Which Part of the Indie Web Ethos is the Bigger Priority?

[osteophage]

Although normally spoken about as a cohesive whole, different aspects of the indie web ethos can wind up in tension with each other, which raises the question of which one ultimately takes priority. On the one hand, we have the general interest in onboarding, i.e. helping more people onto the indie web; on the other hand, the issue of onboarding can place some strain on other commonly touted ideals. At the end of the day, which form of independence matters most? And what does the answer entail for our understanding of who the indie web is “for”?

Note: this post uses the term “indie web” for convenience, but if you prefer some other similar term, you’re still invited to the conversation.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site.

The Issue of Onboarding

While there’s evidently some interest in outreach and onboarding, it’s an open question how to go about that, what it entails, and how highly it ranks as a priority. For the most part, the idea of better onboarding gets general nods of support. Once you scratch beyond the surface, then opinions diverge — not just on the logistics of what to do and how to do it, but on what to pursue as an overarching goal to begin with — which has important consequences for how we conceptualize the indie web itself.

In indie web discussions, getting more people on board has been an ongoing concern. People are asking how come more people aren’t already on the indie web, discussing a lack of uptake, and proposing ideas for how to make the indie web grow beyond “niche coders doing niche coder things.” Many of these posts argue that it’s hard to join the indie web. Making a website should be easy, or at least easier, and it should be more accessible and more inclusive, with better on-ramps for “normies and non-techies.” People have been brainstorming about barriers to adoption and pondering what it would take to lower those barriers.

With that said, there is not unanimous agreement on any of these fronts. People disagree on what the indie web needs, whether that’s more tools or more stuff or more collectives or more simplicity, and whether or not self-hosting is a non-starter. People disagree on what kind of concessions are tolerable and which middle-ground options to recommend, if any. People debate the merits of Pika, Bearblog, Wordpress, Tumblr, Mastodon, and Bluesky. People even question whether to prioritize onboarding in the first place, which brings us to part of the impetus for this post.

In February of 2025, Susam Pal posted The IndieWeb Doesn’t Need to “Take Off” (context), which struck enough of a chord to get linked and discussed and passed around, and I’ve been mentally chewing on it ever since. It’s a relatively short post, just five paragraphs, so you might as well pause here and go read it now. Here’s an excerpt:

I feel that such claims about the IndieWeb not “taking off” are either stating the obvious or, if that’s not the intention, completely missing the point. 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. Maintaining a personal website is about owning your digital presence, embracing creative freedom and expressing your individuality! It’s not about appealing to the masses!

This post provokes ambivalence in me. On the one hand, yes, we don’t need the indie web to be validated by popularity. Making a personal site is a legitimate endeavor regardless. On the other hand, we don’t have to balk at the prospect of ambition, either. Consider the popularity of essays like Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things, which is as clear an indication as you could ask for that 1) a large number of people harbor a deep desire for a different web, one that isn’t predicated on crushing us under its heel, and that 2) some of those same people have no idea how much is already possible.

In light of that, Susam’s post evokes a certain conceptual tension. Is the indie web an ethos, or is it just a hobby? Should it be treated as a mere personal pastime that simply isn’t for everyone? Certainly some parts of it may be just for fun, but if that’s all it is, if that’s all it aspires to be, then we have no grounds for treating it as any kind of answer to what’s wrong with the web today.

What’s wrong with the web today tends to feature as a major basis for how the indie web gets presented and defined in the first place, which introduces moral stakes to the question of onboarding. So when we talk about whether or not the indie web needs mass appeal, what exactly are we understanding “the indie web” to be? Which priority serves as its main center of gravity? Is it a matter of technological independence, or independence from exploitation?

Technological Independence & Independence From Exploitation

The relationship between technological independence and independence from exploitation has often been presented in terms of means and ends. This can seem sensible in the abstract, but in practice, the relationship between the two is not always so straightforward. Some examples can illustrate. Before we get into that, though, some definitions:

1. Technological independence in this context refers to the various steps you can take to make your web presence more resilient against the prospect of trouble with any given service provider. The go-to recommendations on this front are renting a custom domain name and using services with adequate support for data portability.
2. Exploitation in this context refers to predatory structures and decisions on the part of various web service providers, particularly the big ones you’ll see grouped under the banner of “social media.” Metrics-based recommendation algorithms end up elevating things that make people angry and driving creators to burnout. Facebook accepts anti-LGBT advertising and has incentivized predatory ad targeting. Reddit has burned its users in pursuit of an IPO. Instagram promotes starvation. Twitter is a harassment machine. The list goes on. 

