There’s thousands of posts and articles about how the good-ol-days of web are gone. These posts bemoan the lack of creativity present into today’s conforming web experiences. While the nostalgia of yesterweb is a rose colored version of sites that randomly blew out your speakers and set your eyes to bleed, there is a core ethos it embodied that can so often feel missing from today’s internet: Humanity.
Personally, it does feel to me that social media is less and less about connecting with your people and more and more about one-to-many marketing. Influencers will shill you out for anything under the sun, Instagram has become a place of advertising, shopping and business sense. And AI for all it’s benefits, removes the ‘human’ component of content creation replacing it with generic, professional, boilerplate… stuff. The internet feels like a hollow content machine devoid of any actual healthy human interaction.
Enter the Indie Web, a series of interlinked personal sites that typically have little commercial value. It’s made up of a community of people who have created a ‘decentralized social network’ built on older web ideologies and might be called a reaction to the commercialized late-stage 2.0 web.
It’s a hidden subculture (at least in my spheres) that tends to pride itself on being human, personal and is frequently occupied by the creative class. Often made for pure personal expression or creative exploration you’ll find many personal blogs where people write about whatever it is they’re up to. Generally, sites are simple and free of pretense. Ideas, fully-fledged or in process grace their blogs.
The personal and experimental nature of the sites often results unusually creative micro-projects, like measuring rain in Scotland, or spending a minute in a park.
I found this (surprisingly large) corner of the web to be personally refreshing. It throws away many of the “best practices” we’ve established in the design industry and free from the confines of market forces the indie web has exposed an opportunity for creative expression. While this expression comes in all shapes and sizes what was most revelatory for me is the use of web pages as a medium of art, not merely a location to put art. The frame becoming the masterpiece.
Blairs.Computer, for example, tells a narrative through browser alerts. Taking the mundane and turning it into something so much bigger, engaging with visitors in a way that is existentially thought provoking… (the site is meant to be used, to be experienced. But each visit makes the a site a little smaller until it becomes nothing but a memory)
Uncommon interaction patterns are attempted (sometimes even successfully), ASCII art is common place, and narrative driven content encourages exploration as a way to discovery. Sometimes sites are beautiful, sometimes they're ugly but regardless, they are made by somebody with intention.
This writing is mostly a reflection of my exploration into a subculture I know literally nothing about and cannot claim complete accuracy. If you are an active participant in the Indie Web let me know where I may have missed the mark.
The concepts and practices in this world were new and inspirational to me and I genuinely wanted to explore them further. So, letting my exploratory curiosity guide me, I uncovered sites that might not fall under the strictest definition of Indie Web…
By its strictest definition, the Indie Web is a series of interlinked personal sites. Categorically, some examples included here may not be considered personal in nature but are instead artistic artifacts created by a person… so while the content of these sites might not be strictly about a person, they are forms of personal expression and I liked them a lot and decided to include them. (And where does one draw the line between the person and personal expression anyway?)
Additionally, if you search around you'll see there's a few other names for Indie Web. They're often used interchangeably but each has unique characteristics. I try to suss out the differences here:
The core tenets of Indie Web
The indie web has been codified — as much as a semi-anarchist group can be — by IWC (IndieWebCamp). They outline 10 core principals of what makes the indie web the indie web:
- Own your data.
- Use & publish visible data for humans first, machines second.
- Make what you need.
- Use what you make.
- Document your stuff.
- Open source your stuff.
- UX and design is more important than protocols, formats, data models, schema etc.
- Modularity.
- Longevity.
- Plurality.
You can read about these principals in-depth on the IWC site but a quick skim reveals a very flexible and very human centric set of beliefs with a mild bent towards a libertarian worldview. Being an individual on the internet is a prized virtue: Where you (not a corporation) own everything you make and your digital self is self sufficient.
While individualism is esteemed, selfishness is not. Participants are encouraged to open source and creative commons license the tools and content they create fostering a world where ideas can grow and expand as some of the original internet evangelists had hoped. I find the idealism of the movement admirable even in an age where the utopian dreams of internet founders have died a slow and painful death.
Aesthetics and philosophies
Sites on the Indie Web are personal creations so design varies dramatically from site to site as persons vary dramatically person to person. Yet a few motifs seem especially resonate within this subculture.
At a higher cultural level there's a trend towards the belief that social media is damaging to us as individuals and as a society. Social media's risks have been discussed for many years and continues to be part of the zeitgeist. Take for example Haidt's The Anxious Generation which was a NY Times best selling book for a whole year or common narratives around 'doomscrolling.'
There's also a growing disillusionment with established tech corporations which are becoming to be viewed as greedy. To free us from the grips of this faceless force—to cure our feed addiction—mindfulness and slow practices are gaining traction as accepted methods of reducing the algorithm's hold on us. (Touch grass anyone?)
We can see the broad move towards slowness clearly as a part of the The NY Times email The Daily which begun featuring a 10 minute challenge where subscribers are encouraged to do nothing but look at a piece of classical art for 10 minutes.
Within this broader context of culture, the Indie Web is a specific expression of the general resistance against corporate algorithms. On participant's blogs you'll often find rhetorically charged language against common practices of large tech corps and members of the Indie Web often prides themselves on contributing to a slower internet.
