10 ms·

The indieweb doesn't need to “take off”

309 points by susam 2y ago

tony-allan 2y ago
The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”. "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." https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/
forgetfreeman 2y ago
But if it doesn't take off then it can't be strip mined to enhance shareholder value...
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
I agree it doesn't need to take off! And yet, I still want it to have enduring impact, to entice & encourage folks towards taking the journey themselves. Cool can be small, but it should still have on ramps, encourage more, beget more. 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.
quadrifoliate 2y ago
> It's like saying that gardening hasn't taken off because most people buy their vegetables at the supermarket. The IndieWeb doesn't need to "take off" to be valuable to those who participate in it. 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. ----- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden
- rollcat 2y ago
  I think the biggest obstacle are the "getting started", and then "actually owning it" parts. I registered my domain with Gandi (who have also initially hosted my email), got a VM from Hetzner, set me up some nginx, and I was good for a while. 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.
  - 1dom 2y ago
    What's your point here? 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.
cxr 2y ago
> Maintaining a personal website is about owning your digital presence, embracing creative freedom, and expressing your individuality! 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.
- aboardRat4 2y ago
  https://lockywolf.net/2023-12-05_how-to-make-a-good-feed-reader.d/index.html https://lockywolf.net/2023-12-05_how-to-make-a-good-feed-rea...
- 2y ago
klabb3 2y ago
I do love (1) the non-commercial and (2) the long form non-realtime aspect of the indie web but I still wish it was more accessible to other nerds, not just in tech. It’s also hard to search and to connect with people. 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.
ghssds 2y ago
As personal websites become less and less frequent, it become easier for governments to disregard them and regulate them out of existence. Expect the barrier to entry for building a website to become so high only corporations can afford it.
- aboardRat4 2y ago
  This is already the case in China. You need a mass media license for a website.
  - aitchnyu 2y ago
    British forum admins cutting off a couple of decades of posts to be legally compliant.
  - zhouzhao 2y ago
    Do you have any source for that? Chinese language content is also fine
    - aboardRat4 2y ago
      Sure, pretty much any cloud provider has detailed info. For example, Tencent: https://cloud.tencent.com/developer/article/1396101 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.
      - lproven 2y ago
        Informative. Scary, but informative.
- superkuh 2y ago
  For example, HTTPS-only in browsers and CA TLS only connections in HTTP/3 protocol libraries. It's near impossible to host a visitable website without getting permission from a third party corporation every 90 days. These things make sense for corporate/institutional/etc sites but make the barrier to entry, and especially mantainence over time, of personal websites much more difficult. To the point it really does keep people from running personal websites. And it also creates central mechanisms of control for those that do jump through the hoops. LetsEncrypt won't remain benevolent forever as it's popularity grows. Just look at what happened to dot org, and what's happening in the USA in general. HTTP+HTTPS is a fine solution for personal websites.
mediumsmart 2y ago
The web is kind of independent yes. and it took off many years ago.
alex1138 2y ago
Also in general it may well be that nothing on the internet will ever take off in the way we were used to because we've crossed that threshold of "this is new and exciting" and it's taken for granted now (although some of the new technologies are really interesting, like IPFS, or Ruffle), although I think we'd all like to see a little less enshittification (a sane Facebook feed, Google actually showing relevant results again, dropping the ideological censorship and stopping ignoring specified keywords)
pipeline_peak 2y ago
I agree that it doesn’t need wider acceptance, but gen Z seems to be very tech illiterate. Lacking awareness of file systems and more importantly the web beyond 5 different social media platforms. 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.
- stereolambda 2y ago
  Actually it's a dynamic that might be circling us back to the mythical "early web". The more rebellious and out-there members of the younger cohorts tend to be more fascinated by hackable technology, piracy etc. This doesn't mean they're primarily programmers as persons, just like it didn't mean that in the 1990s. 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+.
superkuh 2y ago
In fact the indieweb cannot ever take off. Because take off means being used by a large fraction of people. And the large fraction of people only really use services where they consume content from people who produce content for monetary compensation. Since governments work very hard to make sure non-corporations are never allowed to exchange currency without a corporation being involved the indieweb will never appeal to the vast majority of people.
bblb 2y ago
"IndieWeb movement". It's just the web, right? Always has been? Do we already have entire generations of people who never open web browsers and live their whole online life in Apps? Sad.
- KingMob 2y ago
