fyr.io

Indie:

One, such as a studio or producer, that is unaffiliated with a larger or more commercial organization.

-The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

Many people have been discussing the IndieWeb with regards to the technical knowledge and skills that are (almost) required to get involved. I first read about this in a post by @starbreaker titled "Has the IndieWeb Become Irrelevant?" which is itself a reflection on other posts and comments. It's a good post and has many valid points. In fact, I agree pretty much entirely with the underlying message, and I say that as someone sorta-involved in the community who is pondering adding IndieWeb integrations to this very website. The IndieWeb, as it stands, is a bit... perhaps elitist is the wrong word. It's a club for those that can, and although part of the IndieWeb's broader message is about eschewing the commercial web and owning your stuff, unless you know at least a little bit about websites and how they work, you're gonna be relying on commercial organisations to get you going and keep you rolling in the IndieWeb.

And you know what? I think that's okay. And the IndieWeb community and organisers know it too.

The IndieWeb chat/discord highlights this, with several prominent rooms/channels being developer oriented, but their website says it best: [...] a community of independent and personal websites connected by open standards [...]. Emphasis mine. But it's right there - "Connected by open standards." To build an independent website that connects to other independent websites via open standards literally requires programming knowledge. Sure, there are Wordpress plugins you can install and libraries you can import... You could argue, are sites that use wordpress, or plugins, or third party libraries, truly independent if they rely on these third party resources? The elitism is kinda the point. The IndieWeb is for developers, aspiring or experienced, to build something and connect with others.

"IndieWeb" however, has become the term to describe... well, the non-corporate or non-commercial web. This is sorta unfortunate in my opinion. There are other aspects to the non-commerical web that aren't IndieWeb™, this particular flavour of it just happens to have become one of the more widely known and consciously adopted words to describe this kind of thing.

There are other phrases, and in fact whilst doing a little research for this post I have come to find that there are loads of other words and phrases that describe portions of the non-commercial web and in fact align with the anti-commercial web. You've got The Slow Web which decries the instant, live-happening-now, syncronous web where reactions are immediate and the doomscroll never ends, like! subscribe! swipe left! ...and instead thrives in a slower paced world where things can wait a while and be ingested by humans at a leisurely human-healthy pace, and The Small Web & The Smol Web, where huge files and staggeringly complex and convoluted dependency chains are swapped out for standards-compliant, small, efficient and fast websites that do just enough and no more. Each of these examples encourage doing things your way, which isn't really possible on post-myspace social media. There are many more phrases, each dealing with more and more niche areas, some of which can be found on diagram.website (which I think you should check out.)

It's unfortunate that the IndieWeb™ has that name, because the perfect phrase that instils the "own your stuff, show your personality" feel of the communities represented in these discussions is, in my opinion, "the indie web". Hence the definition at the start of this article.

Perhaps some other name or descriptive phrase needs to be concocted or promoted more heavily so that the meaning of IndieWeb™ can be corrected in peoples minds. Something like "the human web" or "people net", I don't know, I'm not very good at naming things.

So the human web, the people net, the your-net. Whatever it is called, it doesn't matter. The important thing is that it is yours, if you want it. If you're tired of the conglomerate-net, disgusted by the commercialised web, sick of being the product, allergic to The Algorithm, then you can have something else. Something of your own.

You want to upload your artwork? Write fanfic? World build? Document your developing Sistrum-playing skills? Discuss your experiences slice-of-life style? Experiment with poetry?

Do it.

Use wordpress if you want. Use Blogger. Hell, use Frontpage 98 if you want. Or learn some HTML And CSS and type it all up in notepad.exe. Or just HTML, don't even bother with the CSS. Just make it yours.

Once you've got something started, you can think about registering a domain name (but you don't have to) and hosting it somewhere you have more control over (again, you don't have to) - you don't even need to pay for any of this, depending on how you decide to turn your brain-energy into words on a screen, because there are a bunch of free hosts out there. You don't need IndieWeb integrations to be part of the indie web, but if you want them, they're there for you to use.

Join us. It's kinda fun.

The only thing I will say - and I acknowledge that this does require some level of customisation and technical knowledge as the landscape of web publishing tools is nowhere near where it should be on this front - is to try and make it as accessible as you can. Not everyone navigates with their hands or consumes website content with their eyeballs. I still have work to do on this front myself.

@starbreaker updated their post in response to this post, as well as some others who chimed in on the topic. You should go read it, it's good stuff and I'm thankful that he took the time to do this.

I wanted to put a little update out here right away but... *points at life* - anyway, here it is. Really I only wanted to highlight one part:

I don't particularly like the fact that we seem to need so many names for what I think ought to be the default. In my opinion, sites like this one, fyr.io, and even Neocities and omg.lol are the World Wide Web. Sites like Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter are the corporate Web. They're parasitic abberations, walled gardens gentrifying the internet, and an attempt by business people to turn the internet into cable TV with a comments section. We should not accept the premise that they are what the web is or should be.

-@starbreaker of starbreaker.org

Yet again, Starbreaker brings forth into the universe the words that encapsulate and clarify a feeling I've had for years and distills it into an opinion that I have fully taken on board and, indeed, share:

We shouldn't have to call 'The Indie Web' the indie web, or the small web, or any subset of the web. It's just the web. The World Wide Web. Within this WWW we've got everything, all the opinions and diversity and markets and fundraisers, charities, poetry, artwork. And, yes, a small subset of which is the corporate web (though it is small, it, by its addictive and malicious behaviour, has a very large userbase-slash-product (because you are the product they're selling, remember!)). And in and around there you've also got a sea of bots and LLM slop. But there are still whole continents of human out there, and the only sure-fire way to stem the tide of shit is to be your own island of you.

So I say again, if you want to keep the WWW healthy, you must tend to it. Make a website. Put your piece out there. Even if, like me, you feel like you've got nothing of value to say, you have.

...but maybe don't use Frontpage 98. It's terrible.