Creating a new thread since this was getting some replies over in the blogroll thread.
@convexer Personally I do want the indie web to have to have an ethos, but if itās just a hobby, thatās fine. I can take my web ethos elsewhere. In which case, that unnamed ethos is what I want to have a conversation about.
@ConcreteLunch Disappointed to hear that about the person starting a blog on Substack. From what Iāve seen, Pika and Bearblog seem fine, but theyāre also very limiting in certain respects, so I think the appeal depends on what exactly a person is looking for.
They are. Pika, however, has an editing window that is more like what most people are used to seeing. It is nice and smooth ā an easy entry. The themes are nice. All three offer a very inexpensive monthly rate. Hell, micro.blog has micro one ā $1 a month.
Iām going to mainly sit out this round of IndieWeb discourse because I had had my say about the IndieWeb back in August 2024. But this is mainly about the various technologies that IndieWeb as a movement advocates (microformats, webmentions, POSSE, etc).
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This is one of the first things of yours that I read. Agree.
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Even a low rate may be more than some people can afford, for various reasons. Not just because of poverty, but thereās also teens with no way to spend money online, people whose payment methods are limited internationally, etc. Thatās why my post emphasizes the importance of a free tier.
Pika.page does have a free tier, which is good. That free tier limits you to 50 posts, which is so restrictive that it seems more like a limited-time free trial than something that anyone is supposed to stick with, but then again for all I know, there may be bloggers who are comfortable with that. I would just suggest giving people a heads up during your walkthrough hour so that free tier post limit doesnāt catch anyone by surprise.
Neither Pika nor Bearblog have comment sections either, to my knowledge, which is why I havenāt explored them much myself. I have a different upcoming post about why comment sections can be an important feature for those who want them. Thatās not to say Pika and Bear arenāt legitimate options, just that theyāre ā again ā limited, in a way that means they may not be a perfect fit for everyone.
And for what itās worth, in my last reply I focused on Pika and Bearblog because like I said previously, I canāt in good conscience recommend that anyone go to Micro.blog.
Yeah I donāt think those are essential to anything. Occasionally I have seen somebody define the indie web in relation to specific tech like that, so I wonāt say it never happens, but I do feel comfortable in writing off that definition as silly. Saying itās not indie web without webmentions is like saying you donāt have a computer unless you have a wireless keyboard.
@Coyote, I noted your use of the diminutive ājustā in this quote:
but if itās just a hobby, thatās fine.
A hobby doesnāt mean I give zero ethical consideration to what I do on the indie web and how. But it clarifies my goals: I am here, first and foremost, to have a good time, not to save the world. And when I see people make more of the indie web than it isāfor example, trying to layer in revolutionary ideology or false promises of digital independence (cf. @starbreakerās point about ICANN in the other thread), it cramps my style a bit!
Itās good to have personal ethos behind your engagement in the indie web, selection of platforms & tools, etc.āI have this, too. But when we speak in universal terms of ātheā ethos for the indie web (or whatever we are calling it), then thatās where I start to get nervous. Suppose we manage to agree on the ethos; what prize do we get?
Like @starbreaker I think I have mostly laid out my personal, nonbinding indie web ethos (although he and I have fairly different views in the end 
). I wrote about my indie web goals here:
And my view on Substack users (which extends to Wordpress and other problematic platforms) here:
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Better strategizing and world with a little less suffering, one can hope. Given the extent of online exploitation (described in the post), people are interested in better indie web onboarding (to help give people a little reprieve from exploitation), and if people are genuinely interested in making that happen (which I am), then Iām hoping to inspire at least one person to realize that an over-emphasis on domain names is counterproductive.
Or perhaps thereās no convincing anyone, but hey. Might as well try and see what happens.
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I have very much enjoyed neocities and nekoweb. You can do a lot there for free. I think itās a nice place to start if you are willing to learn some very basic HTML. And I agree, the ability to create a site - or even a page - for free, that can be seen all over the world (pretty much) is very powerful. I love that young people or those without the funds or desire to spend money have that available.
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Maybe not that different. I want to be heard, too, albeit by an audience that can actually deal with me leaning into my shadow self and being too extra for corporate environments and LLMs.
As for Substack: my beef with the platform is that itās the Medium of newsletters, the content is thus neither rare nor well done, and itās exploitative toward writers because they take a 10% cut of the gross instead of charging a flat fee like Buttondown.
gratuitous multilingual scatology
If youāll pardon my French, the fact that theyāre willing to monetize neo-Nazis is merely ganache fĆ©cale sur un gĆ¢teau de merde. If youāve already got a shit cake, covering it with diarrhea frosting canāt possibly make matters worse.