  It's less about apps vs web, and more about the web monoculture that arose. It's like that quip, "the web is 5 sites, sharing screenshots of the other 4".
- melagonster 2y ago
  Z generation is not the youngest generation now, so there are two generation.
- charcircuit 2y ago
  The web browser is just another app. It's not sad to check out multiple apps vs being locked into one platform.
  - bblb 2y ago
    Technically correct. The best kind. 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.
    - rapnie 2y ago
      Old people get sad by what modern tech has to offer them. My elderly non-technical mother is forced into "digital transformation", this mindless 'tech-is-good' hype that is marketed as making our lives better, but which is really mostly about disruption and cost savings and not serving the actual needs people have. To my mother each website that she is forced to use to do her administrative tasks, is a completely different app with its different look & feel and terminologies used. And all of it is not increasing her quality of life.
      - 2y ago
aboardRat4 2y ago
I just came to this thread to say that indieweb considers RSS outdated and suggests hFeed/hEntry instead.
- sapphicsnail 2y ago
  Thanks for showing me this. I had no idea it existed.
- benoliver999 2y ago
  I feel like this should be using data- attributes instead of classes? I'm not a frontend guy really but aren't classes more for styling
- BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
  Well, then it can go to hell, even if the idea isn't necessarily bad. Atom/RSS are fine formats that work with countless small clients, what about hFeed?
  - aboardRat4 2y ago
    In both cases you need an xml parser. Atom is very easily desynchronized with the main content, whereas hentry is in sync by construction.
    - BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
      > In both cases you need an xml parser. 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.
      - aboardRat4 2y ago
        >XHTML is basically dead and HTML5 is the murderer Tell me more. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/introduction.html#html-vs-xhtml https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/introduction.html#html-vs-x... Doesn't firefox ship a built-in translator between plainHTML and xHTML?
graphememes 2y ago
If you're trying to force 1999 into 2025 you're doing it wrong
picafrost 2y ago
I agree. Artists wonder why more people don't express themselves with art. Writers wonder why more people don't let it all out with words. Car mechanics wonder why people don't fix their own cars. It's not surprising that tech folk wonder why more people don't engage in tech-adjacent activities. Maintaining an independent web presence is a technical hobby. 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?
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  If what you desire is a tiny, curated web full of like minded skilled technologists, like it was before Usenet eternal September, that exists today. You work hard to get 20 people to respond. You can do that now. 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.
  - ForTheKidz 2y ago
    > If what you desire is a tiny, curated web full of like minded skilled technologists, like it was before Usenet eternal September, that exists today. I mostly remember porn. Granted, i was a child.
- throw80521 2y ago
  A possible answer to your first question, at least how it applies to me: At the intersection of art and technology, I realized recently that the Greater Internet was hampering my progress. By which I mean large public content sharing and delivery services. 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.
mmaunder 2y ago
lol that indieweb website. Join the collective or we won’t think you independent. Just run Wordpress with a few hundred million other site owners and you’re good. There’s a metric fuckton of activity in the space and you don’t need a manbun.
SoftTalker 2y ago
Most people have nothing of any interest whatsoever to say to the world at large. Running one's own website is a waste of time for almost anyone. Just send email to the people you want to keep up to date, if you know they are interested.
ForTheKidz 2y ago
> There's a corner of the Internet where people have been reclaiming their digital independence by hosting their own websites 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.
- cosmicgadget 2y ago
  Compare the content of a blog post and a social media post.
  - ForTheKidz 2y ago
    Yes, blog posters keep writing. This does not imply anything about whether or not it's a waste of time to read. But, substack is where the comments are, and the comments are generally the valuable part.
DeathArrow 2y ago
I didn't know that owning a website and hosting your content makes you part of "indie web".
stakhanov 2y ago
One problem I see with the current state of the IndieWeb having not yet "taken off" is the negative selection effect you get from having the corporate web in existence next to the IndieWeb. Back in the 90s you might write a website advertising your services as an accountant in Word, save as HTML, and upload that HTML to geocities or to webspace provided by your ISP. You can still do that today. The shocking difference is that back then it made actual business sense to do that: People would just stumble across your website. You could reach actual normies. Nowadays, because of the presence of the corporate web next to the Indie Web, the normies are trapped in the corporate web and the only eyeballs your website will attract will be the people who share in your own brand of weird. They might admire the "art" inherent in your crappy HTML, but they won't hire you as an accountant. And they're probably not strong enough in numbers for this to make any business sense.
