The web we want: A beginner’s guide to the IndieWeb
How to build a place on the web where you can own your identity, control your content and create whatever the hell you like.
This presentation was delivered at Peckham Digital’s 3rd Festival of Creative Computing.
My name is Paul. I’m a graphic designer and web developer.
I currently work in government, designing digital services for citizens and civil servants. I previously worked for the Guardian, at a design agency in Brighton and, in the distant past, at a social media start-up in Silicon Valley.
You can find me online at paulrobertlloyd.com.
This is a place where I write about topics I’m interested in, post short notes, share photos and record the places I’ve been, among other things.
I published my first website on the evening of 14 January 1999, in the library of my art college.
That I can still recall this date underlines the enormity of that moment.
It felt almost revolutionary; the college had a website, my town had a website, the BBC had a website — I too could have a website.
Tonight I’m going to talk about the web. What it was, what it’s become, and what it could be again.
I love the web, so this talk will be unashamedly biased.
I hope by the end of it, you’ll love the web too, and want to curate your own little corner of it.
A brief history of the web
I want to start by briefly revisiting the history of the web.
The web is over 35 years old, and very much part of our daily lives.
Such is our familiarity, it’s easy to forget the truly transformational principle at its heart: it’s for everybody.
Anyone can publish a website and, to varying degrees depending on your government, anyone can access it.
Before the web, it was near-impossible to publish something without having access to expensive machinery and a means of distribution; certainly not on a global scale.
The web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in the early 90s, initially as a means of sharing hyperlinked pages at CERN, the international science organisation that was building the Large Hadron Collider.
As his project developed, and other people became interested, he realised its application could be much greater. On the web’s 35th birthday, he wrote:
Underlying its whole infrastructure was the intention to allow for collaboration, foster compassion and generate creativity – what I term the 3 C’s. It was to be a tool to empower humanity.
On 6 August, 1991, Tim published the very first website.
This helped demonstrate what the web was, and explain its purpose.
You can still visit this website today. That you can is testament to the longevity of the web and the robustness of the web protocols Tim had designed: HTML, HTTP and URLs.
It’s also a reminder that, for all innovations and changes that have followed, the old ways still remain valid today.
The popularity of Tim’s invention grew, beyond the realms of scientific and academic institutions, first into the fringes of society before becoming more mainstream, with companies rushing to register their dot-com domains.
This is the website for the film Space Jam – which can also still be visited today!
Server side technologies meant it became possible to create transactional experiences on the web, with entrepreneurial folk realising the web could be a way of enabling commerce.
Meanwhile, individuals would publish their own web pages, either on the web space they got from their college, their Internet Service Provider or by using early website building tools like Tripod or AngelFire.
This was time of enormous experimentation, of animated under construction GIFs and stat counters, with designers – both professional and amateur – pushing the boundaries of what was possible with this immature medium.
There was little if any connection between these websites, beyond the hyperlinks they contained.
After initially dismissing it, Microsoft realised the web’s potential – and the threat it posed to its business. To gain control of the web, it began a battle with the incumbent web browser, Netscape.
This was the time of the browser wars.
Both companies competed by adding new features to their browsers. Often these would be added to HTML, such that websites that used the HTML features of one browser would be incompatible when viewed in the other.
Netscape remained popular, until Microsoft decided to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows ’95.
By the time IE 6 was released in 2001, it had become the most dominant browser, at which point Microsoft stopped development. This began a long period of stagnation of web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
By turn of the century, expectations of what this medium could deliver outpaced reality.
Companies like MP3.com, Pets.com and Boohoo had built their businesses upon mountains of venture capital but untenable business models; once market confidence disappeared, so did their funding, and their sites came crashing to the ground.
This was the inevitable climax of what would be the first of the web’s many hype cycles.
Out of the ashes, the web was reimagined as a distributed software platform, with users at its centre.
Coined by Tim O’Reilly as ‘web 2.0’, this saw a move from publishing to participation, with new services built to allow users to create and share content.
These platforms could talk to each other via open Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs.
This coincided with innovations in user experience as underlying web technologies were taken advantage of.
Google Maps was the poster child for this period. Previously, you would navigate maps using basic directional controls; click an ‘up’ arrow to view the map further north, a ‘down’ arrow to go south.
