The indieweb doesn't need to “take off”
169 comments
·March 21, 2025quadrifoliate
ozim
I did an attempt to grow some vegetables for „war time”. It is pretty much useless. Amounts are too much to consume at once and not enough to consume for longer periods. Putting it into jars is an option but then cost goes up as you need to boil loads of water. Then as mentioned amount to sustain family of 3 for whole year I would have to spend way too much time in it, not even starting on possible diseases that could wipe out crop.
Statistics also show that people in the cities eat much more vegetables than people in the country side - if you exclude potatoes. I don’t want to eat potatoes only.
Exactly the same with self hosting or even running my own blog on VPS - it is nice as a side hobby. But if I have to prevent any DDoS that is already too much to handle and I am DevOps by trade and we buy anti DDoS services.
Unless I am forced to do gardening for survival or I wouldn’t have anything else to do with my time there is no upside for maintaining garden or maintaining self hosted stuff, just a nerdy fantasy because it all takes too much time and people have much more things to do in life.
Nerdy fantasy is having all kinds of vegetables freshly picked - war time reality is eating old potatoes from the cellar.
benrutter
Alternative take, but I get a lot of value from gardening as complimentary to supermarkets.
I normally grow potatoes, carots etc, and have an apple tree, and several herbs like dill, mint, thyme etc that pretty much manage themselves. It's very far from meaning I never need to shop again, and like you pointed out, to get to that point you'd pretty much need to quit your job and work full time growing food.
That said, it does add a bit of resillience into the system (as well as being rewarding) in the same way having solar panels might shield you from energy cost fluctuations without totally removing your dependence on the grid. I save a lot of money on fresh herbs, and never need to buy apples during season.
modo_mario
It's nice physical activity, satisfying, healthy, makes me happy to go out, Also not everything is priced the same. If i wanted to cut back i'd still grow some stuff that's easy to grow but for some reason expensive here. I get to give some stuff away that's hard to preserve. And when winter comes....yeah i go to the store more often because i totally could but don't like eating only frozen, canned, pumpkins, beets, carrots, & leftover kale/winter spinach, etc Is there a problem with that?
>Statistics also show that people in the cities eat much more vegetables than people in the country side - if you exclude potatoes. I don’t want to eat potatoes only.
I'm very confused how that has to do with anything?
>But if I have to prevent any DDoS that is already too much to handle and I am DevOps by trade and we buy anti DDoS services.
I'd have some serious questions if someone were to feel the need to ddos my blog. But I think some ddos protection comes with my ovh plan. I could be running on some rpi in a closet but i don't in the same way that i could be seedsaving but don't.
lenzm
> I'm very confused how that has to do with anything?
Presumably people in the country are more easily able to grow vegetables. If they aren't doing it, then it implies that growing vegetables isn't worth the time.
I think there are other confounding factors like income and education.
aziaziazi
> Amounts are too much to consume at once and not enough to consume for longer periods.
Sounds interesting. Some techniques one can use to mitigate that:
- spread plantations overtime
- use early/normal/late variety
Other techniques ideas than jar:
- sun dry (fruits): boost vitD at the same time
- dark and fresh basement (potatoes, squashes…)
- fermentation (fruits, leaves, roots, ANYTHING!) there’s a bunch of man-old techniques to conserve your vegetable. They’ll keep many nutrients and add some probiotics. Kimchy, pickles (super easy)…
kilpikaarna
Growing food is secondary to storing food. If you just grow your own food without thinking about preservation, it's very easy to run into the situation you mention. Where you have a larger harvest of something than you are able to use at once, and no method of keeping it from spoiling.
Conversely, if you know how to pickle and can, and have a chest freezer and maybe a food processor, it's very easy to buy bulk amounts of vegetables when they are in season and store for later. You get basically the same benefits as with growing your own, for much less effort, and quite possibly less expense.
diggan
Alternatively, something that doesn't seem to be mentioned so far in this comment threads, is befriending your neighbors and gifting them what vegetables/fruits they don't have and them doing the same to you, hopefully leading to less stock of everything but more variety.