To counter exploitation, the thinking goes, what we need is technological independence, which may be why discussions of the indie web seem to vacillate between a technical emphasis and a sociopolitical one. Plenty of indie web explainers and blogposts out there will advise you to get started with a domain name and tend to define the indie web in terms of domain ownership. Meanwhile the indie web also gets contrasted with billionaires, corporate giants, VC funding, and monopoly power. Where the big names are understood in terms of mass surveillance and subjugation, the indie web is spoken of in terms of liberation. The relationship between these two concepts — technological independence and liberation — has been largely presented as seamless.

In practice, the relationship between technological independence and liberation can be more complicated than simply the means and the ends. To be clear, this isn’t a critique of the favored technical measures per se so much as a reminder to keep them in perspective. There is only so much that can be accomplished by custom domain names. In fact, over-emphasizing domain names can itself be negligent.

To prioritize domain names ahead of factors like business model or financial ties means endorsing VC-backed BS and the billionaire-owned parent company of Wordpress and Tumblr. These companies have ticked the boxes for certain forms of technological independence, at least of the kind favored in indie web discourse. And none of that has prevented a track record of user exploitation and discrimination.

For those who don’t know:

• Tumblr and Wordpress are owned by a territorial billionaire who has burned through the trust of countless users with his antics. In 2024, not only did Automattic sell off user data to get chewed up by artificial unintelligence, but its owner also made headlines with how he responded to a transmisogynistic harassment case. Moderation at Tumblr is notoriously unhelpful and discriminatory, and even if Tumblr the company were to change hands, the actual website itself has long been structurally geared toward insatiable conflict and misery. It deserves to be studied as a landmark in how to do wrong by your users. 
• Bluesky has raked in millions in venture capital via its promise of recreating Twitter and offloading its moderation. Again and again it has shown its priorities: racism is allowed, trans people are expendable, and if you’ve got a problem with that then the CEO might personally single you out to mock you. Bluesky exists for catering to its investors, not its users. Its VC funding is a bigger red flag than any amount of centralization, and it is a perfect encapsulation of what the indie web should stand against.

Examples like these are relevant because they expose how certain widely-touted forms of technological independence can in fact be compatible with abuse and exploitation. The problems with services like Bluesky, Tumblr, and Wordpress aren’t just a matter of data loss and broken links, and no amount of technical gizmos can solve their corporate incentives to mistreat their users. These concerns should matter for our understanding of what it means to be “indie web friendly,” particularly given the recurring remarks that the indie web is for everyone.

The Scope of Everyone

If the indie web is for everyone, as the saying goes, then we should acknowledge the scope of “everyone” and what exactly that entails for indie web priorities. The ideal of openness is one you’ll spot being repeated here and there if you read up enough in these circles. And while a spirit of openness is well and good, in practice the scope of “everyone” can conflict with other common indie web ideals, a point of tension that deserves to be identified and addressed.

Assertions that the indie web is for everyone are, if not widespread, certainly mundane enough that they haven’t registered as controversial. In 2024, for example, Tantek Çelik made a post to this effect:

The #IndieWeb is for everyone, everyone who wants to be part of the world-wide-web of interconnected people. The social internet of people, a network of networks of people, connected peer-to-peer in human-scale groups, communities of locality and affinity.

That post was linked and echoed by Ben Werdmuller, and similar remarks were offered again this past December, with offhand mentions of the idea that the indie web is for everyone and wanting the indie web to be welcoming to everyone.

I appreciate that. I think it’s a nice sentiment, and I want it to be true.

Here’s the thing about the scope of everyone:

If it’s not for someone whose every dollar is already being sucked up by survival, then it’s not for everyone. If it’s not for the hungry and the homeless then it’s not for everyone. If it’s not for the refugee and the runaway then it’s not for everyone. If it depends on having cash to spare on renting a custom domain name then it’s not for everyone. People in these demographics do use the internet, and they deserve better than to be ground up for a predatory machine, which is why we need more options that are easy and free and independent from venture capital and corporate giants.