- prox 2y ago
  This is actually the homepage of my accountant. “Instead of building a big website, we decided to save on the money. If you need accounting done, here is where you can reach us. It just black on white with blue links. I love it.
  - flir 2y ago
    I like that as marketing copy. 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.
    - prox 2y ago
      Yeah for some jobs you don’t need a lot of fluff. Some markets do. Carpentry is an honest job. You do your job well and people will find you.
benoliver999 2y ago
The indieweb is both beautiful and frustrating to me. I have been writing online for 20 years in various forms, and my current site is 10 years old. 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 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.
- nanna 2y ago
  This. The barrier of entry is too high. Feels like the Indieweb is stuck at the protocol layer and an abstraction above it is badly needed.
  - flir 2y ago
    Sounds like you just invented social media ;)
- prox 2y ago
  Did you read this line? It says after the domain and site: “That’s it. Everything else is optional awesomeness, you choose.”
- Propelloni 2y ago
  Yeah, just get Level 1 Webhosting from Hetzner for 2 EUR/month, click the 1-click setup for WP and off you go. What's the big deal?
  - benoliver999 2y ago
    Yeah then simply follow the guide https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started_on_WordPress 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 https://indieweb.org/WordPress_IndieWeb_Plugin Oh that's a stub better hit the linked github https://github.com/indieweb/wordpress-indieweb https://github.com/indieweb/wordpress-indieweb Unless it's indieauth you're after? Micropub? websub? webmentions? The world is your oyster!
rambambram 2y ago
Fully agree! 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
joeeverjk 2y ago
Ironically, the fact that the IndieWeb hasn’t taken off is exactly why it matters. Mass adoption would kill the point—turn it into just another algorithm-driven wasteland. It’s for the stubborn ones who still give a damn about owning their corner of the internet, not chasing dopamine hits on rented land.
- prox 2y ago
  You could argue this already happened. We all had websites in the early days. It got bigger so shops wanted their online presence. Then we got banners. First ad agencies started proliferating. People started tweaking their sites to be better visible for search and sell more stuff. The rest is history.
netcan 2y ago
> The IndieWeb doesn't need to go mainstream to be meaningful. It's a celebration of a more personal, decentralised... 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.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  I see what you mean. And yes I don't think it defines the future any longer. Unfortunately. But we passed that fork in the road a long time ago. 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.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > 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. 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.
myaccountonhn 2y ago
My partner and I have been using our own website to share what we've been up to. We also share content we've consumed like books and movies. It's been a lot of fun to design it together, and I am happy that friends have a way to see what we are up to without needing to use social media. 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.
- Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
  > 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.
hackburg 2y ago
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xenodium 2y ago
While the indieweb doesn't need to take off, I sure would love to see /some/ growth. The internet is a big place, so even a small but active percentage would offer sanctuary to folks wanting out of walled gardens, constant tracking, bloat, advertising... 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 https://LMNO.lol. My blog runs on that too https://xenodium.com https://xenodium.com.
reacweb 2y ago
IMHO, indieweb has not taken off because web hosting was dirt cheap and an internet subscription with a good upload was awfully expensive. Nowadays, the balance has changed and it is less true. Cheap web hosting has become complicated trade-offs. 8GBs symmetric (50€/month) is enough for most of uses. My main hindrance is the fear that a hacker will hack into my home network
wvh 2y ago
I agree with the sentiment, that the metrics of independence and self-reliance aren't the same as for economic success. On the other hand, "not taking off" also means that not enough people know or care for solutions that require some effort. I take that statement to mean that self-hosting or open-source "free" solutions have not managed to in any way stop companies like Meta to amass most of the planet into their walled ecosystem and to fight the network effect. 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.
curtisszmania 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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MattSayar 2y ago
The indieweb isn't about anything but writing for yourself. Focus on writing the stuff you'd want to read, and you'll enjoy the benefits of clarifying your thoughts in written words. You get all the bonuses of referencing your work later, having a record of your activity, and maybe sometimes even grabbing someone's attention when they stumble across your site later. 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.
seydor 2y ago
It's not "indie web", it's "the web" , it still exists and all of the "commercial web" is built on top of it. 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