Launched in 2005, Google Maps allowed you to pan over a map by dragging your cursor. It sounds crazy to talk about this now, but at the time it felt like magic! It really was the ChapGPT of its time.
Interactive experiences like this, coupled with the availability of open APIs led to an emergence of what were termed ‘mash-ups’.
The start-up I worked at was originally designed to be an online playground where you could create mash-ups from these different services.
Services like IFTTT and Yahoo! Pipes provided a user-friendly interfaces to create automations between different platforms or combine and manipulate data from different sources.
Who recognises this guy?
Did anyone here have a MySpace account?
MySpace became the most popular of another new type of website, a social network. Unlike other Web 2.0 services, the item of content was a person. These were places where you could find and build out lists of friends, and share lists of your favourite things like films, books or music.
Different countries would have their favoured networks; Friends Reunited, and later Bebo, were big in the UK. VK was popular in Russia, and Orkut had a large user base in Brazil.
Each of these networks would rapidly expand before a new one would appear and become the new place to hang out.
MySpace grew to a network of around 300 million registered users before it too fell out of fashion.
What followed MySpace, was Facebook.
Originally designed as a network for Ivy-league college students, it gradually loosened the criteria for joining.
To keep the service compelling, it added features like photo sharing, blogging, and link sharing.
It was easy to join, but much harder to leave.
Deceptive and manipulative design patterns employed to guilt-trip you into not leaving, famously showing photos of the friends you would leave behind if you left.
From its very earliest days, controversial and ill-thought out features were added.
The algorithmic News Feed promoted items that would get the most likes and comments. Initially focused on posts your friends were creating, this later changed to allow sharing of news and current events. As the most engaging items are typically those that are the most enraging, this planted the early seeds for disinformation and polarisation across the platform.
Facebook Beacon was a way of tracking your activity across the web, via its sharing buttons, the first example of Facebook ignoring any privacy concerns.
These and other features were met by protest from users; each feature was rolled back before slow reintroduction.
The company was concerned only with the overall population of its network, the amount of time people spent on it, and the amount of data it could collect.
The population of Facebook grew into the billions, reaching unseen levels of mainstream appeal. But there’s nothing cool about being on a social network that your parents and grandparents were on too.
It briefly seemed as if the earlier popularity cycle would repeat itself, as a new wave of mobile-first social networks grew in popularity, services like Instagram and Snapchat.
However, if Facebook was unable to compete with them by copying their features, they bought them outright.
Instagram was acquired by Facebook in April 2012 for 1 billion USD.
WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook in February 2014 for 19 billion USD.
As these networks continued to grow, they restricted access to their APIs, and it became increasingly more difficult to share content across different websites.
The humble hyperlink – a means of moving to another website with a single click – became the enemy of networks that sought to maintain their control.
Instagram restricted the use of links such that you could only have one ‘link in bio’. And companies like LinkedIn show a warning if you click a link that would take you to another website.
While social networks are free and easy to use, these websites have in effect become silos, with content trapped inside them.
Algorithmic feeds mean that people in your network may not even see the content you’ve posted, or it may be removed without your knowledge or consent.
And honestly, it seems like a foolhardy endeavour to try and be all things to all people, to aim for a single network with everyone in it. We’re seeing the price paid for networks of this scale.
The purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk was another landmark moment, a reminder of how reliant we’d become on just a handful of networks, and how quickly these can either disappear, or be adapted to suit the whims of a powerful individual.
Cory Doctorow termed the familiar evolution of web-based services as enshittification:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
As we approach the web’s fifth decade, technologists are rethinking how the social networks can be owned and operated, with interest now turning towards the idea of federation.
Federation is the idea that different social networks can continue to operate independently of each other, but by using the same underlying standards, like ActivityPub or AT Protocol, they remain interoperable. This means that if a network goes bad or goes away, for whatever reason, you can move to a new network and take your contacts with you.
However, these decentralised alternatives, while their technical underpinnings may be reimagined, tend to replicate the design and interface patterns of their predecessors, leading to similar behaviours and moderation issues.
As ever, the focus is on using technology to solve the problems created by technology.
What we need is a more people-centred approach.
One that evolves from the ground up instead being dictated from the top down.
One which gives users control of their identity, and agency over their content.
One that is true to the original spirit of the web.
Introducing the IndieWeb
The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”
It is a community of independent and personal websites connected by open standards and based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.