ViscountPenguin
This might be climate dependent.
Here in the subtropics, I've found it relatively easy to get the majority of our fruits and veggies from our backyard, with things like papayas and panama berries producing year round. In temperate climates you'll have more difficulty though.
dudefeliciano
I think there are many upsides of maintaining a garden: you learn how to grow different crops (that you wouldn’t if you didn’t grow a garden) and how to combat disease, you get fresh air, vitamin d and an occasion to wind down, you get to eat your own veggies which taste far better than store bought for the simple fact that you grew them yourself. Maybe it doesn’t make you self sustainable in case of war, but it sure gives you the basics over someone who has never grown anything…
ragebol
Since you tried it, you now have now developed some skills to be able to raise some vegetables if you're in a real pickle (ha!).
Maybe that is the most valuable thing from such a garden: not being totally helpless if the need does arise for some reason.
And when that does, there are probably more people around to trade different foods with, perhaps.
lukan
You do know, that a garden in reality takes longer to produce food, than in stardew valley?
If a breakdown comes, I am probably busy with other things, than planting seeds and tending to the weeds.
I like gardening, because it gives good fresh food. And not (anymore) because I think I will be better prepared for a post apocalyptical world. I'd rather invest in a hunting rifle for that.
robinsonb5
You're right that it's not realistic for most people to grow enough food to be self-sufficient - but it doesn't take a lot of effort to grow enough food to make a difference.
I usually grow runner beans (8 or 9 plants, and maybe some climbing French beans too) and courgettes (2 or three plants, ideally different varieties) - both of which are high-yield for a relatively small amount of space, and both of which freeze successfully. I really don't have to spend much time on doing that - basically just a case of making sure they have enough water.
I'm now on my last bag of runner beans from last season, and I might actually buy some in about a month's time.
Pumpkins or other winter squash will keep for several months after harvesting provided they reached full maturity before picking, and provided you treat them carefully.
Am I self-sufficient? No, nowhere near it. Have I made a noticeable difference to my food bill? Most definitely.
vladms
I do agree that things are harder when you do them then when random people advertise them on the internet.
That being said, things do evolve in time, and while I can't talk about gardening, I find it much easier to host a small website today than 20 years ago, both in terms of personal time and cost. There is a generic fashion to ignore tools and automation in the detriment of "finished products", but even with this, I do feel that tools got better. Not sure it is the case for gardening, but I do wonder if it is not just a matter of initial investment.
rollcat
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.
bluebarbet
Completely agree with your general gist.
As someone who built websites in the 1990s, I too am amazed by how hard it still is to do something as ostensibly simple as publish text.
My conclusion is this: DNS and hosting are just inappropriate overkill for individuals. There's the setup hurdle, then the ongoing security and maintenance of software, and finally the problem that hosting is just fragile, with no internal inertia - if you stop paying, your site goes away or gets squatted. All this just to have one's own domain? In the end, for any site, the only link that will survive is the one on the Internet Archive.
I now tend to the view that domains and hosting and software maintenance are best left to organizations. Individuals should instead pool their resources and publish on shared platforms. There's no reason these need be corporate. The fediverse, for instance, is giving us new publishing options almost every day.
vladms
I think expectations not to pay for things are one of the reasons people give up control to companies - you complain about 48 eur and not having a free tier, but you also mention you want stuff.
I decided for myself to use less free services. Either I find them useful and I should pay for them (and demand improvements), or I shouldn't expect that stuff is "provided" to me without some downsides (ads, etc.).
I am grateful that so many people made things more accessible and easier by building all the open source and free software! That's an immense work already, not recognized enough, and (probably) put off a bit by people that demand stuff without wanting to learn and understand the details.
rollcat
> you complain about 48 eur and not having a free tier, but you also mention you want stuff.
I don't mind paying. Hardware has to be manufactured, infrastructure has to be kept up. I paid for my phone and my computer, I keep paying the electricity and Internet bills. Heck, imagine this: I also buy software. (€48/y for domain renewal is still robbery by the way.)
