> The IndieWeb doesn't need to go mainstream to be meaningful. It's a celebration of a more personal, decentralised...
There was a time when rock and roll was going to "change the world." Like jazz and beat poetry before it, it was defining the vanguard of youth culture. Creating the values, taste, language and culture of a generation.
Rock music still exists. So does Jazz. It's certainly not dead as an entertainment and art form. But... it no longer has that creative, future-defining vibe. No longer belongs to youth culture. No longer defines the eras.
There's a difference between steam engine enthusiasts in 2025 and 1825. One is about the future and the other is about the past.
If the author is saying that there is nothing wrong with like steam engines in 2025... then I agree. Steam engines are awesome.
If this is about recapturing what the web was, culturally, circa 1995-2005... that's a different sort of judgement.
In any case, the indieweb.org has a lot of value statements. Principles. I suspect these are aesthetic values. Important to the internal integrity if the art form, rather than their external affects.
I think you underestimate the cultural impact that small groups can have. I am not sure about indieweb in particular, but there are many niche groups that had much longer-term impact than more mainstream movements. In music this is often expressed as your artists favorite artist. For me Captain Beefheart (influencing Beck and Tom Waits), Death Grips (influenced Björk and David Bowie) come to mind, but there are probably more niche groups that I don't know.
In economics the Chicago school had a outsized impact considering they how fringe they seemed in the world of academia. Nowadays I would say that George Mason is the new Chicago school, and for similar reasons.
I would love to get more examples of this phenomenon if anyone else has any.
> underestimate the cultural impact that small groups can have [...] I would love to get more examples of this phenomenon
I wasn't alive at the time, so I don't know how small/fringe the lisp community was at the time, but your comment made me think of how lisp "invented" things like if-then-else, recursion, garbage collection, first-class functions and more, which we more or less take for granted in every programming language today (at least some of those features), although lisp and lisp-likes remain fringe today.
The same pattern seems to be repeating even in modern times where things like React/Redux/hot code reloading were heavily inspired by what the ClojureScript (a lisp-like compile-to-JS language) community was experimenting with at the time, if I remember correctly.
Sorry for the confusion, but I was just trying to add additional examples since parent said "love to get more examples of this phenomenon", I wasn't trying to make any argument for one side or the other.
I think the Beat Generation (and mid-century Mississippi blues) from my earlier comment are also examples. Niche in their time. Automobile enthusiasts were a niche group. Early web forum users, IRC, ICQ... Predecessors of modern social media culture.
For an even more "on the nose" example would be the Homebrew Computer Club, Altair programmers and whatnot. I think we're all familiar with "disruption theory" by this point on HN.
The point is... is this a vanguard or a rear guard? Both have value. But... expecting the rear guard to "take off" is misguided.
I see what you mean. And yes I don't think it defines the future any longer. Unfortunately. But we passed that fork in the road a long time ago.
Most people are happy to store all their data with big tech and get snoothly marketed content designed to extract as much value as possible from themselves for corporate benefit. It is what it is.
I'm just happy it still exists and it doesn't have to take off for me either. It's similar to Linux. If it ever would take off on the desktop, it would be so corrupted that it wouldn't be Linux as we know it. So it would be the worst thing that could happen for me.
Perfectly reasonable take. "Taking off" is, I agree, a misguided expectation within this frame.
Desktop Linux (year of) is a great analogy. Had it happened, Linux would not have remained Linux as we know it. Differences would likely not to the liking of desktop Linux users irl.
Otoh... had Linux desktop really "taken off" circa 2008... it would have had a major impact on personal computing.
These are two, usually distinct desires. "Indie" generally goes with the niche, principled ethos.
> Most people are happy to store all their data with big tech and get snoothly marketed content designed to extract as much value as possible from themselves for corporate benefit.
Is this even a thought on people's mind? I don't think it's a choice people are explicitly making in their mind, but it's more like water and electricity that just takes the path of least resistance. It happens to be that centralized services are easy to join and get started with, and non-centralized services were harder to join, case in point being Mastodon where you need to first chose what server you want to join, then you can join the network itself. Same goes for IRC, torrents and a bunch of other things, it tends to just be harder to get into less centralized things, for better and worse.
But I still have the belief that we can figure out the UX to making it easier. Bluesky/ATProto is a step in the right direction, although it isn't 100% self-hostable and decentralized today, the foundation is there and the UX seems simple enough that when people have the choice, both paths have about the same friction today.
The ideas have always been very simple. Own your own data, scratch your own itch, build things and share them.
"Take off," "Get Big," "Stay Small," "Change the World," "Be Retro," "Be Art," none of this was ever the point, it's always just been, go build something on the web you have some ownership over and share it with whoever may be interested.
Over the years I've found it fascinating that so many people who weren't doing what the Indieweb is about, namely building, sharing, and scratching your own itch, have felt compelled to commentate and pontificate about whatever they believed it to be.
> Over the years I've found it fascinating that so many people who weren't doing what the Indieweb is about, namely building, sharing, and scratching your own itch, have felt compelled to commentate and pontificate about whatever they believed it to be.
Unfortunately, many people see doing things yourself as an amateur—like cooking a meal, fixing a car, or hosting a personal website—as a low-status activity. The modern way of life is to pay for everything; only losers spend their precious time on those boring tasks. And they always trying to find a way to justify it.
I think the stakes are higher, and the IndieWeb movement is about the future, and it's not just an aesthetic.
