monetize your own trivialities so easily.
Frankly, having been around for twenty years and then quite a few more, I have no idea what you're talking about in your comment.
No it wasn't. It was the norm among an ingroup of technically savy young people who, on HN, always confuse themselves with the average user at the time. A normal guy two decades ago was as the other commenter above points out, accessing the internet through a bunch of apps provided by their ISP (it's where the name comes from) a sort of vertically integrated company town, likely completely reliant on proprietary software that was so monopolistic, like IE, it sucked completely. When was browser choice better, then or now?
If you're an average user, not an average hacker in 2025 you have significantly more ways to avoid "big corpo" than you did back then. You weren't on IRC as a normie in 2005, you were on AIM and ICQ, also AOL owned of course. The norm, as in for a normal person, was to engage with the web and the world of computing to two, maybe three mega-companies, they weren't torrenting, ripping and re-encoding media.
Largely, the most "technically savvy young people" who you're engaging with on HN these days were not doing those things, but were complaining on their many independent and decentralized communities about all the headaches involved in incessantly being brought in to help those people clean up their messes.
Twenty years ago, it was the wild west. Those who had savvy had staked their claims and knew how to survive safely, but the news had made it to everybody else and rails had been laid and all the starry eyed naive people were flooding in to an exciting, if dangerous, new world of novelty and opportunity. It was very different than what we have now, and grossly less consolidated.
Absolutely none of this tracks for me, it smacks of someone extrapolating their tiny niche to the entire world.
PS: Limewire was loaded with browser toolbars and malware. The definition of corporate hell.
And I agree that the uncountably many software publishers of the time were aggressively experimenting with the dark monetization patterns that Doubleclick, Facebook, Google, Amazon and others were soon to refine into what are now only a handful of ~trillion dollar business engines.
Of course there was corporate participation in that era, but following the dot-com boom and its bust, the scale and number of these operations was very different than the small-and-consolidated Compuserve/AOL/Prodigy era of a decade before and equally different than titanic-and-consolidated Facebook/Google/Amazon era a decade later.
Every single soul in my class was pirating music online.
Napster was a blip (too early, very few had pcs) and only the tech saavy used it, but Kazaa, Soulseek and Limewire were absolutely huge among my cohort.
Btw I asked German friends my age and pretty much all of them have a similar experience.
This is a mainstream mass-market advert from Apple in 2001:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Apples-Rip-Mix-Burn-camp...
"Rip. Mix. Burn."
I think you're totally wrong.
Nothing has really changed, has it? Just the speed and scope of access has increased, and the mass of noise amidst the (hopefully still existing after AI aftermath) quality signal (by magnitudes).
I think the two of you agree about those time periods, they were just pointing out that they believe the peak sad, stale, corporate internet period was not now, but actually a decade or so ago.
FWIW I agree with them. I think people who romanticize the early days of the internet are quick to dismiss what we have currently just because it isn't exactly the same as what they remember. There's plenty of online spaces that have the same vibes on today's internet, and they have the same or even more users as they did back then (because there were a lot less overall users back in those days - like multiple orders of magnitude less - a small slice of the pie today is bigger than the whole thing ~30 years ago), they're just in different places and in different shapes.
Statistics also show that people in the cities eat much more vegetables than people in the country side - if you exclude potatoes. I don’t want to eat potatoes only.
Exactly the same with self hosting or even running my own blog on VPS - it is nice as a side hobby. But if I have to prevent any DDoS that is already too much to handle and I am DevOps by trade and we buy anti DDoS services.
Unless I am forced to do gardening for survival or I wouldn’t have anything else to do with my time there is no upside for maintaining garden or maintaining self hosted stuff, just a nerdy fantasy because it all takes too much time and people have much more things to do in life.
Nerdy fantasy is having all kinds of vegetables freshly picked - war time reality is eating old potatoes from the cellar.
Here in the subtropics, I've found it relatively easy to get the majority of our fruits and veggies from our backyard, with things like papayas and panama berries producing year round. In temperate climates you'll have more difficulty though.
Sounds interesting. Some techniques one can use to mitigate that:
- spread plantations overtime
- use early/normal/late variety
Other techniques ideas than jar:
- sun dry (fruits): boost vitD at the same time
- dark and fresh basement (potatoes, squashes…)
- fermentation (fruits, leaves, roots, ANYTHING!) there’s a bunch of man-old techniques to conserve your vegetable. They’ll keep many nutrients and add some probiotics. Kimchy, pickles (super easy)…
>Statistics also show that people in the cities eat much more vegetables than people in the country side - if you exclude potatoes. I don’t want to eat potatoes only.