My problem is: I already paid for all these different services, still have to do all of the integration work by myself, and then when the need arises, I have to start paying for yet-another thing (e.g. a VPS) that in addition to integration now also requires maintenance effort on my part. And then, when I need to change providers, I have to redo a considerable chunk of that work, by myself.
> [...] demand stuff without wanting to learn and understand the details.
This is a lose-lose arrangement. High bar to adoption means fewer users. Lost users will never contribute any value back. (How to get existing users to contribute is an entirely separate issue.)
My complaint also has almost nothing to do with free software. What I want is easy and painless setup, integration, and (when things don't work out) migration. When you signed up with your ISP, they came to your house, maybe ran some cables, plugged a router into the wall - and you can now enjoy WiFi on every device you own, and "it" doesn't care if the traffic is DNS, HTTP, IMAP+SMTP, or Quake. Yet if you want your own DNS, HTTP, IMAP+SMTP, and Quake, each of these is its own little nightmare.
If you want to change the ISP for any reason, the process is more or less the same - the worst "technical" part is you will have to type a new WiFi password on every device. Most people can't explain the difference between "the WiFi" and "the Internet", and even those who do will look funny at you when you bring up FTTH vs FTTP. Because all of it just works, and makes people's lives better by being so.
Do you see the asymmetries? Can you imagine a world where owning your digital presence was just as painless?
1dom
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.
null
zombot
Goalpost moved error.
It's not the job of the indie web to repair the damage that bungling regulators and lawmakers cause with their laissez-faire attitude towards the megacorps. Cleanig up this deeply corrupt system cannot be done by the indie web, however much we wish it could.
Barrin92
>The non-independent web which is largely controlled by faceless corporations has never been bigger or more able to hurt the average person
I disagree with this one pretty strongly because it's important to consider it in relation to the amount of internet users.
The early web was less corporate largely just due to its small size. If you take into account the number of users I'd argue that the corporate web peaked about 10 - 15 years ago, ever since then there's been a gradual shift towards more diversity. If you grew up in the AOL messenger and Yahoo news era not only was it corporate, but there was one corporation for like, everything. In 2010 you had effectively 1 social network, Facebook. Internet Explorer had a marketshare of 95% at its peak.
Today it's still heavily commercial but that's not the same as corporate. There's a lot of alternatives now, Signal, Telegram, niche decentralized alternatives, direct consumer facing creator focused platforms like substack, patreon, onlyfans etc. Even Amazon to me seems way less central and with more alternatives than it did 5-7 years ago. Netflix has more competitors, as a software developer you have a much healthier open source and linux ecosystem, and so on.
You have to have some pretty heavy rose tinted glasses on if you think creators, devs or endusers had more choice on the internet 20 years ago than they do now.
j4coh
The early web was largely academic, not corporate. I was there when it switched over. You’re describing a time period after the dot com crash as the early internet, but it was around before that and was quite nice actually. I was a kid back then, we learned in junior high school how to upload our hand-edited websites via ftp over dial up internet, and the companies that intermediated the internet to us were ISPs not advertising companies. I suppose AOL was an exception but nobody I know used it and would have been made fun of for doing so.
p1necone
I think you've misread the comment. They never called the "more corporate" era of 10-15 years ago the "early web", they were describing it as distinct from the even earlier "early web", which seems to be the same early web you're fond of.
I think the two of you agree about those time periods, they were just pointing out that they believe the peak sad, stale, corporate internet period was not now, but actually a decade or so ago.
FWIW I agree with them. I think people who romanticize the early days of the internet are quick to dismiss what we have currently just because it isn't exactly the same as what they remember. There's plenty of online spaces that have the same vibes on today's internet, and they have the same or even more users as they did back then (because there were a lot less overall users back in those days - like multiple orders of magnitude less - a small slice of the pie today is bigger than the whole thing ~30 years ago), they're just in different places and in different shapes.
swatcoder
Twenty years ago, the norm was to email your personal "social network" using a completely standardized and decentralized protocol.