309 points by susam 2y ago

The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”. "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." https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/

forgetfreeman 2y ago

But if it doesn't take off then it can't be strip mined to enhance shareholder value...

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

I agree it doesn't need to take off! And yet, I still want it to have enduring impact, to entice & encourage folks towards taking the journey themselves. Cool can be small, but it should still have on ramps, encourage more, beget more. 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.

quadrifoliate 2y ago

> It's like saying that gardening hasn't taken off because most people buy their vegetables at the supermarket. The IndieWeb doesn't need to "take off" to be valuable to those who participate in it. 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. ----- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden

rollcat 2y ago
I think the biggest obstacle are the "getting started", and then "actually owning it" parts. I registered my domain with Gandi (who have also initially hosted my email), got a VM from Hetzner, set me up some nginx, and I was good for a while. 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.
- 1dom 2y ago
  What's your point here? 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.

cxr 2y ago

> Maintaining a personal website is about owning your digital presence, embracing creative freedom, and expressing your individuality! 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.

aboardRat4 2y ago
https://lockywolf.net/2023-12-05_how-to-make-a-good-feed-reader.d/index.html https://lockywolf.net/2023-12-05_how-to-make-a-good-feed-rea...
2y ago

klabb3 2y ago

I do love (1) the non-commercial and (2) the long form non-realtime aspect of the indie web but I still wish it was more accessible to other nerds, not just in tech. It’s also hard to search and to connect with people. 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.

ghssds 2y ago

As personal websites become less and less frequent, it become easier for governments to disregard them and regulate them out of existence. Expect the barrier to entry for building a website to become so high only corporations can afford it.

aboardRat4 2y ago
This is already the case in China. You need a mass media license for a website.
- aitchnyu 2y ago
  British forum admins cutting off a couple of decades of posts to be legally compliant.
- zhouzhao 2y ago
  Do you have any source for that? Chinese language content is also fine
  - aboardRat4 2y ago
    Sure, pretty much any cloud provider has detailed info. For example, Tencent: https://cloud.tencent.com/developer/article/1396101 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.
    - lproven 2y ago
      Informative. Scary, but informative.
superkuh 2y ago
For example, HTTPS-only in browsers and CA TLS only connections in HTTP/3 protocol libraries. It's near impossible to host a visitable website without getting permission from a third party corporation every 90 days. These things make sense for corporate/institutional/etc sites but make the barrier to entry, and especially mantainence over time, of personal websites much more difficult. To the point it really does keep people from running personal websites. And it also creates central mechanisms of control for those that do jump through the hoops. LetsEncrypt won't remain benevolent forever as it's popularity grows. Just look at what happened to dot org, and what's happening in the USA in general. HTTP+HTTPS is a fine solution for personal websites.

mediumsmart 2y ago

The web is kind of independent yes. and it took off many years ago.

alex1138 2y ago

Also in general it may well be that nothing on the internet will ever take off in the way we were used to because we've crossed that threshold of "this is new and exciting" and it's taken for granted now (although some of the new technologies are really interesting, like IPFS, or Ruffle), although I think we'd all like to see a little less enshittification (a sane Facebook feed, Google actually showing relevant results again, dropping the ideological censorship and stopping ignoring specified keywords)

pipeline_peak 2y ago

I agree that it doesn’t need wider acceptance, but gen Z seems to be very tech illiterate. Lacking awareness of file systems and more importantly the web beyond 5 different social media platforms. 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.

stereolambda 2y ago
Actually it's a dynamic that might be circling us back to the mythical "early web". The more rebellious and out-there members of the younger cohorts tend to be more fascinated by hackable technology, piracy etc. This doesn't mean they're primarily programmers as persons, just like it didn't mean that in the 1990s. 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+.

superkuh 2y ago

In fact the indieweb cannot ever take off. Because take off means being used by a large fraction of people. And the large fraction of people only really use services where they consume content from people who produce content for monetary compensation. Since governments work very hard to make sure non-corporations are never allowed to exchange currency without a corporation being involved the indieweb will never appeal to the vast majority of people.

bblb 2y ago

"IndieWeb movement". It's just the web, right? Always has been? Do we already have entire generations of people who never open web browsers and live their whole online life in Apps? Sad.