At least when Nearly Free Speech gets money from fascists, they donate it to the Southern Poverty Law Center, are up front about it in their FAQ, and call it āmorons funding the fight against moronsā. They donāt claim to be neutral.
As for a common ethos: if that was what I wanted Iād go to church.
I think a big part of the indie web seems to be precisely about breaking away from huge corporations, especially on the social media side of things. I donāt think there needs to be a higher purpose to ājoinā the indie web and thatās not why Iām here.
Simply put, I donāt enjoy mainstream social media and the like. It feels harder to find good content in the middle of all the garbage churned out for money/engagement. It feels ānoisierā. Meanwhile, browsing indie sites and blogs makes it easier for me to curate my experience and avoid things I find uninteresting.
The indie web feels less commercial and that shows in many peopleās content. Itās easier to find peopleās passion projects and it often feels more genuine. It reminds me of why I used to spend hours browsing peopleās personal sites or reading their blogs.
I also donāt like the way so many big platforms seem more rigid and harder to customise, or the way they try to push you to make an account or download an app. I can post on my blog from my phoneās browser if I want, no need for an extra app that wants a ton of permissions. I can choose the colours and fonts and a bunch of other things.
Regarding Bearblog, you can actually turn the posting window into a WYSIWYG editor. Iām on mobile right now and canāt find it, but thereās a way and itās available to free accounts as well. The free tier (which is what I use because Iām constantly broke) is pretty generous. It does limit some options a bit but Iāve been able to do a ton of stuff with it. Iām happy to help anyone if I can, by the way.
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With apologies in advance for using the word ānormieā.
Iāve not previously heard the idea of āfreedom from exploitation as a domain nameā, and, whilest I think purchasing a domain name is very helpful to that end, I think I would immediately disagree with such a sentiment, even if I first saw it being presented positively. The indie web should be inclusive of those who cannot purchase a luxury like that, including adults who canāt afford it and children without financial independence. You touching on the issues with this idea by pointing to Tumblr and Bluesky was very well-done.
I donāt know how much bigger I want the indie web to grow, though. I hate to seem like a hipster, but Iāve seen far too many niche movements start to become exploited, and filled with people who donāt understand the actual history/intentions behind the subculture. (Iām specifically thinking about how 2020 caused a bunch of normies to flood into fandom, but there are other examples, too.)
There is seemingly a sort of template which is followed:
Something is niche, and mostly enjoyed by a select few enthusiasts (typically geeks) ā More ānormalā people take notice and join ā It is no longer so niche; it is perhaps even āpopularā ā The mainstream takes notice of this new, cool, popular thing ā Billionaires begin trying to exploit and monetize that subculture, as it is now a demographic to be marketed to
I suppose what I am saying is that I am extremely cautious about the possibility of an āEternal Septemberā on the indie web, and so I, rather selfishly, think that the task of onboarding to the indie web should be done with caution. I think that everybody deserves to be free from exploitation under social media, but, at the same time, I donāt think I want a Twitter user who regularly partakes in harassment campaigns against autistic people and trans women to be my indie web neighbor.
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Yeah, people like that can keep social media, and probably will as long as thereās a steady supply of victims within easy reach. Itās easy to dunk on people who arenāt just like you if a recommendation algorithm is constantly bringing them to your attention because your anger is āengagementā. If you have to actually learn how to find other peopleās websites, and they are under no obligation to tolerate your presence in their spaces, it gets a little harder to be a troll.
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Thank you. Iām glad to hear that.
Hmm. Iām of two minds about that, which might mean that I need to think about it some more.
On the one hand, I definitely have an investment in community memory, and Iāve had my share of getting frustrated with people for not knowing or seeming to care about relevant history. On the other handā¦ Iām not sure Iām prepared to see that as a threat, in this case. Maybe I just donāt know what I should be picturing here.
You did link some points of comparison, which I appreciate, but stuff like Usenet and fanfiction sites are specific communities/contexts that can get flooded with input. I would think thereās a bit of asymmetry there with the indie web if (emphasis on if) weāre thinking of the indie web along the lines of āhaving your own website,ā sinceā¦ if a ton of people suddenly make a ton of websitesā¦ those websites donāt all suddenly appear in front of you or take up all the oxygen in the room. That rise in volume just doesnāt necessarily impact anyone else directly.
The worst case scenario I can imagine there is something likeā¦ I donāt know, maybe so many people sign up for the free tier of Neocities at once that it overloads the servers? ā¦Which would be unfortunate, certainly, and a good reason to make frequent backups, but I think generally Iām more concerned about the opposite problem ā that too many people are being kept in the dark or prematurely turned away at the door.