Twenty years ago, the norm was to maintain a bookmark list of personally maintained websites you might visit in your online time, using a completely standardized protocol distributed across hosts ranging from home PC's to closet racks to countless disparate ISP's, universities, and hosting providers.
Twenty years ago, the norm was to have topical conversations with strangers using completely standardized protocols using decentralized or federated networks (NNTP and IRC).
Twenty years ago, the norm was to trade with and organize within your community on minimalist bulletin boards that took no fees and had almost no rules.
Twenty years ago, the norm was still that you kept most of your purchases in your local economy, but when you chose to remove money from your local economy (a certain kind of travesty, now become the norm), you did so with nearly unmediated relationship with far away merchants, with only a few points in fees being absorbed by agencies situated in between.
Twenty years ago, the norm was that when you bought digital media, you received a commodity copy of it that you could duplicate and access and re-encode as you saw fit.
Twenty years ago, the (illicit) norm was to digitize your own physical media and share it freely with others using numerous clever protocols to overcome bandwidth and accountability concerns, all decentralized.
True, twenty years ago, you did not get to have trivial access to trivial interactions with celebrities. You did not get endless streams of trivial headlines about trivial things. You did not get to drone out to endless autoplay of trivial videos. You did not get to monetize your own trivialities so easily.
Frankly, having been around for twenty years and then quite a few more, I have no idea what you're talking about in your comment.
Barrin92
>Twenty years ago, the (illicit) norm was to digitize your own physical media
No it wasn't. It was the norm among an ingroup of technically savy young people who, on HN, always confuse themselves with the average user at the time. A normal guy two decades ago was as the other commenter above points out, accessing the internet through a bunch of apps provided by their ISP (it's where the name comes from) a sort of vertically integrated company town, likely completely reliant on proprietary software that was so monopolistic, like IE, it sucked completely. When was browser choice better, then or now?
If you're an average user, not an average hacker in 2025 you have significantly more ways to avoid "big corpo" than you did back then. You weren't on IRC as a normie in 2005, you were on AIM and ICQ, also AOL owned of course. The norm, as in for a normal person, was to engage with the web and the world of computing to two, maybe three mega-companies, they weren't torrenting, ripping and re-encoding media.
xarope
and another 20 years prior to that, we had mixed tapes, from a friend who had one of those dual deck tape recorders, or VHS copies (alas poor Betamax) from that friend who worked in the video store that had access to multiple video recorders.
Nothing has really changed, has it? Just the speed and scope of access has increased, and the mass of noise amidst the (hopefully still existing after AI aftermath) quality signal (by magnitudes).
anthk
Twenty years ago you would use IM protocols and forums; IRC and Usenet were for die hard hardcore nerds/geek/academics.
alex_abt
I would join you but I'm busy making sure everyone is drinking out of paper straws to save the environment.
netcan
> 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.
iNic
I think you underestimate the cultural impact that small groups can have. I am not sure about indieweb in particular, but there are many niche groups that had much longer-term impact than more mainstream movements. In music this is often expressed as your artists favorite artist. For me Captain Beefheart (influencing Beck and Tom Waits), Death Grips (influenced Björk and David Bowie) come to mind, but there are probably more niche groups that I don't know.
In economics the Chicago school had a outsized impact considering they how fringe they seemed in the world of academia. Nowadays I would say that George Mason is the new Chicago school, and for similar reasons.
I would love to get more examples of this phenomenon if anyone else has any.
diggan
> underestimate the cultural impact that small groups can have [...] I would love to get more examples of this phenomenon
I wasn't alive at the time, so I don't know how small/fringe the lisp community was at the time, but your comment made me think of how lisp "invented" things like if-then-else, recursion, garbage collection, first-class functions and more, which we more or less take for granted in every programming language today (at least some of those features), although lisp and lisp-likes remain fringe today.
