indieweb

 

The funny thing about the IndieWeb is that it started with a genuinely good complaint. The web did get weird. It did get centralized. It did get swallowed by a handful of companies that turned what was once a messy collection of personal spaces into a handful of giant, sanitized platforms designed around keeping people endlessly scrolling. The idea that maybe people should own their own words, their own archives, and their own little piece of internet real estate is not some ridiculous nostalgia trip. It is a pretty reasonable reaction to what happened.

The problem is that every good rebellion eventually develops its own culture, its own language, and eventually its own little hierarchy. The people who set out to escape the machine sometimes end up building a smaller machine with nicer typography and a more tasteful color palette.

That is where the IndieWeb starts getting funny.

Because there is a certain kind of personal website floating around that feels less like a personal website and more like a resume that discovered meditation. It has the custom domain, the carefully chosen fonts, the minimalist layout, the page explaining the philosophy behind the website, and usually a section explaining the technical choices behind the philosophy behind the website. Then you eventually find the actual person buried underneath several layers of "digital garden," "knowledge management," and "personal knowledge graph" terminology, and what you discover is basically a LinkedIn profile that went backpacking through Europe and came back wearing linen pants.

The irony is that a lot of these people are correctly identifying the problem with modern social media while accidentally recreating the same behavior. Social media encouraged everyone to package themselves into a product. The IndieWeb sometimes encourages people to package themselves into an intellectual product. Instead of "look at my lifestyle," it becomes "look at my carefully considered relationship with technology, identity, and online presence." The performance changes, but the desire to be recognized is still sitting right there.

And honestly, wanting attention is not some terrible human flaw. People have always wanted to leave something behind. Writers publish books. Artists hang paintings. Musicians play shows. The old web itself was full of people screaming into the void hoping somebody would eventually stumble across their little corner. The difference was nobody pretended it wasn't happening. A GeoCities teenager making a Sailor Moon fan page in 1998 was not writing a manifesto about authentic decentralized identity. They just liked Sailor Moon and wanted to make a page about it.

That ridiculousness was part of the charm.

The best parts of the old web were never the technology. Nobody really misses broken HTML tables, terrible background textures, or websites that looked like they were assembled during a caffeine overdose. What people miss is the feeling that there was an actual person behind the page. You could stumble into someone's strange obsession and spend an hour there because it was obvious that somebody cared about something for no practical reason.

Those are still the websites worth finding.

The person documenting abandoned malls because they have always been fascinated by forgotten places. The writer keeping twenty years of essays online. The artist uploading experiments and unfinished work instead of just a polished portfolio. The person who builds an entire archive around some obscure corner of music, movies, computers, history, or whatever strange rabbit hole grabbed them.

That stuff feels alive.

The problem is that much of the modern personal web has confused having a website with having a personality. A website is only a container. You can hand-code every line yourself, host it on your own server, use some obscure framework nobody has heard of, and still create something completely forgettable. Technical ownership does not automatically create human presence.

A beautifully designed empty room is still an empty room.

There are thousands of personal sites now that are technically impressive but spiritually dead. They are immaculate digital apartments where every piece of furniture has been carefully selected and nobody actually lives there. They tell you what someone does, where they work, what technologies they use, and what books they have read, but somehow you leave knowing absolutely nothing about the person.

That is the part that misses the point.

The web was never interesting because everyone was professional. It was interesting because people were strange. People were obsessive. People made things that had no obvious business value and no clear audience. Someone somewhere would spend six months documenting a forgotten arcade game or building a tribute page to an obscure filmmaker or writing a long essay about a topic that maybe fifty people cared about.

And those fifty people mattered.

The modern internet has trained everyone to think everything needs scale. Everything needs followers, reach, engagement, monetization, growth. Every hobby gets turned into a brand. Every interest becomes a content strategy. Every person becomes a potential product.

The IndieWeb was supposed to be an escape from that.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes you find something incredible: a true personal archive, a weird little corner of someone's mind, a place that feels impossible to recreate anywhere else.

But sometimes it feels like social media put on glasses, grew a beard, learned some terminology about decentralization, and started insisting it was different.

The answer is not to abandon the idea. The answer is to remember why it mattered.

The point was never owning a domain name as some kind of purity badge. The point was making something that could not exist anywhere else. A place with fingerprints on it. A place where someone could wander in late at night and find something unexpected.

The web does not need more people explaining why their website represents them.

It needs more people actually putting themselves into it.

The best personal sites are not advertisements for a person. They are evidence of a person.

You can feel the difference.

One is asking to be noticed.

The other gives you something worth noticing.