I'm very confused how that has to do with anything?
>But if I have to prevent any DDoS that is already too much to handle and I am DevOps by trade and we buy anti DDoS services.
I'd have some serious questions if someone were to feel the need to ddos my blog. But I think some ddos protection comes with my ovh plan. I could be running on some rpi in a closet but i don't in the same way that i could be seedsaving but don't.
Presumably people in the country are more easily able to grow vegetables. If they aren't doing it, then it implies that growing vegetables isn't worth the time.
I think there are other confounding factors like income and education.
I normally grow potatoes, carots etc, and have an apple tree, and several herbs like dill, mint, thyme etc that pretty much manage themselves. It's very far from meaning I never need to shop again, and like you pointed out, to get to that point you'd pretty much need to quit your job and work full time growing food.
That said, it does add a bit of resillience into the system (as well as being rewarding) in the same way having solar panels might shield you from energy cost fluctuations without totally removing your dependence on the grid. I save a lot of money on fresh herbs, and never need to buy apples during season.
Maybe that is the most valuable thing from such a garden: not being totally helpless if the need does arise for some reason.
And when that does, there are probably more people around to trade different foods with, perhaps.
If a breakdown comes, I am probably busy with other things, than planting seeds and tending to the weeds.
I like gardening, because it gives good fresh food. And not (anymore) because I think I will be better prepared for a post apocalyptical world. I'd rather invest in a hunting rifle for that.
(And I regret a bit my condescending question above)
This depends on what you grow. Squashes and root vegetables can last for months in a cool dark location at home.
Conversely, if you know how to pickle and can, and have a chest freezer and maybe a food processor, it's very easy to buy bulk amounts of vegetables when they are in season and store for later. You get basically the same benefits as with growing your own, for much less effort, and quite possibly less expense.
But giving food away and getting nothing in return is preferable to having it spoil, obviously. And every situation is different.
That being said, things do evolve in time, and while I can't talk about gardening, I find it much easier to host a small website today than 20 years ago, both in terms of personal time and cost. There is a generic fashion to ignore tools and automation in the detriment of "finished products", but even with this, I do feel that tools got better. Not sure it is the case for gardening, but I do wonder if it is not just a matter of initial investment.
I usually grow runner beans (8 or 9 plants, and maybe some climbing French beans too) and courgettes (2 or three plants, ideally different varieties) - both of which are high-yield for a relatively small amount of space, and both of which freeze successfully. I really don't have to spend much time on doing that - basically just a case of making sure they have enough water.
I'm now on my last bag of runner beans from last season, and I might actually buy some in about a month's time.
Pumpkins or other winter squash will keep for several months after harvesting provided they reached full maturity before picking, and provided you treat them carefully.
Am I self-sufficient? No, nowhere near it. Have I made a noticeable difference to my food bill? Most definitely.
This is a strange take. Food preservation methods have been around for hundreds of thousands of years now, there are a myriad of ways to store excess produce, it's not all just about jarring for example.
It's not the job of the indie web to repair the damage that bungling regulators and lawmakers cause with their laissez-faire attitude towards the megacorps. Cleanig up this deeply corrupt system cannot be done by the indie web, however much we wish it could.
Then Gandi dropped their "no bullshit" motto and wanted €48/y to renew a €12 domain; I transferred it away to MrDomain, plugged my email into iCloud, and since I didn't actually need a VM, Netlify is now my web host (with Hugo as the blog engine). Now I want to move away from non-EU companies and facing another crisis.
The fact that you can do it at all is a welcome sign for individuals who desire digital independence. But every step of the way, I needed sysadmin expertise, and also now have to shop around for a whole bunch of new providers.
What is a DNS record? Why can't I set up CNAME on a naked domain? Why is it so difficult to find out the correct IMAP/SMTP settings? Why do I need a PC, a text editor, and git to publish a link with a 20-word comment? Why is $PROVIDER integrating with Github only, while git has always been non-centralised?
There has to be a better way. There are countless providers that will offer you a DNS+email+web hosting package, but there will always be shortcomings (e.g. running a blog engine that is not Wordpress; Wix is impossibly slow and clunky; etc), and moving to a different provider is pure pain even for experts.
