Has the IndieWeb become discourse again?

I recently read Has the IndieWeb Become Irrelevant from starbreaker.org.

The post does a great job linking to and summarizing a spate of posts that I will call “people being mad at the IndieWeb”, while also being one of these posts.

These posts accuse “the IndieWeb” of being elitist, exclusionary, overengineered, complicit, and unnecessary, among many other things.

There are some common threads I noticed among these posts:

• None of them mention micro.blog!
• They seem to attack a “straw person” version of the IndieWeb, where one is expected to read, follow, and implement over a decade of experimentation on the web.

Micro.blog is real

Folks that would like to try a turnkey website hosting service, where:

• you bring your own domain (or register a new one!)
• you can leave and take your content with you whenever you want
• requires no coding (and no plugins to configure, and no “files and folders”)
• offers mobile and desktop apps that let you post (and read) the kinds of content you want
• supports IndieWeb building blocks to let you follow and interact with other people via your own websites

I don’t see eye-to-eye with its creator Manton Reese about everything, but micro.blog is a great example of a real world service that makes use of IndieWeb building blocks in ways that customers benefit from without having to build anything!

The rest is wiki

I think many of other complaints, from being “overengineered” to (paraphased) “POSSE makes IndieWeb complicit with the corporate web”, come from misconstruing the IndieWeb wiki at indieweb.org as the entirety of “being IndieWeb”.

When I discovered indieweb.org (in maybe 2015?) I was intrigued and nearly instantly overwhelemed. Trying to absorb all the concepts there would be nearly impossible. Understanding and implementing all the techniques there is actually impossible.

That’s because indieweb.org is not a presciption or a cookbook or an exercise plan. It doesn’t tell you how to “be IndieWeb”. It’s a collective memory of experiments, some successful and some not, from a group of experimenters that has changed greatly over time.

For example, I find that criticisms like “f*ck the corporate web and f*ck IndieWeb for interoperating with the corporate web” don’t really hold up when a lot of that stuff doesn’t even work anymore.

On corporate complicity

Automatic POSSE, syndicating posts from your own site out to your profiles on social silos, only ever barely (and briefly) worked for Instagram, was turned off for Facebook a few years ago, and was all but destroyed for Twitter shortly after its last acquisition. backfeed - pulling comments and likes from these platforms to display on your own site - has similarly been blocked by technical measures.

These were experiments that worked for a time. People used them for a time. That time has passed and the people have moved on.

Some folks have replaced their Twitter usage with something like Mastodon, or Blue Sky, or Threads, and amazing people like Ryan have stepped up to help experiment with bridging personal sites and federated services.

There is no “the way”, only “your way”

People don’t have to move on for purely technical reasons. Even before Twitter closed their APIs, many in the IndieWeb community were shuttering their Twitter accounts and removing posts. They moved on from Twitter, despite all those documented pages on the IndieWeb wiki, because they didn’t want to use the web this way anymore.

And to me, this is actually what “being IndieWeb” or “doing IndieWeb” is about: using the web in ways that fit your wants and needs, being mindful of when (and to whom) you give up control over your stuff and your connections.

Figuring out how you want to use the web is a daunting task, to say the least! The IndieWeb wiki is full of interesting examples and ideas - but as a logbook of ways of using the web, it can be inscrutable. It was never intended that every way of using the web would be suitable for everyone. A collective memory is extremely hard to keep up-to-date and to signpost for navigation. Trying to rely on the wiki alone is a recipe for frustration.

I freely admit that the community has fallen into some serious prescriptive traps over time. Like with tools like indiewebify.me that offer a checklist of implementation details, without accompanying reasons why you might want these features.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, by any means, and it won’t be the last, but the criticisms of these tools and models do make their way back into the collective memory. (see: generations and IndieMark)

Talk with us

That’s why the IndieWeb chat exists. It’s a place where real actual people, who are working to use the web in ways that suit them, are ready to help in whatever ways we can. We love to share what is (and is not) working for us, what we’re trying, and so on. More importantly, we want to help you find ways of using the web that work for you.