The same pattern seems to be repeating even in modern times where things like React/Redux/hot code reloading were heavily inspired by what the ClojureScript (a lisp-like compile-to-JS language) community was experimenting with at the time, if I remember correctly.
netcan
There is no argument about small groups' potential impact. The question is "what kind of group is this."
Where is the analogy of Lisp to indieweb?
netcan
Sure. I don't disagree with that.
I think the Beat Generation (and mid-century Mississippi blues) from my earlier comment are also examples. Niche in their time. Automobile enthusiasts were a niche group. Early web forum users, IRC, ICQ... Predecessors of modern social media culture.
For an even more "on the nose" example would be the Homebrew Computer Club, Altair programmers and whatnot. I think we're all familiar with "disruption theory" by this point on HN.
The point is... is this a vanguard or a rear guard? Both have value. But... expecting the rear guard to "take off" is misguided.
jjulius
>But... expecting the rear guard to "take off" is misguided.
Uhh... not "taking off" is exactly the point.
3np
Aphex Twin?
wkat4242
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.
netcan
Perfectly reasonable take. "Taking off" is, I agree, a misguided expectation within this frame.
Desktop Linux (year of) is a great analogy. Had it happened, Linux would not have remained Linux as we know it. Differences would likely not to the liking of desktop Linux users irl.
Otoh... had Linux desktop really "taken off" circa 2008... it would have had a major impact on personal computing.
These are two, usually distinct desires. "Indie" generally goes with the niche, principled ethos.
diggan
> 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.
safety1st
> If this is about recapturing what the web was, culturally, circa 1995-2005... that's a different sort of judgement.
Well the principles are there for everyone to see, and it sounds like you may have read them, so we don't need to guess about them.
https://indieweb.org/principles
The ideas have always been very simple. Own your own data, scratch your own itch, build things and share them.
"Take off," "Get Big," "Stay Small," "Change the World," "Be Retro," "Be Art," none of this was ever the point, it's always just been, go build something on the web you have some ownership over and share it with whoever may be interested.
Over the years I've found it fascinating that so many people who weren't doing what the Indieweb is about, namely building, sharing, and scratching your own itch, have felt compelled to commentate and pontificate about whatever they believed it to be.
itsfine2
> Over the years I've found it fascinating that so many people who weren't doing what the Indieweb is about, namely building, sharing, and scratching your own itch, have felt compelled to commentate and pontificate about whatever they believed it to be.
Unfortunately, many people see doing things yourself as an amateur—like cooking a meal, fixing a car, or hosting a personal website—as a low-status activity. The modern way of life is to pay for everything; only losers spend their precious time on those boring tasks. And they always trying to find a way to justify it.
agumonkey
I'm more and more willing to forget the linear aspect of time. Steam engines are different from ICEs, and from AC motors.
It's a bit like going to the country side. The house is old, everything is limited.. yet it's not a loss.
PaulRobinson
I think the stakes are higher, and the IndieWeb movement is about the future, and it's not just an aesthetic.
Allow me a metaphor. Many years ago humans wandered the Earth, hunted and gathered and lived where they wished. Then came along civilisation, and with it, a normalisation not just of trade, but of property. Some people realised that they could "own" the best land, and make people pay a "rent" to use it. And so was born, The Law. The Law was used for a long time in a way that meant people were born into a system where they just accepted there were Lords of the land and those who worked it for an existence. Eventually, people asked important questions, some set out for a New World, others in the Establishment sought to impose The Law in new lands, sometimes accepted, sometimes rejected. After a long, long time, we came to a place in society where we accepted personal property - particularly personal ownership of the land on which you lived - was a just, beneficial and suitable place for civilisation to settle.
Now, back to the web. Right now, we're in a phase of feudalistic control. In order to "feel informed", or to even be entertained, you are required to make sacrifices (your personal data), to a rich group of Lords who demand The Law bends to their will.
The IndieWeb is the web version of freeholding. It won't change the World, but without it, the World can't change.
As a society we have a choice: our future online presence entirely owned and shaped by a handful of "land owners", or we invest in making the New World and creating an online world that we want to see.