And then, self-hosting even the most basic apps, like an RSS reader, bookmarks, calendar/TODO? No providers will get you the full package, you have to resort to a VM of some kind and do the expert-level twiddling, likely including setting up Postgres somewhere along the way. Assuming you have the knowledge: cryptominers destroyed the free tier on anything that needs compute; it doesn't matter if you need 30min of CPU and 100MB of transfer per month, you will end up with a bunch of extra bills and several moving parts.
You could argue that gardening also requires knowledge and maintenance. But free software and open protocols are about reusing existing building blocks. You never ever had to write an email client.
I want the experience of installing stuff from the App Store. I want the experience of changing web browsers, where the new one just imports bookmarks and history from what you've been using to date. Even if it's adversarial compatibility.
It should not matter if I'm a noob or if I've been a sysadmin for the past 10 years. Even if the latter is the case, I still value my free time, and don't want to take my work back home.
Doing things yourself is hard. Doing things in a way that reuses other people's effort should be slightly easier.
Doing something that that is defined by "doing it all yourself", like growing your own veg, or, running/hosting your own website is going to be very hard.
I feel this is one of the biggest single things I have learned with age (specifically in my 30s) that has actually changed my life in a way that I believe younger me couldn't/wouldn't be able to grasp: there is no easy way to do things yourself, but that is the value in doing things yourself. Do things for yourself, not because they are easy...
> There has to be a better way.
There is another way. But any other way is either going to involve someone else doing part of it for you, or it's equally as hard.
As someone who built websites in the 1990s, I too am amazed by how hard it still is to do something as ostensibly simple as publish text.
My conclusion is this: DNS and hosting are just inappropriate overkill for individuals. There's the setup hurdle, then the ongoing security and maintenance of software, and finally the problem that hosting is just fragile, with no internal inertia - if you stop paying, your site goes away or gets squatted. All this just to have one's own domain? In the end, for any site, the only link that will survive is the one on the Internet Archive.
I now tend to the view that domains and hosting and software maintenance are best left to organizations. Individuals should instead pool their resources and publish on shared platforms. There's no reason these need be corporate. The fediverse, for instance, is giving us new publishing options almost every day.
I decided for myself to use less free services. Either I find them useful and I should pay for them (and demand improvements), or I shouldn't expect that stuff is "provided" to me without some downsides (ads, etc.).
I am grateful that so many people made things more accessible and easier by building all the open source and free software! That's an immense work already, not recognized enough, and (probably) put off a bit by people that demand stuff without wanting to learn and understand the details.
I don't mind paying. Hardware has to be manufactured, infrastructure has to be kept up. I paid for my phone and my computer, I keep paying the electricity and Internet bills. Heck, imagine this: I also buy software. (€48/y for domain renewal is still robbery by the way.)
My problem is: I already paid for all these different services, still have to do all of the integration work by myself, and then when the need arises, I have to start paying for yet-another thing (e.g. a VPS) that in addition to integration now also requires maintenance effort on my part. And then, when I need to change providers, I have to redo a considerable chunk of that work, by myself.
> [...] demand stuff without wanting to learn and understand the details.
This is a lose-lose arrangement. High bar to adoption means fewer users. Lost users will never contribute any value back. (How to get existing users to contribute is an entirely separate issue.)
My complaint also has almost nothing to do with free software. What I want is easy and painless setup, integration, and (when things don't work out) migration. When you signed up with your ISP, they came to your house, maybe ran some cables, plugged a router into the wall - and you can now enjoy WiFi on every device you own, and "it" doesn't care if the traffic is DNS, HTTP, IMAP+SMTP, or Quake. Yet if you want your own DNS, HTTP, IMAP+SMTP, and Quake, each of these is its own little nightmare.
If you want to change the ISP for any reason, the process is more or less the same - the worst "technical" part is you will have to type a new WiFi password on every device. Most people can't explain the difference between "the WiFi" and "the Internet", and even those who do will look funny at you when you bring up FTTH vs FTTP. Because all of it just works, and makes people's lives better by being so.
Do you see the asymmetries? Can you imagine a world where owning your digital presence was just as painless?
It sounds like you want to be able to express yourself personally, but you don't want to be personally responsible for what you use to express yourself.
Have you considered social networks? E.g. twitter and facebook: they're pretty painless to setup, integration isn't easy but is well documented. Migration isn't nailed yet, but mastodon and bluesky have approaches to that covered, so how about them?
There was a time when rock and roll was going to "change the world." Like jazz and beat poetry before it, it was defining the vanguard of youth culture. Creating the values, taste, language and culture of a generation.