There are 2 core ideas that help describe the IndieWeb.
The first is that an independent web presence starts with an online identity that you own and control.
The most reliable and accessible way to do this today is with your own domain name.
This is the opposite to having a username on somebody else’s service; it’s like owning your home rather than renting one.
Having a personal domain name means you choose what it points to, and can change this whenever you want to.
You could start by having it redirect to an existing social media profile, before pointing to a site you’ve built with Squarespace.
Maybe later, if you’ve decided to build a website from scratch with a static site generator with pages published to GitHub pages, your domain can point to that instead.
You can chop and change how your site is built and what is shown there, but having your own domain name means people can still find you.
A domain name is not just for a website, but an identifier you can use in lots of different places on the Internet.
You can use it for your email address, while newer social media sites let you use your domain name in your handle or as part of it.
A domain name can also be used for verification.
This can be done by adding a rel="me" attribute to links to your other profiles on the web. If those profiles include a link back to your website that also use rel="me", a bi-directional relationship between those 2 websites is created.
Mastodon uses this to verify users, showing a tick on your Mastodon profile if the domain links back to the profile.
You can choose whatever name you like. It’s easier to find a domain name these days, thanks to the availability of new top-level domains, or TLDs, beyond .com or .co.uk, etc.
A good place to search for a domain name is Domainr, which searches for available domains across all top level domains.
Once you’ve found a name you like, you need to register it. There are plenty of companies that provide this service, although some TLDs can only be purchased from certain providers.
I use and recommend hover.com.
Once you have a domain name registered, you need to point it to your web host or the web builder that you’re using.
While all this sounds complicated, registrars typically provide tools and guidance to help you get set up.
The second aspect of building an independent web presence is retaining ownership of your content.
This is especially important if you want to use a third-party service to build and host your website.
Many services will allow you to point a personal domain name to their service, but you need to read the small print. Terms and conditions are rarely written to be understood by the lay person, and they are subject to change.
Sometimes companies will exert rights over your content. There may be legitimate and legal reasons why services may want to do this, I’m not a lawyer. But it can be difficult to know what rights they need, and what rights they’re taking away from you.
This is especially true now that many businesses that host user-generated content are now looking to sell this on to AI companies to seed language models.
Another consideration is whether you can export your content, and in a useful format.
WordPress allows you to export your site, and has a fairly common XML-based export format called WXR that some other services support.
Squarespace, supports importing and exporting content in WXR format, as well as support for importing from Tumblr and Blogger blogs.
Wix does not provide any export options, locking you in to their platform.
A final consideration is the longevity of the service.
What if Squarespace disappears? You might be able to export your content, but what about the design? It’s unlikely you’d be able to use the code that its closed-source, propriety layout tool generates in any meaningful way.
What if WordPress disappears? If WordPress the company disappears, its software will still be available as its open source, and likely maintained by its community.
Open source isn’t a guarantee of longevity of course, and companies may have valid reasons for not wanting to give away their code for free.
Ultimately, your independence on the web all comes down to the question; how much control do you want.
The more you control, the more you are responsible for, and the more technical proficiency is needed.
The less you control, the more power you give to those you rely on to help you build and host your website.
Services like pika.page allow you to create a blog really easily, and while they provide some themes, you really have little ability to make it yours.
In the middle, services like Squarespace and Micro.blog have a suite of great features like blogs, podcasts and newsletters. They also provide a great deal of customisation and design options. But you give over a degree of control.
Or, you could do as I do, and use some combination of tooling and software like Eleventy or Hugo, which help you generate static websites that you are then responsible for hosting and keeping up to date. But, you can change every single line of code that is shown on your website.
The good news is, by owning your own domain name, you have taken the biggest and most useful step to gaining independence on the web.
After that, you can take small steps towards further independence as you gain confidence and begin to understand what you want from the web.
There’s no right answer, all that matters is that you are able to achieve what you want to achieve online. And that you are having fun doing so.
Independent creation
So, you have a domain name, and you have some webspace. What should you put on it?
Firstly, it’s important to not think of websites as being solely as a means of publishing words.
As Ana Rodrigues says, you don’t have to be a content creator to have a website; the goal of a personal website is to be reachable.
The best place to start is with a single page website.
Include your name, photo, a brief bio, and link to the different places on the web people can find you.