If the indie web is for everyone, then that necessarily calls for a free tier option at every step of the way, which is at odds with defining the indie web in terms of paying up for domain names. The domain name ideal can be subordinated to a focus on other factors, such as evaluating business models or funding sources for their capacity for harm. Otherwise, a dogmatic purism about technological independence means defining the indie web in a way that’s financially exclusive, leaving vast swathes of people outside its scope, relegated to corporate exploitation.

That’s not good enough for me.

Is it good enough for you?

 

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Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I read that article you mentioned, and actually quite resonated with it. For me, it was making a similar point that I've made with respect to anarchism. People tend to laugh at bottom-up, decentralized movements as having failed because they haven't completely fixed the problems they seek to solve. But in my opinion, there is likely never to be a single moment where the top-down revolutionary approach works (especially long-term). In any case, I frankly don't want to just grin and bear it while I "wait for the revolution".

So with anarchism and the indie web alike, people are practicing prefiguration: helping our vision of the future become real by just doing it today, in whatever scale we can. This process is very experimental, and it may find obstacles and have failures along the way, but those help inform future attempts and likely still had meaningful positive impact on those involved, at least temporarily. And I think that's enough, which is what the article echoed as well. It's okay that the fight is not yet over, that we're not even close yet. We can't put the pressure of upending all of society / the big web on our shoulders, or consider the movement failed because it hasn't done that upending yet.

To that end, I also share your critique of the focus on domains in not only the indie web, but also on bluesky and the fediverse. Having our identities tied to domains we don't own or relying on servers we don't control remaining online forevermore does not sound like the resilient alternative to the big web that we need. Link rot already happens, moderation on sites declining already happens, enshittification already happens.

I think the more promising experiments we see today are the ones that tie identity to a public-private keypair. That way, your identity is completely owned by you, not dependent on a (or even any) server remaining online, and can't be taken away from you by new management, a lapse in payment, or anything else. Plus it can trivially persistent not only between different sites, but completely different forms of communication - like the Bluetooth meshes we've seen happen in moments of crisis. Some of the experiments that use this have their own problems, like nostr being filled with techbros, but I think this will eventually be a path with increasing adoption.

[osteophage]

I'm not sure which article you're referring to, but I'm guessing maybe Susam's? In which case, I think I understand the comparison. It does make sense to do what we can without taking an all-or-nothing outlook on it, so I appreciate that perspective.

Public-private keypairs aren't something I know anything about, so unfortunately I'm not prepared to form an opinion on that. Sounds like another technical measure, though. So regardless of what its pros and cons are, with this post I'm hoping to direct more attention to financial considerations, as well: business models, funding sources, budgets. That kind of thing. Those are things that help us evaluate business incentives and also account for the extent of needs to cover if we want the indie web to be for everyone.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, I was referring to Susam's article.

I was mentioning keypairs because its an established technology that would allow for people to have technological independence without renting a domain or hosting a server. It would still need some sort of infrastructure, but its infrastructure agnostic (like the bluetooth mesh example). So its not expecting anyone to pay a registrar, a vps, or a internet provider, nor would it need to rely on corporations continuing to offer free services like static page hosting. Although early in its life, such a network likely would (temporarily) rely on "relay servers" whose goal is just to pass around people's signed messages over the internet, since any mesh alternative wouldn't have reliable coverage (yet).

[claudeb]

I gave a different answer over on the 32-Bit Cafe forum, but:

Expecting everyone to be able to afford a domain name is incredibly elitist.

Expecting everyone to self-host is incredibly elitist.

I encourage people to learn the basics and make their own websites however they can, but even that is out of reach for a lot of people who have better things to do with their life.

So what's left? If you do have a website, use it well. Use it to keep the signal going. To connect people and ideas. That's what the web can do like no technology before.

Everything else is techies showing off.

[osteophage]

You know, after the kind of blogposts I've been immersed in as part of reading up on the indie web, that's a refreshing perspective to hear.

I understand why a lot of these things are important to folks, of course, and I think they make a decent case for why certain measures are beneficial, and at the same time I just don't place the same degree of importance on those measures myself.

Haven't heard any counterarguments from that camp just yet, but I hope this post reaches them and gets some more discussion going. I'm also pleasantly surprised and grateful for the positive responses this post has gotten so far.