Rock music still exists. So does Jazz. It's certainly not dead as an entertainment and art form. But... it no longer has that creative, future-defining vibe. No longer belongs to youth culture. No longer defines the eras.
There's a difference between steam engine enthusiasts in 2025 and 1825. One is about the future and the other is about the past.
If the author is saying that there is nothing wrong with like steam engines in 2025... then I agree. Steam engines are awesome.
If this is about recapturing what the web was, culturally, circa 1995-2005... that's a different sort of judgement.
In any case, the indieweb.org has a lot of value statements. Principles. I suspect these are aesthetic values. Important to the internal integrity if the art form, rather than their external affects.
Most people are happy to store all their data with big tech and get snoothly marketed content designed to extract as much value as possible from themselves for corporate benefit. It is what it is.
I'm just happy it still exists and it doesn't have to take off for me either. It's similar to Linux. If it ever would take off on the desktop, it would be so corrupted that it wouldn't be Linux as we know it. So it would be the worst thing that could happen for me.
Is this even a thought on people's mind? I don't think it's a choice people are explicitly making in their mind, but it's more like water and electricity that just takes the path of least resistance. It happens to be that centralized services are easy to join and get started with, and non-centralized services were harder to join, case in point being Mastodon where you need to first chose what server you want to join, then you can join the network itself. Same goes for IRC, torrents and a bunch of other things, it tends to just be harder to get into less centralized things, for better and worse.
But I still have the belief that we can figure out the UX to making it easier. Bluesky/ATProto is a step in the right direction, although it isn't 100% self-hostable and decentralized today, the foundation is there and the UX seems simple enough that when people have the choice, both paths have about the same friction today.
Desktop Linux (year of) is a great analogy. Had it happened, Linux would not have remained Linux as we know it. Differences would likely not to the liking of desktop Linux users irl.
Otoh... had Linux desktop really "taken off" circa 2008... it would have had a major impact on personal computing.
These are two, usually distinct desires. "Indie" generally goes with the niche, principled ethos.
I agree that there's a lot of misguided prose about the whys and hows of such a revival, but trying to make the web fun again for the small part of the population interested enough to put in some elbow grease is worth it, in my opinion.
It's not trying to change the world, it's trying to build a small "indomitable Gauls village" style community.
Allow me a metaphor. Many years ago humans wandered the Earth, hunted and gathered and lived where they wished. Then came along civilisation, and with it, a normalisation not just of trade, but of property. Some people realised that they could "own" the best land, and make people pay a "rent" to use it. And so was born, The Law. The Law was used for a long time in a way that meant people were born into a system where they just accepted there were Lords of the land and those who worked it for an existence. Eventually, people asked important questions, some set out for a New World, others in the Establishment sought to impose The Law in new lands, sometimes accepted, sometimes rejected. After a long, long time, we came to a place in society where we accepted personal property - particularly personal ownership of the land on which you lived - was a just, beneficial and suitable place for civilisation to settle.
Now, back to the web. Right now, we're in a phase of feudalistic control. In order to "feel informed", or to even be entertained, you are required to make sacrifices (your personal data), to a rich group of Lords who demand The Law bends to their will.
The IndieWeb is the web version of freeholding. It won't change the World, but without it, the World can't change.
As a society we have a choice: our future online presence entirely owned and shaped by a handful of "land owners", or we invest in making the New World and creating an online world that we want to see.
This isn't about aesthetics. It's about freedom, democracy, the law, your rights and those of future generations. There's a place for landlords in this World, but please don't try and consign the IndieWeb to a curious retro hobby clan: it has the potential to offer you and many others so, so much more than that.
TFA says that IndieWeb does not need to "take off". I agree. But it also doesn't need putting down or dismissing, and it can adapt to whatever future defining vibe of youth culture it needs to: it is a platform, not an art form. It is land on which to build coffee shops/libraries/museums/diaries, not those things itself.
Freeholding has always existed since the web was born. The current structure of overwhelmingly dominant landlords was built on top of it.
The problem we have is that the IndieWeb is not currently a viable alternative for most content creators who need to make a living. If it's not economically viable then it's by definition a hobby.
"Taking off" may not be the right yardstick, but I think walking away from the goal of making the IndieWeb economically effective enough to claim back some territory from the oligopolists just means giving up.
I think adtech on websites is a problem. And social media is an adtech product, not a content product.