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Great read as always! Iām new to the IndieWeb, the term is new to me, and this reminded me of a conversation I had on social.coop, a Mastodon server built around openāsource values. People there reacted to Susam Palās essay The IndieWeb Doesnāt Need to āTake Offā. The debate was mostly about whether growing visibility or increasing numbers instantly pushes the IndieWeb toward the mainstream, or turns it into a chase for views and likes.
I mentioned that understanding the purpose of decentralization and the corporate tech structures that can impair independence is part of digital literacy; we should all be digitally literate enough to grasp the basics of web development and HTML. Thereās also an intersection between digital literacy and underāserved communities worldwide (donāt get me started on this topic, lol!).
I think onboarding would be helpful for people trying to understand all the platforms that allow free web hosting and custom CSS; I would also consider the ethics and history of each platform. Itās not easy entering a new hobby or space. When I first built my website, I didnāt realize how much WordPress had changed over the years, and creating my own theme was very difficult.
Iāve seen several people on this forum run multiple personal sites, each with its own domain, and link those sites together across different IndieWebāfriendly platforms such as Neocities, Bear, and others. Discovering how often that kind of crossāplatform linking occurs was interesting to me. I think the goal should be for everyone to keep building and engaging with the IndieWeb so they can create personalāarchive sites that reflect their own lives.
An onboarding guide would definitely be useful, but the real question is who is responsible for delivering that information and how people actually find it? Who should be curating and sharing resources about visibility, onboarding, and bestāpractice tools? Just my two cents!
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This has been a really interesting conversation so far. I have some thoughts, but a caveat: my response may be a little all over the place, as this is something I need to think about further.
I think itās useful to remember that internet users can be divided into two broad categories: creators and consumers. There often is, of course, considerable overlap between the two (creators are also consumers, and consumers often want to create ā even if itās just to repost something they read that they enjoyed), but they are distinct categories nonetheless.
Correct me if Iām wrong, but the IndieWeb (capital I, capital W) seems to focus almost entirely on creators, to the point where it feels like you have to be a creator to ābelongā to this space. The very idea of āonboardingā in this case is creator-focused and thus exclusionary from the start. I donāt think anyone should have to purchase a domain or even build a website of their own to feel like theyāre part of this community. If the independent web is supposed to be for everyone, it has to be for people who passively browse the web as well ā not just those of us who contribute to the web.
Iāll use a personal example to underscore what Iām trying to say here: I have my own website, and my husband has a Substack publication (heās not a Nazi, I promise). Iām happy with having only a few readers who might follow me here on this forum or on the Fediverse. Sharing my writing online is an enjoyable hobby for me, and I donāt really care about metrics. My husband, conversely, is an academic who wants to start publishing and selling his fiction, so being able to reach a bigger audience when heās starting out is more important to him. We both have VERY different goals when it comes to what we put out there on the internet. My goals are no more valid than his, simply because I no longer participate in the corporate web.
My husband has zero experience with coding, and while Iām sure I could teach him how to build a website, and while better onboarding features would be nice to help bring him into the IndieWeb space, it would mean nothing to him if he couldnāt easily reach other people ā especially early on, when heās trying to build an audience for his writing. Established authors whoāve had their own well-known independent websites for years and years are privileged in the sense that they were there at the beginning and had the leg up that goes along with being āfirstā in a space. A lot of publishers these days want to see PROOF of a following before theyāll even consider cutting a deal with an unknown author, and itās really hard to build a following on the independent web.
To get back to the creators versus consumers thingā¦ My mother-in-law is in her late 70s, and has also never coded. She follows my husbandās writing via email subscription. It was very easy for her to start following him; she clicked on a button and entered in her email address. Simple. Sheās told me that sheād like to follow my writing, but she doesnāt use or understand RSS. She has my site bookmarked, and I know that she probably only reads it on a very sporadic basis ā unlike my husbandās publication, which she receives via email. Itās just much easier for her to consume content posted on the corporate web as opposed to the independent web. She is representative, I think, of a lot of people who use the internet.
Until the independent web makes it easier for consumers to find, follow, and interact with other people participating in this space in a privacy-respecting way, I think the independent web will always be niche. We either accept that, or we work to make it more inclusive for everyone ā including those who have no interest in maintaining a site of their own.
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But someone who behaves poorly doesnāt have to be your indie web neighbour. The beauty of things like personal, independent sites, blogs and communities is that people can set their own rules. Transphobic trolls, theyāre easier to remove/ignore when youāve got more control over the tools youāre using. If a community (like this one) doesnāt want them, itās possible to simply not allow it.
