Indie web
𐑦𐑯𐑛𐑦 𐑢𐑧𐑚
The indie web is the part of the World Wide Web written, maintained, and owned by individuals, as opposed to the more popular parts owned by large corporations and organisations. This includes, but is not limited to, blogs and personal wikis.
Before corporations moved in, the early days of the World Wide Web looked very promising. In the 1990s, many people (perhaps mostly autistic) who enjoyed using computers for the sake of it shared their knowledge and passions with each other, as the information itself was no longer constrained by where it was physically stored.
They joined webrings that linked together sites by theme, and started making friends with the authors of their neighbouring sites across the world, joined by shared interests rather than their now-arbitrary physical location. This was especially important for autists and other isolated minorities, who seldom have local peers to befriend.
Regardless of offline politics, the Internet is digital, and so it's largely based on the idea that computers can generate unlimited perfect copies of information at essentially no cost. Indeed, to access anything on the Internet is to copy it and then read that local copy. Sharing information freely is so easy on the Internet that it's all but inherent. This all gels quite nicely with the free software ethos.
Then social media corporations sprang up. At first, it seemed good that people no longer needed to learn anything in order to connect with each other. Not everyone enjoyed using computers for the sake of it, and it was only fair for everyone else to have the same kind of international platform.
But letting corporations own and control everything everyone says has its cost, and by the 2020s, social media sites had devolved into aggressively mining everyone's attention, to show them adverts sandwiched between an endless supply of novel yet ultimately unimportant or unactionable information.
The indie web consists of older people like myself who are still stubbornly maintaining our own websites, and younger people who are also joining in. It's a nice alternative to social media sites. When we publish articles, a corporation isn't inserting itself to try to sell anyone anything, or to promote the most enraging information in order to keep readers hooked for as long as possible, indefinitely distracting them from the myriad better uses of their time.
If you want to join the indie web, you can, for example, set up your own tiny hardware web server using a tiny PC such as a Raspberry Pi, a relatively simple software web server such as thttpd, and a Markdown to HTML converter. It has a steep learning curve, but it's the sort of knowledge that you can build a career on.
In short, the indie web is the future of 1990s personal websites.
Further reading
Deep dives
- Webmaster in a Nutshell, Second Edition Stephen Spainhour & Robert Eckstein, 1999, ISBN 1-56592-325-1
Everything was better back when everything was worse: Indie web | Low fidelity
World Wide Web: Blog | Indie web | Personal wiki