IndieWeb for me is about reducing reliance on adtech. You want to build a page to showcase your hand-carved penguins? Cool, hit me up with a URL! Selling independently produced courses or 1:1 mentorship? Offering consultancy or classes? Cool!
Wrapping it all up in an adtech hell hole for people to harvest my data and then try and scam me or sell me utter crap based on browsing patterns around "news stories" that are false? Nah, I'll pass, thanks.
Well most of our power generation still comes from steam turbines, and boiling water is more of than than not still the most efficient approach for energy extraction, so it's as much the present and future as it is the past.
In economics the Chicago school had a outsized impact considering they how fringe they seemed in the world of academia. Nowadays I would say that George Mason is the new Chicago school, and for similar reasons.
I would love to get more examples of this phenomenon if anyone else has any.
I wasn't alive at the time, so I don't know how small/fringe the lisp community was at the time, but your comment made me think of how lisp "invented" things like if-then-else, recursion, garbage collection, first-class functions and more, which we more or less take for granted in every programming language today (at least some of those features), although lisp and lisp-likes remain fringe today.
The same pattern seems to be repeating even in modern times where things like React/Redux/hot code reloading were heavily inspired by what the ClojureScript (a lisp-like compile-to-JS language) community was experimenting with at the time, if I remember correctly.
Where is the analogy of Lisp to indieweb?
Sorry for the confusion, but I was just trying to add additional examples since parent said "love to get more examples of this phenomenon", I wasn't trying to make any argument for one side or the other.
I think the Beat Generation (and mid-century Mississippi blues) from my earlier comment are also examples. Niche in their time. Automobile enthusiasts were a niche group. Early web forum users, IRC, ICQ... Predecessors of modern social media culture.
For an even more "on the nose" example would be the Homebrew Computer Club, Altair programmers and whatnot. I think we're all familiar with "disruption theory" by this point on HN.
The point is... is this a vanguard or a rear guard? Both have value. But... expecting the rear guard to "take off" is misguided.
Uhh... not "taking off" is exactly the point.
It's a bit like going to the country side. The house is old, everything is limited.. yet it's not a loss.
Both have creative vibe. They are not future defining or "youth culture", but that does not mean they are not meaningful or personal or decentralized.
It is ok for subcultures to be what they are and not being mainstream or becoming super popular.
Well the principles are there for everyone to see, and it sounds like you may have read them, so we don't need to guess about them.
https://indieweb.org/principles
The ideas have always been very simple. Own your own data, scratch your own itch, build things and share them.
"Take off," "Get Big," "Stay Small," "Change the World," "Be Retro," "Be Art," none of this was ever the point, it's always just been, go build something on the web you have some ownership over and share it with whoever may be interested.
Over the years I've found it fascinating that so many people who weren't doing what the Indieweb is about, namely building, sharing, and scratching your own itch, have felt compelled to commentate and pontificate about whatever they believed it to be.
Unfortunately, many people see doing things yourself as an amateur—like cooking a meal, fixing a car, or hosting a personal website—as a low-status activity. The modern way of life is to pay for everything; only losers spend their precious time on those boring tasks. And they always trying to find a way to justify it.
Not culturally no.
But yes in the way the web was independent in that era.
"Creative of modern culture" is what rock music was... a pretty defining quality of what rock music was. It produced youth culture. Mainstream culture. Memes. Fashions. Ethos, etc.
Currently, there is not a single bonafide "rock star" under 50. Even the idiomatic term "rockstar" has fallen out of use.
I love it.
My brother's a carpenter, and I pushed him in the same direction. "Here's our contact details, and here's a link to the instagram where we post pictures of the cool stuff we make". I think of it as a digital business card.
I think the web is headed in the wrong direction. But what value does an independent web bring people in a tangible way? Maintaining and growing their digital presence in a multi-modal form is extremely simple on the big platforms. Why write a blog no one will ever read on a website no one remembers to go to when you can state your point for one minute in video and let a BigCorp platform do the work for you?
I’m perplexed by these “the internet is a piece of shit now” arguments. If you want to run your own email server to email other people who run their own email servers, that’s totally doable. Your addressable market is even bigger than it was in 1990. You just have to mentally accept that the size of and types of people will be similar to 1990.
I mostly remember porn. Granted, i was a child.
Imagine if you try to practice a skill you're bad at like pottery, but all the windows in your house are open and random people you don't know come right up to them and stare at your work at arbitrary times. Even worse, it's nearly always dark outside so you can never tell when they're looking anymore. But sometimes, at unpredictable times, you can hear a fist knocking or a random phrase uttered at you from outside.
