It is common to refer to universally popular social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest as “walled gardens.” But they are not gardens; they are walled industrial sites, within which users, for no financial compensation, produce data which the owners of the factories sift and then sell. Some of these factories (Twitter, Tumblr, and more recently Instagram) have transparent walls, by which I mean that you need an account to post anything but can view what has been posted on the open Web; others (Facebook, Snapchat) keep their walls mostly or wholly opaque. But they all exercise the same disciplinary control over those who create or share content on their domain.
Professor Alan Jacobs makes the case for the indie web:
We need to revivify the open Web and teach others—especially those who have never known the open Web—to learn to live extramurally: outside the walls.
What do I mean by “the open Web”? I mean the World Wide Web as created by Tim Berners-Lee and extended by later coders. The open Web is effectively a set of protocols that allows the creating, sharing, and experiencing of text, sounds, and images on any computer that is connected to the Internet and has installed on it a browser that can interpret information encoded in conformity with these protocols.
This resonated strongly with me:
To teach children how to own their own domains and make their own websites might seem a small thing. In many cases it will be a small thing. Yet it serves as a reminder that the online world does not merely exist, but is built, and built to meet the desires of certain very powerful people—but could be built differently.
This is a terrific presentation from Paul. He gives a history lesson and then focuses on what makes the indie web such a powerful idea (hint: it’s not about specific technologies).
Things can be different:
The core value of the IndieWeb, individual empowerment, helped me realise a fundamental change in perspective: that the web was beautiful and at times difficult, but that we, the people, were in control.
I really, really like Paul’s idea of splitting up the indie web principles into one opinionated nerdy list of dev principles, and a separate shorter list of core principles for everyone:
- Own your identity An independent web presence starts with an online identity you own and control. The most reliable way to do this today is by having your own domain name.
- Own your content You should retain control of the things you make, and not be subject to third-parties preventing access to it, deleting it or disappearing entirely. The best way to do this is by publishing content on your own website.
- Have fun! When the web took off in the 90’s people began designing personal sites with garish backgrounds and animated GIFs. It may have been ugly but it was fun. Let’s keep the web weird and interesting.
It would be much harder for a 15-year-old today to View Source and understand the code structure that built the website they’re on. Every site is layered with analytics, code snippets, javascript plugins, CMS data, and more.
This is why the simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.
One of the reasons to own your content is to make it last. When you have control of the text you write or the photos you post, it’s up to you whether that content stays on the internet. When you post to someone else’s platform, you’ve given up that control. It’s not up to you whether the company that hosts your content will stay in business or change everything to break your content.
Small pieces, loosely stacked.
API shall not kill API.
2022 was once unimaginable to some web folks.
Preserving the habitual, the banal.
The I/O of adactio.com