This isn't about aesthetics. It's about freedom, democracy, the law, your rights and those of future generations. There's a place for landlords in this World, but please don't try and consign the IndieWeb to a curious retro hobby clan: it has the potential to offer you and many others so, so much more than that.
TFA says that IndieWeb does not need to "take off". I agree. But it also doesn't need putting down or dismissing, and it can adapt to whatever future defining vibe of youth culture it needs to: it is a platform, not an art form. It is land on which to build coffee shops/libraries/museums/diaries, not those things itself.
fauigerzigerk
>The IndieWeb is the web version of freeholding. It won't change the World, but without it, the World can't change.
Freeholding has always existed since the web was born. The current structure of overwhelmingly dominant landlords was built on top of it.
The problem we have is that the IndieWeb is not currently a viable alternative for most content creators who need to make a living. If it's not economically viable then it's by definition a hobby.
"Taking off" may not be the right yardstick, but I think walking away from the goal of making the IndieWeb economically effective enough to claim back some territory from the oligopolists just means giving up.
freeone3000
Making money from a website ruins the entire point — you’re now part of the problem.
moffkalast
> steam engine enthusiasts in 2025 and 1825. One is about the future and the other is about the past
Well most of our power generation still comes from steam turbines, and boiling water is more of than than not still the most efficient approach for energy extraction, so it's as much the present and future as it is the past.
mrob
I've never met a steam turbine enthusiast. Steam engine enthusiasts are specifically piston engine enthusiasts.
BoingBoomTschak
Thing is that music trends are (indeed) only trends and expected to not last centuries, and that the steam engine is arguably inferior to what came after. What the "build your own website" crowd posits is that what we have now is factually inferior and dehumanizing.
I agree that there's a lot of misguided prose about the whys and hows of such a revival, but trying to make the web fun again for the small part of the population interested enough to put in some elbow grease is worth it, in my opinion.
It's not trying to change the world, it's trying to build a small "indomitable Gauls village" style community.
watwut
> 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.
Both have creative vibe. They are not future defining or "youth culture", but that does not mean they are not meaningful or personal or decentralized.
It is ok for subcultures to be what they are and not being mainstream or becoming super popular.
jjulius
Right? I don't understand OP's thought there. Plenty of jazz still innovates. Look at the impact Robert Glasper and Terrace Martin have had, especially with Kendrick Lamar, over the past decade. Innovation is there if you're paying attention.
picafrost
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
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
> 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
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.
cootsnuck
I feel like you've expressed something I've been struggling to put into words for awhile now.
Sometime around a decade ago, a switch flipped for me and "being online" in such a transparent way just felt incredibly uncomfortable for me. And for some reason this drastic change has been so curious to me for awhile. Because I actually am someone who loves discourse. I enjoy talking to strangers and learning about them (in moderation) and I've never had a problem having a pointed opinion and discussing it. Back when FB felt "small" and had a greater balance of text posts vs images/video, I relished posting and discussing with my network.
But like I said, something changed and yes it was around the time that political discourse took a turn to say the least. And while that may very well be a factor, it doesn't fully explain my overwhelming discomfort with the idea of "putting myself out there" online in any meaningful way.
I've been going to art therapy for awhile and this fear has been something I've been exploring. I've been describing it as a "fear of my own narrative being taken away from me and perverted in front of me without any regard for my own actual truth". That's the best way I can explain it. But that explanation has always felt like it was still missing something.
I think your analogy filled in the rest for me though. It's the omnipresent threat of nonconsensual spectacle. Or perhaps just the fear of that threat. And something inside me just being totally opposed to even entertaining that hypothetical even though logically I know "the onlookers don't matter, their opinions don't matter". Just feels like I'm not wired for this era of online identity. Which sucks since for the majority of my life I've felt the opposite.