Even if you don't know their faces or reactions, or even if they exist at all, you just can't help but believe they're thinking something of you. And logic dictates that even if they don't happen to think something bad of your skill, their positivity is only transient as they're still strangers to you.
That sensation breeds paranoia, and I realized if I wanted to hone an artistic skill I needed to discard the Internet entirely and fiercely protect my individuality at all costs. My artistic muse is not to be given away for free so that people can point and gawk at it; it is far too valuable. There is only one me in the entire world, and they are irreplaceable.
I believe this is one of the main reasons most artists keep their processes a secret. Baring your entire soul for the world all the time is exhausting. What is released publicly is only a highly refined and focused sliver of such a soul, and the rest is tightly protected from prying eyes.
For me, the Internet was a red herring to being an artistic person. "Chock full of all the world's information," you understand, but also chock full of many other inseparable elements that are too stressful to be worth it. Thankfully realizing this means I can cut down my smartphone usage to 10 minutes a day at most; far too many important things to work on instead.
The most I will ever accept from the Internet is practical advice on how to accomplish certain techniques, but the rest I had no choice but to discard to have any hope at improvement and positive well-being. That includes professional critique online. I used to hang on to the belief I needed people on the Internet to judge me so I could improve, even if they were actual teachers, but I realized I could just as easily get private lessons in the real world. I feel a better connection to human instructors than chat threads. And a lot of art involves the perception of the world as it really is, not a virtual counterpart to it.
Sometime around a decade ago, a switch flipped for me and "being online" in such a transparent way just felt incredibly uncomfortable for me. And for some reason this drastic change has been so curious to me for awhile. Because I actually am someone who loves discourse. I enjoy talking to strangers and learning about them (in moderation) and I've never had a problem having a pointed opinion and discussing it. Back when FB felt "small" and had a greater balance of text posts vs images/video, I relished posting and discussing with my network.
But like I said, something changed and yes it was around the time that political discourse took a turn to say the least. And while that may very well be a factor, it doesn't fully explain my overwhelming discomfort with the idea of "putting myself out there" online in any meaningful way.
I've been going to art therapy for awhile and this fear has been something I've been exploring. I've been describing it as a "fear of my own narrative being taken away from me and perverted in front of me without any regard for my own actual truth". That's the best way I can explain it. But that explanation has always felt like it was still missing something.
I think your analogy filled in the rest for me though. It's the omnipresent threat of nonconsensual spectacle. Or perhaps just the fear of that threat. And something inside me just being totally opposed to even entertaining that hypothetical even though logically I know "the onlookers don't matter, their opinions don't matter". Just feels like I'm not wired for this era of online identity. Which sucks since for the majority of my life I've felt the opposite.
Sorry for rambling, I thought I was just going to say thanks and move on haha.
Honestly the tenants of indieweb have seemingly gone very little distance across well over a decade of time. My feeling is that there is a distinct anti-ambition that eskews well known good protocols & systems, judges them in a suckless.org style of claiming identity mostly as against what is more than what for. Valorizing small while too often forsaking using good mainstream well known protocols.
I feel like I should be part of it. And according to their website, I own a domain and a site, so I am a part of it!
But then you scroll down and the headaches begin.
https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started
It feels like so much infra and setup to get stuff up and running that it scares me away every time.
“That’s it. Everything else is optional awesomeness, you choose.”
https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started_on_WordPress
Which links to dozens of other guides but maybe it's this one you want
https://indieweb.org/WordPress_IndieWeb_Plugin
Oh that's a stub better hit the linked github
https://github.com/indieweb/wordpress-indieweb
Unless it's indieauth you're after? Micropub? websub? webmentions? The world is your oyster!
"We are a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content."
I think many actually would love to have their own website that they can curate themselves and have the features they specifically want, but aren't tech literate enough to do so, or haven't been taught that it is even an option.
From 2009 to 2012, Opera had this thing called Opera Unite... you would put content (websites, images, etc.) in there, and it would be served from your own personal computer, with the web server being embedded in the browser and no configuration needed.
It was incredibly easy to use even for the tech illiterate, but never got much adoption. I suppose it was either ahead of its time, or more likely perhaps the opposite, too late (this was during Facebook's heyday, and most people had already got used to sharing their content through social networks). But I like to think there's a timeline where it was a success and many regular people would have their own website using this type of technology.