Allow me a metaphor. Many years ago humans wandered the Earth, hunted and gathered and lived where they wished. Then came along civilisation, and with it, a normalisation not just of trade, but of property. Some people realised that they could "own" the best land, and make people pay a "rent" to use it. And so was born, The Law. The Law was used for a long time in a way that meant people were born into a system where they just accepted there were Lords of the land and those who worked it for an existence. Eventually, people asked important questions, some set out for a New World, others in the Establishment sought to impose The Law in new lands, sometimes accepted, sometimes rejected. After a long, long time, we came to a place in society where we accepted personal property - particularly personal ownership of the land on which you lived - was a just, beneficial and suitable place for civilisation to settle.
Now, back to the web. Right now, we're in a phase of feudalistic control. In order to "feel informed", or to even be entertained, you are required to make sacrifices (your personal data), to a rich group of Lords who demand The Law bends to their will.
The IndieWeb is the web version of freeholding. It won't change the World, but without it, the World can't change.
As a society we have a choice: our future online presence entirely owned and shaped by a handful of "land owners", or we invest in making the New World and creating an online world that we want to see.
This isn't about aesthetics. It's about freedom, democracy, the law, your rights and those of future generations. There's a place for landlords in this World, but please don't try and consign the IndieWeb to a curious retro hobby clan: it has the potential to offer you and many others so, so much more than that.
TFA says that IndieWeb does not need to "take off". I agree. But it also doesn't need putting down or dismissing, and it can adapt to whatever future defining vibe of youth culture it needs to: it is a platform, not an art form. It is land on which to build coffee shops/libraries/museums/diaries, not those things itself.
>The IndieWeb is the web version of freeholding. It won't change the World, but without it, the World can't change.
Freeholding has always existed since the web was born. The current structure of overwhelmingly dominant landlords was built on top of it.
The problem we have is that the IndieWeb is not currently a viable alternative for most content creators who need to make a living. If it's not economically viable then it's by definition a hobby.
"Taking off" may not be the right yardstick, but I think walking away from the goal of making the IndieWeb economically effective enough to claim back some territory from the oligopolists just means giving up.
I think making money from a website is fine. You can sell products and services, and that's great.
I think adtech on websites is a problem. And social media is an adtech product, not a content product.
IndieWeb for me is about reducing reliance on adtech. You want to build a page to showcase your hand-carved penguins? Cool, hit me up with a URL! Selling independently produced courses or 1:1 mentorship? Offering consultancy or classes? Cool!
Wrapping it all up in an adtech hell hole for people to harvest my data and then try and scam me or sell me utter crap based on browsing patterns around "news stories" that are false? Nah, I'll pass, thanks.
If my desire to make a living without submitting to some all powerful overlord makes me part of the problem, then we disagree on a very fundamental level on what the point actually is.
Would you say the same about music or fine art? What is the "point" exactly? History's greatest writers and artists have generally been able to dedicate their time to working because they are supported financially by selling their work.
> steam engine enthusiasts in 2025 and 1825. One is about the future and the other is about the past
Well most of our power generation still comes from steam turbines, and boiling water is more of than than not still the most efficient approach for energy extraction, so it's as much the present and future as it is the past.
Thing is that music trends are (indeed) only trends and expected to not last centuries, and that the steam engine is arguably inferior to what came after. What the "build your own website" crowd posits is that what we have now is factually inferior and dehumanizing.
I agree that there's a lot of misguided prose about the whys and hows of such a revival, but trying to make the web fun again for the small part of the population interested enough to put in some elbow grease is worth it, in my opinion.
It's not trying to change the world, it's trying to build a small "indomitable Gauls village" style community.
> Rock music still exists. So does Jazz. It's certainly not dead as an entertainment and art form. But... it no longer has that creative, future-defining vibe. No longer belongs to youth culture. No longer defines the eras.
Both have creative vibe. They are not future defining or "youth culture", but that does not mean they are not meaningful or personal or decentralized.
It is ok for subcultures to be what they are and not being mainstream or becoming super popular.
Right? I don't understand OP's thought there. Plenty of jazz still innovates. Look at the impact Robert Glasper and Terrace Martin have had, especially with Kendrick Lamar, over the past decade. Innovation is there if you're paying attention.
Creative, perhaps, in a purely artistic sense. Even here, I think it's arguable. But, it's still definitely an art form and art is creative.
"Creative of modern culture" is what rock music was... a pretty defining quality of what rock music was. It produced youth culture. Mainstream culture. Memes. Fashions. Ethos, etc.
Currently, there is not a single bonafide "rock star" under 50. Even the idiomatic term "rockstar" has fallen out of use.
This is more to do with the effect of the web disrupting and decentralizing the ability of corporations to create and curate a homogeneous cultural experience than the failure of rock as an art form. "Rock Star" is a commercial construct that can't exist in a world of Spotify and Soundcloud and hyperlocal community-created genres.
There was a time when rock and roll was going to "change the world." Like jazz and beat poetry before it, it was defining the vanguard of youth culture. Creating the values, taste, language and culture of a generation.
Rock music still exists. So does Jazz. It's certainly not dead as an entertainment and art form. But... it no longer has that creative, future-defining vibe. No longer belongs to youth culture. No longer defines the eras.
There's a difference between steam engine enthusiasts in 2025 and 1825. One is about the future and the other is about the past.
If the author is saying that there is nothing wrong with like steam engines in 2025... then I agree. Steam engines are awesome.
If this is about recapturing what the web was, culturally, circa 1995-2005... that's a different sort of judgement.
In any case, the indieweb.org has a lot of value statements. Principles. I suspect these are aesthetic values. Important to the internal integrity if the art form, rather than their external affects.