Wilson Miner’s page has a short bio, and links to select talks and interviews he’s given. Vasilis van Gemert’s page links to his many other websites and side-projects.
Once you have a profile page, perhaps add a second page.
Building a web-based CV is a great way to learn HTML, as this can introduce you to lots of different HTML elements needed to structure and layout of such a document.
Here are two examples from Aaron Parecki and Calum Ryan.
Maybe after that, if you have projects you want to share, you could create a portfolio of your work.
There’s no shortage of examples I could mention; here are the portfolios for Jon Hicks and Lynn Fisher.
When people talk about personal websites, the conversation soon moves to blogging. Blogs are a great way to share your thoughts on topics you are interested in; longer form content is likely to be more thoughtful and less pithy than a post shared on Twitter.
Again, millions of examples I could mention, so here are just two: Ana, who I mentioned earlier, has a beautifully illustrated site with a very open an honest tone, while I can just stare at Aegir’s site for hours with each post individually art directed.
But this format doesn’t work for everybody.
The reverse chronological format enforces expectations around frequency; I’ve spoken to people who’ve written one blog post which has then languished on their home page, and they feel embarrassed about it.
Expectations around length and quality means some people struggle with what they should write. One way some have overcome the pressure of posting is to write weeknotes.
These are posts that summarise what you did the previous week. These tend to have an informal tone, with many bloggers who use this format publishing bulleted lists.
Barry Frost uses an emoji to represent each week’s post, while Alice Bartlett recently reached a 300 week milestone!
An alternative to a blog is a digital garden. With this format, posts are more exploratory, not ordered by publication date but categorised by how finished or refined the author considers each post to be.
You could think of them as personal wikis, where pages are linked together, but each page is in a differing level of completion, and may be moved or merged with another.
This is the approach Maggie Appleton has taken (and written about), while Tom Critchlow’s site is another that uses this format.
Another option is to share links to websites you’ve found or articles that you’ve read.
This immediately gives you a topic to write about; what did you think about this article; what did you agree with, what didn’t you. What is your experience of the topic? I’ve often written blog posts after starting out wanting share a link to an article or website.
Not only will these posts help you find these articles again later, but it helps other people find new writers and content creators; such posts are really a fundamental aspect of the underlying infrastructure of the IndieWeb.
It’s worth nothing that some of the most successful bloggers on the web built their profiles off the back of recommending and sharing links, two prominent examples being Jason Kottke and Andy Baio.
Maybe you could keep a record of the books you’ve read, or films you’ve watched. Bookshelves are a common feature on a lot of people’s websites.
Two examples of bookshelves are those of Dave Rupert and Mandy Brown.
There’s a growing community around slash pages; these are commonly named sections of a website, some with a central directory from which you can link to it from.
The most common of these is the now page; a page at /now where you write a brief and irregularly updated summary of what you are up to, a bit like what you’d tell a friend you hadn’t seen in a year.
Again, you can do whatever you like on your own website. But it’s also a good idea to find inspiration of what other people are doing with their websites. If enough people start doing the same, a set of conventions are created, and can later be documented or codified.
This bottom-up approach is in stark contrast to the centralised model employed by social networks, who dictate what you can publish and in what format.
Independent discovery
So, how might you find sites on the indie web?
One of the key benefit of social networks is that they can aid discovery, albeit via opaque algorithms. Fortunately, a lot of the ideas from the early days of the web are still relevant and are resurfacing in renewed forms.
A common means of discovery is via web directories. Sometimes these may be focused around a particular topic, or more broadly around personal websites.
Phil Gyford’s ooh.directory is a place to find good blogs that interest you, while Henry Desroches currently maintains Personal Sites, a directory of personal websites.
Another old idea attracting interest again is blogrolls. A blogroll is a list of blogs you visit regularly, and that you perhaps subscribe too. Typically these appear in a sidebar, but could also be on a separate page.
Having a blogroll is a way of giving back to the blogs you enjoy. People who visit your site may be interested in reading similar content.
By having a blogroll, visitors can easily find similar websites that they may want to read.
Then there are webrings, collections of websites linked together in a circular structure.
When you join a webring, you add a snippet to your website which provides a link to the ‘next’ website in that ring. These are usually picked randomly to further encourage discovery of sites that share a similar interest.