KingMob 2y ago
It's less about apps vs web, and more about the web monoculture that arose. It's like that quip, "the web is 5 sites, sharing screenshots of the other 4".
melagonster 2y ago
Z generation is not the youngest generation now, so there are two generation.
charcircuit 2y ago
The web browser is just another app. It's not sad to check out multiple apps vs being locked into one platform.
- bblb 2y ago
  Technically correct. The best kind. 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.
  - rapnie 2y ago
    Old people get sad by what modern tech has to offer them. My elderly non-technical mother is forced into "digital transformation", this mindless 'tech-is-good' hype that is marketed as making our lives better, but which is really mostly about disruption and cost savings and not serving the actual needs people have. To my mother each website that she is forced to use to do her administrative tasks, is a completely different app with its different look & feel and terminologies used. And all of it is not increasing her quality of life.
    - 2y ago

aboardRat4 2y ago

I just came to this thread to say that indieweb considers RSS outdated and suggests hFeed/hEntry instead.

sapphicsnail 2y ago
Thanks for showing me this. I had no idea it existed.
benoliver999 2y ago
I feel like this should be using data- attributes instead of classes? I'm not a frontend guy really but aren't classes more for styling
BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
Well, then it can go to hell, even if the idea isn't necessarily bad. Atom/RSS are fine formats that work with countless small clients, what about hFeed?
- aboardRat4 2y ago
  In both cases you need an xml parser. Atom is very easily desynchronized with the main content, whereas hentry is in sync by construction.
  - BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
    > In both cases you need an xml parser. 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.
    - aboardRat4 2y ago
      >XHTML is basically dead and HTML5 is the murderer Tell me more. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/introduction.html#html-vs-xhtml https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/introduction.html#html-vs-x... Doesn't firefox ship a built-in translator between plainHTML and xHTML?

graphememes 2y ago

If you're trying to force 1999 into 2025 you're doing it wrong

picafrost 2y ago

I agree. Artists wonder why more people don't express themselves with art. Writers wonder why more people don't let it all out with words. Car mechanics wonder why people don't fix their own cars. It's not surprising that tech folk wonder why more people don't engage in tech-adjacent activities. Maintaining an independent web presence is a technical hobby. 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?

monero-xmr 2y ago
If what you desire is a tiny, curated web full of like minded skilled technologists, like it was before Usenet eternal September, that exists today. You work hard to get 20 people to respond. You can do that now. 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.
- ForTheKidz 2y ago
  > If what you desire is a tiny, curated web full of like minded skilled technologists, like it was before Usenet eternal September, that exists today. I mostly remember porn. Granted, i was a child.
throw80521 2y ago
A possible answer to your first question, at least how it applies to me: At the intersection of art and technology, I realized recently that the Greater Internet was hampering my progress. By which I mean large public content sharing and delivery services. 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.

mmaunder 2y ago

lol that indieweb website. Join the collective or we won’t think you independent. Just run Wordpress with a few hundred million other site owners and you’re good. There’s a metric fuckton of activity in the space and you don’t need a manbun.

SoftTalker 2y ago

Most people have nothing of any interest whatsoever to say to the world at large. Running one's own website is a waste of time for almost anyone. Just send email to the people you want to keep up to date, if you know they are interested.

ForTheKidz 2y ago

> There's a corner of the Internet where people have been reclaiming their digital independence by hosting their own websites 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.

cosmicgadget 2y ago
Compare the content of a blog post and a social media post.
- ForTheKidz 2y ago
  Yes, blog posters keep writing. This does not imply anything about whether or not it's a waste of time to read. But, substack is where the comments are, and the comments are generally the valuable part.

DeathArrow 2y ago

I didn't know that owning a website and hosting your content makes you part of "indie web".

stakhanov 2y ago

One problem I see with the current state of the IndieWeb having not yet "taken off" is the negative selection effect you get from having the corporate web in existence next to the IndieWeb. Back in the 90s you might write a website advertising your services as an accountant in Word, save as HTML, and upload that HTML to geocities or to webspace provided by your ISP. You can still do that today. The shocking difference is that back then it made actual business sense to do that: People would just stumble across your website. You could reach actual normies. Nowadays, because of the presence of the corporate web next to the Indie Web, the normies are trapped in the corporate web and the only eyeballs your website will attract will be the people who share in your own brand of weird. They might admire the "art" inherent in your crappy HTML, but they won't hire you as an accountant. And they're probably not strong enough in numbers for this to make any business sense.