As mentioned above, one of the core philosophies of the Indie Web is its dogmatic opposition to the algorithm. Instead of being fed content by Facebook, the indie web proposes webrings, RSS feeds and webmentions. For the general web user these all present a steep learning curve for new adoption. Even if you are familiar with these tools setting them up takes time and effort.
Curation is freedom from the algorithm and the incentives of those who own and build them. — Asad Rahman: On curation, or fighting back in the age of the algorithm (link)
This is is seen as a feature, not a bug. You opt-in to what you want to see and who you want to follow. Getting set up is a very manual and time intensive process but over time it's possible to acquire a good set of feeds and notifications that supply you with content you actually want to see. Indie Web sees this as an antidote to the addictive doom-scroll we all participate in.
With out a central hub, the Indie Web relies on the goodwill participation of its members, namely by frequently linking to others sites. In fact, links power the whole concept of an independent, decentralized network. So participants often link to each others websites and are fairly generous with their link count. Many links don't even use use target="_blank" gasp
It's common to see a wall of text filled with links to other sites or to create a page dedicated to other sites the author found valuable or interesting.
This feels altruistic in a way my inner naive/idealistic self really resonates with. Instead of sending users like sheep down a conversion funnel the Indie Web encourages collaboration and exploration. The selfless linking serves the community rather than the author, and rising tides raises all boats.
In this world blogs are called gardens. Thoughts are tender seeds that become plants… over time they grow and evolve. Participants are encouraged to share unfinished or unresolved works. And they're equally encouraged to tend to them. So instead of shouting your ideas into the raging content storm that is social media you quietly post them on your own site, leaving notes and self criticisms about your own views.
The expectation that posts and thoughts will change is a healthy acknowledgement that very few things life are truly static. Projects are never perfect when first launched, our thoughts (hopefully) change as we gain more experience, and people really can change. We see this theme also explicitly reflected in this subculture's concept of slash pages:
Slash pages are common pages you can add to your website, usually with a standard, root-level slug like /now, /about, or /uses. They tend to describe the individual behind the site and are distinguishing characteristics of the IndieWeb. (link)
/now is a particularly common one and refers to what a person is working on right now. Of course, this page will change through the seasons, of course we change through the seasons.
Because so many of these sites are handcrafted by hobbyists or created with tools such as Neocities, a lack of polish is a natural outcome. Generally you end up with designs on a spectrum of typographic/minimal to maximalist. Images and gifs are often smattered onto pages with little care for visual hierarchy. The acceptance of these chaotic designs is an obviously inclusive way for the average person to join the ranks of indie creators.
But beyond the practical, this aesthetic seems to be almost a part of the movement. There's a lack of pretense on many of these sites. Things might exist just for the sake of existing… I can see an image on a site and it's just there because the author thought it was cool. It feels different to me from standard social media platforms where assets are highly curated, polished versions of life. It feels genuine to me and that's probably true for others in this community.
Thus, a low-fidelity aesthetic becomes part of the Indie Web's identity. Images might be intentionally rough, colors clash and typography might be retro-pixelated, this all in pursuit of novel self-expression, something earnest.
While not true of all members this subculture is generally opposed to AI. Perhaps because an outsized portion of Indie Web contributors are from the creative class, AI in this world is seen as a slight against creatives… especially considering the questionable ethics by which data was obtained to train generative models.
When you pair negative AI sentiment with a general disdain for big tech, it can quickly lead to the assumption that the Indie Web is just a new brand of luddite. A deeper exploration reveals that's not exactly true.
The disdain for AI and big tech largely pulls from their values. They want control over what they see, want to own their content, and connect with others. These values aren't inherently opposed to technological progress. For example, the Indie Web generally approves of web 3.0 technologies where digital ownership is highly valued. We also see that open source tools are generally welcomed implying participants have joy in discovering and using new tools but are cynical of corporate interference.
The TLDR
The avant-garde nature of these sites is a reminder that the web is what we make it. As a cynical designer operating most frequently in the corporate world stumbling upon the Indie Web was a source of fresh air. It helped me see the constraints that I apply to my work don't inherent to the medium. The molds I follow aren't the only way to create and that's worth remembering.
The Indie Web is an exciting space but it does come with some inherent dangers.
- Content moderation — Preventing harmful content from arising is a core feature of modern social media. In my opinion, it is a truly necessary and beneficial function of social media to prevent bad actors from posting harmful content. The Indie Web, with its focus on privacy and content ownership, results in an anarchist world that can quickly devolve into the worst humanity has to offer. The idealisms of Indie Web may fail the face of reality here.
- Adoption is slow and barriers to entry are high. As part of a movement towards a slower web, the non-viral nature of it's ecosystem is viewed positively in the eyes of supporters. Yet gaining traction in a world where onboarding flows, apps and games are optimized to foster attention, this slowness may not be able to compete with broader systems.
- Practically speaking, relying on open source tools is a challenge to the core tenets own your stuff and longevity. Creating a website is a difficult task, especially for the non-technical crowd. Open source tools, such as 11ty, are popular in these circles but are reliant on the good will of the community and the financial freedom of primary contributors to allow work to continue on these tools.
- Accessibility — By it's nature Indie Web is made by people of varying skills and knowledge. WCAG might be an unfamiliar term to many uninitiated members and the push away from traditional layouts often results in breaking patterns that were wisely considered. Improper contrast ratios and unpausable movement are common.