Once you’ve found a website you enjoy, you can subscribe to a feed of its content. This is done using a technology called RSS.
RSS, or really simple syndication, is a format for websites to provide a feed of posts; title, content, date and author.
With an RSS feed reader, you add this URL of this feed, and after that point, the feed reader will periodical check for updates to that feed.
Being a mature protocol, many websites provide an RSS feed, even those you might not expect.
For example, unwilling to give Google information about which channels I watch on YouTube, I instead subscribe to them using RSS. This means I can only visit YouTube when a creator has published a video.
These are well-proven ideas, and they all revolve around the hyperlink. The web is about making web pages and sharing links to them, it really is that simple.
Jim Neilsen calls permission-less link sharing the web’s superpower:
I send you a link and as long as you have an agent, i.e. a browser (or a mere HTTP client), you can access the content at that link.
This ability to create and disseminate links is almost radical against the backdrop of today’s platforms.
This becomes more important as search engines turn more towards generating answers using AI, hiding links to the websites they’ve sourced information from.
IndieWeb building blocks
As you’ve seen, a lot of the IndieWeb is built around common conventions and usage, with ideas shared and adapted as people see fit.
But at a technical level, it helps if there can be standards to ensure interoperability. A number of these have been developed by the IndieWeb community.
These are really exciting for nerds like me but entirely optional, and hopefully invisible to most people using the indie web.
I don’t want to spend too much time on these, so here’s a brief summary.
If the primary means of identity on the web is a personal domain name, then it should be the case that you should be able to sign into websites using your domain name, as opposed to a username and password.
IndieAuth is one way of achieving this.
Micropub is a standard for creating, editing, and deleting posts on websites. It means you can post from apps like IA Writer and potentially from another site’s CMS.
Another standard is called Webmention. This technology provides a method for one webpage to let another know that it has linked to it.
This is useful for enabling comments across websites; I can respond to a post somebody has written on my website, and when I publish that post, they’ll be notified. They might then choose to show that response on the original post.
The final building block, is the concept called POSSE. This stands for Publish on Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere.
This is the idea that you host all your content on your own site, and then, either manually or using APIs or other tools, create copies of your content on relevant social networks.
This means you get the best of both worlds; you retain control of your content, maintaining a permanent archive, but share it on the networks where other people may still be active.
What you’re probably thinking is, this all sounds great, but it’s either a bit niche, doesn’t scale, or isn’t something that could ever work.
What if I told there’s already an open, independent medium that has:
- ~20m million subscribers in the UK alone
- 100s of client applications
- Built upon open web technology
- Not controlled by a single company
- Supported by advertising but with no tracking
Any ideas?
It’s podcasts. Anil Dash:
…being able to say, “wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement. Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that’s supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that’s not owned by any one company, that can’t be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.
Get involved
Besides creating your own website, how can you get involved in the IndieWeb?
The first place to start to learn more about the IndieWeb, the movement, its ideas and the protocols and conventions people are inventing is on the IndieWeb wiki.
Everything I’ve spoken about this evening, you will find a page for, often with examples and history.
There is also an active community chat.
This has been designed so that it be accessed via a number of different platforms: Slack, Discord, Web, IRC.
There are a number of different channels and a friendly and welcoming community that are able to answer questions and give recommendations.
Not everyone likes chat rooms, so IndieWeb community member Fran Figari recently started the IndieWeb Forum as a slower paced way of asking the community questions and sharing ideas.
There are also a number of face-to-face meet-ups, some that are in person, but now mostly online.
One of these is called Homebrew Website Club – named after the computer clubs that sprang up in Silicon Valley during the dawn of the personal computer – and these tend to happen every other week.
A couple of times a year, at locations around the globe, 2-day get-togethers called IndieWebCamps are organised.
These events typically start with introductions and personal site demos on the first day, followed by an afternoon of breakout discussions.
Then, on the second day, people focus on creating things, be they getting their first website online, adding features to their existing sites, or resolving issues and developing some of those technical specifications.
These events are especially fun when a few people leave having put their first website online.
I heartedly agree with this from Molly White:
Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since.
The founding vision of the web remains true: this is for everybody.
There’s a community of creatives who want to see the web return to its roots, away from corporate interests and motivations, and be a place for people to share their thoughts, their work, their hopes and dreams.
The web is for everybody, and that includes you.