Bigger social media platforms arenāt obligated to allow that crap, either, but they do it because they want as much activity and as many users as possible. When you remove the profit motive, thereās no real incentive to let everyone in the door to the detriment of quality.
Conversely, certain things are not protected speech in many jurisdictions and may actually be illegal. The problem is that big corporations can afford legal and lobbying strategies to dodge this.
I disagree that more people on the indie web would make it worse. Itās easier to just not engage with people with abhorrent views when thereās no feed getting spammed with them.
Incidentally, I donāt see 2020 as a turning point in making fandom worse. I was already admittedly indifferent to fandom stuff by then, but tumblr and its format really made things worse long before the pandemicā¦
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Thank you. :3
Oh but I want to! I want to get you started on it. Already so much of the internet is anglocentric, to the point of practically requiring a lot of people around the world to learn a second language (or third, or fourth), and then weāre asking them to learn anglocentric coding languages as well?
Thereās been some efforts on this front, itās worth noting ā the 32BC of course has the resource list and the Creating Your Own Website guide, and more recently I created a beginner guide of my own, You Can Make A Website, which links to lots of different tools and tutorials. Plus the IndieWeb Camp wiki has a Getting Started page that Iāve been trying to make improvements to (if you log in, you can access the edit history and see what kind of state it was in before).
But, yes, that does still leave the question of how anyone is supposed to stumble across these things, and then once they do, following a guide like this does still require some considerable legwork, which takes us back to the interest in making things easier. Right now Iāve got my eye on a few upcoming indie content management services that I hope Iāll be able to recommend, since in theory those should be able to help simplify the process. And besides developing more tools like thatā¦ I suppose that leaves it to us to help spread the word.
Thank you, Iām glad to hear itās been thought-provoking.
Yes, I think thatās a good point as well. Iām reminded of the recent carnival contribution that talked about independent web browsers and the perspective of a visitor/reader, looking to access sites in an indie way.
Hmm. Could an RSS-to-email tool work for her, or is that something youāve already ruled out?
Yeah. To me, āinteractā is the big one out of those three, although I recognize the importance of all of them. I have some tangentially related thoughts for an upcoming post about comment sections, which I think have been an under-discussed factor in why people keep making accounts on social platforms instead of making static sites.
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Thatās an interesting idea Iād potentially be on board with ā especially if the browsers themselves could incorporate opt-in social features that shift the onus of managing data / privacy / age restrictions away from individual web administrators.
Possibly (in her specific case), but I mostly mentioned her to paint a portrait of the average internet user who knows nothing about RSS and other syndication / social technology that is common on the independent web. Even something like RSS-to-email adds another layer of friction that the average internet user simply doesnāt want to deal with.
Iāll be interested in reading that! Comments sections can be such a catch-22ā¦ Itās true that they could possibly draw more people to the independent web, but itās worth noting that people could also be driven to the independent web because of comments sections on social platforms and the toxicity they so often stoke.
I used to be pretty firm in my belief that all websites (especially blogs) SHOULD have comments sections, but Iāve relaxed my stance on that. I would add a comments section to my blog again only if it was possible to do so in an easy, totally anonymized, privacy-respecting way, and if I could easily block trouble makers. The non-commercial personal web is largely exempt from stuff like the GDPR, but keeping up to date with various nationsā continually-evolving data / privacy laws to ensure that Iām still in the clear just isnāt something I want to do.
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i think my primary problem with having a universal (or at least a widely agreed upon one) indie web ethos is more of the fact that i donāt particularly view the indie web as a community at all. thereās communities within the indie web (e.g. 32bit cafe, IndieWeb, webrings and the like) but in itself is not a community (i think the term webweaving may be better for my case since indie web, by its adjective-noun nature does make it sound like a community).
there does tend to be a through line of revolt against the current state of the internet, but the extent of ones revolt changes depending on the person. iād also argue thatās not even a primary motivator for many; itās cool to have your own code and domain and whatnot but itās still just a tool that you use because something else doesnāt adequately do the job.
i think in communities like here we do tend to get more people who strongly believe in itās liberatory nature, but from my perspective talking to people irl who, although left leaning are not particularly interested in drastic change or ideology debates, itās a pretty weak pull. most people i know are either 1) pretty apathetic to the state of affairs and donāt have much desire to change it (basically everyone) 2) feel social media is adequate enough 3) prefer being more private and donāt like talking about themselves or blogging (and thus view having a personal website as uncomfortable). the biggest pull iāve seen is just telling people itās an art medium and to view it as such or as a way to showcase their professional research.
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