Sorry for rambling, I thought I was just going to say thanks and move on haha.
stakhanov
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
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
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
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.
jauntywundrkind
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.
joeeverjk
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
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.
benoliver999
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
It feels like so much infra and setup to get stuff up and running that it scares me away every time.
nanna
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
Sounds like you just invented social media ;)
Propelloni
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
Yeah then simply follow the guide
https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started_on_WordPress
Which links to dozens of other guides but maybe it's this one you want
https://indieweb.org/WordPress_IndieWeb_Plugin
Oh that's a stub better hit the linked github
https://github.com/indieweb/wordpress-indieweb
Unless it's indieauth you're after? Micropub? websub? webmentions? The world is your oyster!
jjulius
Why continue to make this argument when, an hour prior to you posting this, it was correctly pointed out that literally none of that is required?
prox
Did you read this line? It says after the domain and site:
“That’s it. Everything else is optional awesomeness, you choose.”
tony-allan
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."
myaccountonhn
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
> 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.
bblb
"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
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".
depingus
> Do we already have entire generations of people who never open web browsers and live their whole online life in Apps? Sad.
Absolutely. Look up Facebook Free Basics. It was Meta's plan to become "Thee Internet" for developing countries.
melagonster
Z generation is not the youngest generation now, so there are two generation.
em-bee
it's about who controls content for the web. if the indieweb is just the web then indie movies would be the same as all of hollywood. just like major film studios effectively dictate what movies get made and promoted, major tech companies dictate the content they promote.
charcircuit
The web browser is just another app. It's not sad to check out multiple apps vs being locked into one platform.
bblb
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
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.
ForTheKidz
The browser is a platform lockin. One with shitty search and spam on most pages and javascript.
Maybe we need a new type browser that doesn't try to be an app platform but rather tries to be a document browser.
myaccountonhn
There is gemini which is basically that (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol))
Timwi
I mean, you could just turn JavaScript off in your browser, but we all know your experience of the web will be abysmal.
I think what you actually want is a web without JavaScript. One where you can only find documents and not accidentally run into apps.
klabb3
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
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.
superkuh
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.
bruce511
On the one hand, yes, certificates are issued by certificate authorities. And this is a critical part of the current web landscape.
But, I'll counterpoint that LetsEncrypt isn't the only ACME provider. Should they behave badly others can step into the gap.
The 90 day thing isn't a barrier. Certificates in general are automated- it's no harder to be HTTPS than HTTP.
Promoting HTTPS and dropping HTTP is ultimately valuable to all sites, because it prevents HTML injection. Given that your reader will be accessing the web via an ISP it prevents that ISP from injecting things into your site.
As an author of my own websites, I'm https only, and I think LE improves the indie web experience. There is a long chain of big companies between my site and my reader (Isp, LE, DNS, browser etc) but HTTPS offers me the best way of making sure the contect I create is the content delivered.
superkuh
Why is dropping HTTP valuable? CA HTTPS is extremely fragile and will eventually break over even just a few years without mantainence. HTTP sites have no expiration date(s). HTTP+HTTPS is the best of both worlds. Unless your threat model includes targeted MITM attacks and your website requires the execution of javascript code.
aboardRat4
>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.
This is why cacert.org still has value and is worth trying to preserve, donate, and contribute.
charcircuit
>make the barrier to entry, and especially mantainence over time, of personal websites much more difficult.
All of this can be automated away.
superkuh
Automation only hides the complexity. It doesn't solve it. Try using an acme1 client these days. Try using an older computer that has some LE expired root cert. etc. Over years it will break and then you've got a facefull of complexity.
aboardRat4
This is already the case in China.
You need a mass media license for a website.
aitchnyu
British forum admins cutting off a couple of decades of posts to be legally compliant.
zhouzhao
Do you have any source for that? Chinese language content is also fine
aboardRat4
Sure, pretty much any cloud provider has detailed info.
For example, Tencent: https://cloud.tencent.com/developer/article/1396101
The are, basically, two kinds of licenses, for websites participating in commercial activity (ads, shops), called ICP证，and for smaller websites, not directly involved into commercial activity, ICP备案.
> 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.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden