The Indie Web

Vibes: Describes how confident I feel about what I’ve written. pretty sure this is a thing
Effort: The amount of effort I put into creating this. medium to high
Certainty: How certain I am about this information. medium
the indie web data sovereignty our internet

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on YouTube, watching people talk about Neocities and something called “The Indie Web”.

What is the Indie Web?

The Indie Web seems to be touted as the alternative to social media. If you are a 90s kid, you’ll recognise it as just the web from your childhood. It’s a throwback to sites like Geocities, Blogspot, and MySpace, where everyone was experimenting with HTML and CSS—sometimes even JavaScript snippets. Homepages were a thing and animated glitter clipart was everywhere. It was a time of marquee text, animated gifs, HTML tables, and tiled background images.

The Indie Web, as a term, seems more specific. It’s a community of people building software that enables users to build and host their own websites, independent of the big tech social media giants. From the Wikipedia page:

It uses a suite of tools including Webmention and microformats to decentralise social communication and distribution of content.

The IndieWeb is based on 10 core principles:

  1. Own your data.
  2. Use & publish visible data for humans first, machines second.
  3. Make what you need.
  4. Use what you make.
  5. Document your stuff.
  6. Open source your stuff.
  7. UX and design is more important than protocols, formats, data models, schema, etc.
  8. Modularity.
  9. Longevity.
  10. Plurality.

And an informal eleventh: “Above all, Have fun.”

Decentralised social communication

This feels like the answer to social media addiction and tech giant oligarchy is decentralisation. However, I’m not sure if the movement will reach most users. But I believe it will reach young people who have a deep desire to feel empowered. Being able to code and maintain your own website is empowering. I know that when I learnt to code, I felt like I was acquiring special powers that could turn all the thoughts in my brain into something in the real world.

Joining the cause

I want to join this movement and do my part to make personal homepages accessible to regular people. I want to learn more about the suite of tools that include Webmention and microformats. I also feel like the Indie Web is the perfect use case for web components. Imagine maintaining a library of components that young people can copy and paste into their own sites, giving them features like tweets (without Twitter), photo grids (without Instagram), etc.—essentially replacing all the things that social media does and severing ourselves from the algorithms and control.

Stripping it way back

I yearn for a simpler web. I constantly find myself annoyed at the ever-increasing complexity that is modern web development. I’d like to build an ecosystem that uses web components to power a decentralised, personal web that gives control back to the individual. This means as static as possible. Whenever a component feels like it could use a database, we should instead have a JSON file. The goal would be autonomy and ownership over your own data.