prox 2y ago
This is actually the homepage of my accountant. “Instead of building a big website, we decided to save on the money. If you need accounting done, here is where you can reach us. It just black on white with blue links. I love it.
- flir 2y ago
  I like that as marketing copy. 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.
  - prox 2y ago
    Yeah for some jobs you don’t need a lot of fluff. Some markets do. Carpentry is an honest job. You do your job well and people will find you.

benoliver999 2y ago

The indieweb is both beautiful and frustrating to me. I have been writing online for 20 years in various forms, and my current site is 10 years old. 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 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.

nanna 2y ago
This. The barrier of entry is too high. Feels like the Indieweb is stuck at the protocol layer and an abstraction above it is badly needed.
- flir 2y ago
  Sounds like you just invented social media ;)
prox 2y ago
Did you read this line? It says after the domain and site: “That’s it. Everything else is optional awesomeness, you choose.”
Propelloni 2y ago
Yeah, just get Level 1 Webhosting from Hetzner for 2 EUR/month, click the 1-click setup for WP and off you go. What's the big deal?
- benoliver999 2y ago
  Yeah then simply follow the guide https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started_on_WordPress 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 https://indieweb.org/WordPress_IndieWeb_Plugin Oh that's a stub better hit the linked github https://github.com/indieweb/wordpress-indieweb https://github.com/indieweb/wordpress-indieweb Unless it's indieauth you're after? Micropub? websub? webmentions? The world is your oyster!

rambambram 2y ago

Fully agree! 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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

joeeverjk 2y ago

Ironically, the fact that the IndieWeb hasn’t taken off is exactly why it matters. Mass adoption would kill the point—turn it into just another algorithm-driven wasteland. It’s for the stubborn ones who still give a damn about owning their corner of the internet, not chasing dopamine hits on rented land.

prox 2y ago
You could argue this already happened. We all had websites in the early days. It got bigger so shops wanted their online presence. Then we got banners. First ad agencies started proliferating. People started tweaking their sites to be better visible for search and sell more stuff. The rest is history.

netcan 2y ago

> The IndieWeb doesn't need to go mainstream to be meaningful. It's a celebration of a more personal, decentralised... 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.

wkat4242 2y ago
I see what you mean. And yes I don't think it defines the future any longer. Unfortunately. But we passed that fork in the road a long time ago. 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.
- diggan 2y ago
  > 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. 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.

myaccountonhn 2y ago

My partner and I have been using our own website to share what we've been up to. We also share content we've consumed like books and movies. It's been a lot of fun to design it together, and I am happy that friends have a way to see what we are up to without needing to use social media. 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.

Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
> 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.

hackburg 2y ago

[dead]

xenodium 2y ago

While the indieweb doesn't need to take off, I sure would love to see /some/ growth. The internet is a big place, so even a small but active percentage would offer sanctuary to folks wanting out of walled gardens, constant tracking, bloat, advertising... 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 https://LMNO.lol. My blog runs on that too https://xenodium.com https://xenodium.com.

reacweb 2y ago

IMHO, indieweb has not taken off because web hosting was dirt cheap and an internet subscription with a good upload was awfully expensive. Nowadays, the balance has changed and it is less true. Cheap web hosting has become complicated trade-offs. 8GBs symmetric (50€/month) is enough for most of uses. My main hindrance is the fear that a hacker will hack into my home network

wvh 2y ago

I agree with the sentiment, that the metrics of independence and self-reliance aren't the same as for economic success. On the other hand, "not taking off" also means that not enough people know or care for solutions that require some effort. I take that statement to mean that self-hosting or open-source "free" solutions have not managed to in any way stop companies like Meta to amass most of the planet into their walled ecosystem and to fight the network effect. 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.

curtisszmania 2y ago

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deleted 2y ago

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MattSayar 2y ago

The indieweb isn't about anything but writing for yourself. Focus on writing the stuff you'd want to read, and you'll enjoy the benefits of clarifying your thoughts in written words. You get all the bonuses of referencing your work later, having a record of your activity, and maybe sometimes even grabbing someone's attention when they stumble across your site later. 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.

seydor 2y ago

It's not "indie web", it's "the web" , it still exists and all of the "commercial web" is built on top of it. 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