Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

If IndieWeb wants content, burying it under a ton of tech soup is the exact opposite of what they claim they want.

How do the developers not realise that this set of protocols is completely unworkable for 90% of users?

Please stop developing systems where the engineering is front and centre. If you want to put content UX first, you need to do exactly that, with a one-click solution that gets users up and running instantly.

If you users have to go anywhere near a command line, or Docker, or they have to hand-edit HTML or CSS, you're creating walls most users aren't going to scale.

At the moment this looks more like NerdNet than IndieWeb.

View on HN

If you spend time in IndieWeb discussion circles, such as chat.indieweb.org or the get-togethers listed on events.indieweb.org, or if you spend time wandering through the indieweb.org wiki, you will find evidence that many of us share the view that UX must come first[1].

There are one-click-setup IndieWeb entry points. The most prominent is micro.blog which gives you a personal blog/site with all the latest IndieWeb goodness and costs $5/month.

But most people interested in the IndieWeb these days are devs, i.e. nerds, and want to roll things themselves, which is why IndieWeb-related blog posts can feel like tech soup.

This is something IW members would gladly see change! Adoption by non-nerds is something the IW cares about. David Shanske[2], for instance, has spent much time in the last decade on Wordpress plugins that gives you much of of the IW tools out of the box [3].

Finally, you don't need to use all of the tech to be "doing IndieWeb". Having your own domain is the first and most important step. Then maybe you[4] try making a few pages: raw HTML, generated from Markdown, Django, whatever. Then you can add Microformats. Then maybe add a script to send WebMentions, or use a free hosted service to do it for you. Then branch out in whatever direction you choose. At all of these stages, your site is still IndieWeb.

[1] I'm not as active in IW circles as I was a few years ago but still consider myself part of it: my personal site has microformats, I use Micropub to update it, etc.

[2] david.shanske.com

[3] https://profiles.wordpress.org/dshanske/#content-plugins

[4] Generic "you".

Digital homesteading is the essence of the IndieWeb. Building things with one's own resources and know-how is part of it's DNA, whether or not that is acknowledged.

Because it's anti-platform and pro-ownership, content is secondary to the means of distribution. It's why it is bound to be a tech-heavy sub-culture and never a real alternative to big platforms.

which is exactly why the web lost, and large platforms won.

Meh. “Won” who? For a long time I was sad about the lost web, but it turns out most people on social media that has replaced the web have nothing interesting to say.

I am sad about local groups and forums, but that is not something that IndieWeb is trying to solve.

The other problem is businesses that have retired to Instagram. which I find baffling.

So then why are so many, so eager and committed, to overturn the big platforms if “most people”… “have nothing interesting to say.”?

People love to go "bad thing bad", but without actually anything else.

because the ones who have interesting things to say and want to say it for themselves number many, despite being very small in the face of the unwashed masses

Huh?

How does having their own place away from the “unwashed masses” relate to overturning the big platforms?

the people who want to overturn big platforms seem a lot larger than they really are. Think of how many people genuinely like facebook. It seems impossible to us, but there are hundreds of millions who still actively post and interact who see no problem with facebook

Three different groups of people, with some overlap between the first two:

    - people with their own websites
    - privacy activists and /or anti-capitalists 
    - almost everybody on the planet

The second group is especially loud. Which is normal, silent activism doesn’t really make sense.

I seriously doubt that people who clamor for the death of Facebook and the likes do it so that indie web is full of macha latte labubu car tastings and supplement and gambling shills.

No. Exact opposite. Opening it up to everyone is what kills everything good, the endless september of grocery store tabloid aisles and clickbait. Gatekeepers are good, restrictions on participation are good. The internet was better when it was a self selecting place for interesting interested people and not the global walmart.

"Bad roads act as filters", Joseph Wood Krutch, 1967.

<https://wist.info/krutch-joseph-wood/53557/>

This is the way! There _has_ to be friction when getting access or the uneducated hordes of the internet will spoil it. I only use mailinglists and fediblocked instances for "social" media. Mainstream mastodon is useless and just a bad parody of x or fb.

Mailinglists are great, because more and more people do no longer know how to use email or follow the instructions to sign up for a mailinglist, so many interesting people tend to gather around the lists.

Eh, I feel like the issue with this logic is that being technically savvy and having interesting things to say aren't really that heavily correlated. Plenty of people are incredibly knowledgeable about non-technical fields and have tons of things they could say about them, but aren't technical enough to setup a website (or in many cases, edit videos/run a YouTube channel/etc either).

Meanwhile there are also plenty of tech folks that have zero empathy or interest in quality that can easily get past any technical barrier you put in front of them, like the more talented folks at companies like Anthropic or Meta.

Making things difficult to set up tech wise doesn't select for intelligence or skill or creativity, it selects for people that work in tech as their day job.

You aren't getting the point though. Despite the burdens being technical in nature, they aren't very complex. There's just enough friction to prevent every village idiot from publishing, but the friction is easy enough to overcome that anyone with something actually interesting to discuss or useful to add to a discussion can overcome it in at most a weekend

I'm pretty new to this so I can't speak for IndieWeb, but I wouldn't blame them. People who seek independence from the social silos are usually engineers or other web-aware people. It is only natural that they want to solve the problem with the knowledge they possess and tools they know - and I think it's fine. If you look back at how internet evolved, it was always like this - the geeks and nerds coming up with something fun but naturally hard to get into for the regular folk. But then it would get more and more approachable until it adopted for the said regular folk.

I think the IndieWeb is at this early stage. The adoption for a broader audience will come naturally (if this survives), but for now - let them cook

First of all, techy nerdy people like things to be easy too. They're just somewhat more likely than other people (on average) to overcome not-easiness.

Second of all, how long is IndieWeb supposed to cook for before it's supposed to be ready for a broader audience? This is no shade on the IW folks if they like what they're building. But if what they're building is supposed to catch on somewhat, what's the path supposed to be? The project seems to be 15 years old already: https://indieweb.org/IndieWebCamps#

Exactly I have limited time in my life to tinker with stuff.

If something is important for me I can waste hours setting it up and running.

If it is something new to me, if it doesn’t work out of the box I most likely will just move on.

Hi! I started a startup, Known, that did exactly this in 2014, explicitly as part of the indieweb movement. The open source code is still around.

The trick is the economics here. A one-click solution is great, but right now the indieweb solves an ideological but not a hard _user_ problem. There isn't enough "there" there to either justify investment or get enough customers to cover the costs of a service.

The closest is micro.blog, which is a genuinely great service that bakes in this tech under the hood. But the tradeoff is that you can't run it on your own infra; it's a centralized service that is compatible with the protocols but isn't quite a genuinely indieweb tool.

I've wondered if there might be something around providing better tools for logging an agent's activities, or for publishing from a sensor / server / etc, but that's all speculation. Without a genuine hard user need, it's hard to imagine how this would work as a turnkey service.

They realize it's "unworkable for 90% of users" and they don't care.

Part of the Indieweb philosophy, like Libre software, is to "scratch your own itch" - no one's paying you. You do the stuff that's interesting to you. It's not a business. The point is not to take over the market.

The planet needs fewer marketing pinheads, not more. I would like it if we passed various laws that killed off a lot of the marketing pinheads, basically eliminating their jobs one way or another, and encouraged more people to create the things they want, rather than submit to the things that are popular.

The pinheads rarely create much of substance and mostly just sit around strategizing all day on how to rent seek. They have a lot of free time and money they can use to lobby the government and make it worse. They dress this all up as capitalism though it isn't really. We should strike back.

the irony is that the scratch your own itch mindset also explains why indieweb struggles to grow.

there’s nothing wrong with building software for yourself. but if your stated goal is giving everyone ownership over their online identity, then usability stops being marketing and starts becoming part of the mission.

good ux isn’t selling out. it’s removing accidental complexity so more people can benefit from the ideas. otherwise you’re not building an alternative to big platforms, you’re building a club for people who enjoy configuring web servers.

ownership requires a bit of toiling to be meaningful, though. If everyone can have something, then nobody has it because it stops being something to be had

Why does it need to grow? Not trying to be a curmudgeon here, I'm just trying to explain the philosophy because I think it's totally alien to some people. And I mean actually this HAS grown. Just pointing out that as far as I still know, guys like Aaron and Tantek are still doing their thing, scratching their itches, being indie, and the framework is there if anyone else wants to also scratch their personal itch.

What it isn't: a service working on perfection and maximizing consumption, as for example a commenter (Andrea Zanchetta) seems to expect. "What they built isn't suitable for me" simply isn't a relevant statement. You can build the thing you want, or have a nice day.

The point of these movements is that people are doing things for themselves, not for you, and not for the mass market. They are generally quite friendly to other people who create their own things. They are not doing it however to engage a consultant, a collective, a central authority, or pursue market share. They're just being themselves and making. Opinions that aren't backed by creating your own are just not really part of the picture and that's OK. We don't need to respond to the collective zeitgeist. We don't need to listen to all the opinions of other people online. We can just make and appreciate it as its own reward.

Occasionally these people get sponsored, and then you end up with miracles like the Linux kernel. Most times they don't and they just tinker and they're happy. It's all good.

>They realize it's "unworkable for 90% of users" and they don't care.

No, you don't understand, it's bad because it does not provide ""value""

People who aren't willing to put any effort into learning how computers and the internet work are free to stay on Xitter and Facebook. Not everything has to be for everyone.

Its initial 7 steps: having your domain, managing your site, creating your pages... are quite accessible. There is some unavoidable complexity, such as configuring DNS. However, with interest and AI, there are no real limitations.

Peak HN comment. Barely anyone knows what a "domain" is, no-one knows what DNS is. Very few people would even know what questions to ask AI.

I know people in tech consulting advising large finance enterprises for 3+ years who barely know what DNS is.

Reddit /r/sysadmin "Everything is DNS because I don't actually understand what I am doing or what is happening"

Of course https://xkcd.com/2501/

Haha, I had to laugh a lot about this.

This is essentially DNS, every single step of the way. Hosting wouldn't be hard if ISPs weren't so hostile with carrier-grade NATs, if HTTP/S wouldn't rely on DNS primarily, if legitimization were using actually mTLS instead... and all of the things usually break because of DNS and (lack of) proper standardization.

DNS in its current form is such a shitshow of RFCs overriding RFCs overriding RFCs...and not a single moment was spent on the configuration of DNS, or a protocol to request a domain, or a protocol to authenticate a domain, or a protocol to host something for a domain, ...

/nerdrage

At this point, I want to see the next indieweb thing be forgoing domains entirely, instead passing around IPv4 addresses and keeping your own indexes in a markdown file or something

It's 2026, we have LLM's and one-click everywhere. And still people have to pay "techs" to setup hosting and domains for them....

> If you users have to go anywhere near a command line, or Docker, or they have to hand-edit HTML or CSS, you're creating walls most users aren't going to scale.

Oh, no?

that it was so perversely gatekept is what made the early internet so enjoyable though.

I find it all the more appealing with that barrier to entry because I miss the internet that this community is nostalgically trying to replicate and reproduce.

Doing a quick look over the article and your comment, I gotta agree. If you want stupid simple and content first, why wouldn't you use the gemini protocol? Pages are in mark down, no way to embed gotchas in it.

Its not one click, but is massively simple and building up tooling around it to make it easier would also be super simple.

Indieweb is sometimes tied to self-hosting to give people configurabilty and flexibilty.

It does keep indieweb for the few and not the many.

Rather than self-hosting, IndieWeb advocate for managing hosting; like GitHub Pages or similar.

ask street-bbq vendor or cleaning-lady or uber-driver what is a "GitHub"

If you can learn to make a hamburger, with or without AI, they can learn to manage their site.

Of course not.

Or at least they won't enjoy it.

Physical activity is enjoyable for most people, whereas mental is painful.

For me it's the exact opposite, and I don't think I'm alone. Now you've reminded me that I have to go to the gym this afternoon... :(

Have you been past a tradies white van in the last 20 years?

They, if you're lucky, may have "davethepublumber.co.uk" and then "dave6969@gmail.com" printed on the side

GitHub Pages requires subscriptions for private repos.

use Cloudflare.

Are you sure?

https://github.com/pricing

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/22817

GitHub Pages is free for public repos, which makes perfect sense for a public blog. IndieWeb content is public by design.

you guys keep shifting goal posts is nuts.

whatever critisism is just "IndieWeb decides not to do so".

not admiting own mistakes also goes hand-in-hand with it.

overall, recipe for disaster.

We're talking about public websites. Nobody moved the goalpost. It's always been about online presence, hence public websites.

no. you do move goalpost. you talking about public webiste, and now you need to make public entire git for it.

do you see difference between history of edits and internal documentation about the public website and public website itself? or sources to build website vs website itself? it is nuts not to see distinction of that.

github repo != public webpage. this is nuts.

IndieWeb could and should find ways to make self-hosting turn key.

Some examples of that exist for sure.

Squarespace, Wix

If it's turnkey it can't be "self". Even if you could buy a magic hosting box to put in your home network, you would be dependent on its support.

"Say no to big tech by buying services"

Why?

>If you users have to go anywhere near a command line, or Docker, or they have to hand-edit HTML or CSS, you're creating walls most users aren't going to scale.

>If you want to put content UX first, you need to do exactly that, with a one-click solution that gets users up and running instantly.

You clearly don't understand the IndieWeb movement, which consists of amateurs and professionals who are motivated to go the extra mile and learn this stuff. The reason the Internet is the way it is in 2026 is precisely because we’ve eliminated all friction and have cultivated the dumbest possible user.

+1. unless I see IndieWeb in AppStore and real volume of real people use it, it is all tech people toy hobbies

(which seems diametrically opposite of IndieWeb: no HTML - iOS/Android is the king, no browsers, no desktop, no terminal, no GitHub, gated App Stores, rich media, videos is the king)

IndieWeb is pretty large. And by its own design the majority of users (lurkers) is hidden behind a page views metric that most people don’t even look at.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com