Do we already have entire generations of people who never open web browsers and live their whole online life in Apps? Sad.
Maybe _I_ am the sad old person here, with my stale opinion of World Wide Web equals the browser?
Nah. It must be children who are wrong.
Maybe we need a new type browser that doesn't try to be an app platform but rather tries to be a document browser.
I think what you actually want is a web without JavaScript. One where you can only find documents and not accidentally run into apps.
Some promotion and branding and badges for how to build a site that contains no scripts at all.
I don't see the need for a new protocol and new clients. Just a plain ol' JS-free Web.
And, equally, something similar for the back end. No scripting languages, no PHP and no JS and nothing akin to them. Just native code, compiled from safe languages with bounds-checking.
No CMS, just dump text or markdown in a folder and presto you have a website.
It doesn't sound impossible. So let's think about how.
Absolutely. Look up Facebook Free Basics. It was Meta's plan to become "Thee Internet" for developing countries.
A lot of the modern features of you’re-the-product social media aren’t inherently bad. They’re just made into products designed for engagement, fomo and addiction, often with minimal human oversight (the algorithm finds our weak spots on its own). I think being 10-20 years behind the ”competition” in features is holding us back.
You need a mass media license for a website.
For example, Tencent: https://cloud.tencent.com/developer/article/1396101
The are, basically, two kinds of licenses, for websites participating in commercial activity (ads, shops), called ICP证，and for smaller websites, not directly involved into commercial activity, ICP备案.
HTTP+HTTPS is a fine solution for personal websites.
But, I'll counterpoint that LetsEncrypt isn't the only ACME provider. Should they behave badly others can step into the gap.
The 90 day thing isn't a barrier. Certificates in general are automated- it's no harder to be HTTPS than HTTP.
Promoting HTTPS and dropping HTTP is ultimately valuable to all sites, because it prevents HTML injection. Given that your reader will be accessing the web via an ISP it prevents that ISP from injecting things into your site.
As an author of my own websites, I'm https only, and I think LE improves the indie web experience. There is a long chain of big companies between my site and my reader (Isp, LE, DNS, browser etc) but HTTPS offers me the best way of making sure the contect I create is the content delivered.
Maybe less so in the West, but on a permanent basis in the East.
So the best solution is HTTP+HTTPS on the server and using HTTPS till it inevitably breaks (for legal, technical, social, or other reason), then the HTTP is there to keep things accessible. I'm not anti-HTTPS. I'm anti-HTTPS-only. And you should be too if you care about human persons over corporate use cases.
All of this can be automated away.
Updates can be automated too.
This is why cacert.org still has value and is worth trying to preserve, donate, and contribute.
Or you can log off. There's no need to post. Plus there are church doors in your physical community.
I don't really see much benefit to hosted blog posts when the conversation is on social media.
But, substack is where the comments are, and the comments are generally the valuable part.
Not everything you write will go viral on your favorite social media sites, and that's OK. I POSSE (post on your own site, syndicate everywhere) everything I write, and some of my posts get thousands of views, while some of them might get tens of views. The things you think will be popular aren't, and things you don't think will be popular, are. You can't always get lucky.
But we have neglected it. We have not updated e.g. the SMTP standard to support something like notifications, or a way to communicate spam lists or contact lists or block lists or subscriptions. We left all those to be taken over by big walled gardens who have every incentive to stop the adoption of new standards that will compete with them. It's in the hands of the engineers
My main hindrance is the fear that a hacker will hack into my home network
I'm a long time trail runner. I joined a group last year. I sort of had to join Whatsapp and Instagram to stay up to date. I take "taking off" here as in not having to join Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or any other surveillance cesspool to be able to communicate with the people I need to to be able to live my daily life.
From that viewpoint, the indieweb is failing to be enough of an alternative for regular people to consider it a default go-to for daily usage. And I wish it was.
I'd really like to see blogs be part of that small, but hopefully constant growth. We can builds hybrids that lean on some of the early greatness (rss), but also make it easy to publish (markdown) without the typical bloat, tracking, advertising, etc. of the modern web. Here's my attempt at building such a blogging service https://LMNO.lol. My blog runs on that too https://xenodium.com.
Atom is very easily desynchronized with the main content, whereas hentry is in sync by construction.
If only that were true! XHTML is basically dead and HTML5 is the murderer. Something that leaves RSS/Atom intact.
> Atom is very easily desynchronized with the main content, whereas hentry is in sync by construction.
I know, and no need for XSLT magic to fix browsers having made RSS/Atom persona non grata. Still, "deprecating" RSS/Atom is completely wild, people should be happy to find blogs with usable feeds in the first place.
Tell me more.
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/introduction.html#html-vs-x...
Doesn't firefox ship a built-in translator between plainHTML and xHTML?
A true Indie web would just let technologies exist side by side, see which ones get implemented by popular clients or which clients become popular due to their implementation, and let it all exist organically.
That's how RSS happened in the first place.
I go even further: the indieweb is not even a "community" or "movement". These words sound way too much like it's organized, like there are gatekeepers who decide about in- and outgroup.
Hard disagree here.
The value of this aspect of the IndieWeb movement is way too overstated. MySpace-like customization gets the entire obligation for empathy that's inherent in the user–creator relationship inverted. It should not matter whether you like blinking white stars on backgrounds that come straight from a Dan Flashes T-shirt and high-pitched chiptunes playing on a loop. If you really like those things so much, you should modify your user agent to show them to you when you're on the websites that other people have published instead of leaning on your control over the rules for what should show up in other people's browsers as your outlet for creative expression.
Look at books. Look at how little variation there is in presentation, despite the wide-ranging variation in content and themes. That's because, essentially, we figured out how to do books. We got them right. Tufte is good at deviating from the standard and taking care that the deviations contribute in a worthwhile way to the actual content. Most people are not. Look at the Reader Mode in various browsers. These things exist only because of the propensity for people—and not just amateurs; paid professionals, even—to utterly fail at providing what people really need and desire, which is a simple, unassuming and distraction-free substrate for the main message. (Much of the same is true of RSS readers that are exalted within the very same circles of "indie" consumers and creators.)
Look at those browsers' Reader Mode again. Try them all out, and find one whose defaults you find the most pleasing, and then go publish your indie site using that as a template. Forget about trying to wow people with CSS and animated confetti.
The real value of operating an indie site is that it gives you as the operator the latitude to say "no" to participating in the silos and walled gardens of contemporary social networks and instead contributing positively to the standards-based Web that interoperates best with the software (like RSS readers) that puts the user's best interest at the fore, which is all way, way more important (and totally opposite to) gimmicks and gewgaws like sparkles that follow your mouse cursor around.
But your reasoning for denying individualism is myopic. Do you only count the ones that have words printed in 16 point type using a standard layout as books? There are all kinds of layouts available in book form. There are graphic novels. There are photography books. There are pop-up books. Books with braille. Books that have augmented reality elements in them. There are poetry books where words are deconstructed on the page, maybe with pages cut up deliberately. There's notes and opinions scribbled on the pages. Or you might get lucky and find some old leaves pressed in between there. Every possible individualistic concoction you can do with a bunch of paper and some form of printing exists, and if it doesn't yet, it will eventually.
There are plenty of people that like the Lisa Frank looking websites. You don't need to be one of them, but you don't need to be a boring person, either.
I look at a lot of books. I don't think you've summarized them well here. I suggest you look at more yourself. You're missing a lot of beautiful art.
That said, you're right that minimizing decoration and distraction is itself a treasured kind of expression enabled by independent publishing, set against a world where some six Lead Designers get to say precisely how everybody must read and see things this year.
So I very much agree with your sentiment, but you happen to be doing a great injustice to books on your way to saying it. :)
This comment is pretty obnoxious. (I've stepped into a library, thanks.)
For all the books that you're thinking of that don't fit the mold, when you put that set up against the set of those that do, it's not even close.
I'm not talking about hypotheticals (i.e. the potential for stuff that could be made that deviates from the norm) or creative works that really exist but only at the margins (i.e. in small numbers by comparison). I'm talking about what people actually produce and consume in large numbers and the average experience for each context/form.
There is undeniably a lot more homogeneity in books than blogs to a large degree. It's something like over a hundred or a thousand to 1.
I don’t want the IndieWeb to just be a place for us 30+ year olds and gen z compsci majors. These kids need to know there’s more to the internet than swiping through instantly gratifying 30 second clips while some mysterious remote farm mines their every interaction.
Usability decline and brain rot of the mainstream internet would only push toward this kind of stratification. My main "accelerationist" wish would be that Discord somehow becomes unusable shit for this demographic. At least so all semi-capable people want to avoid it.
Besides, I think depending on your definition some Zoomers can be already 30+.