I joined the IndieWeb, here's what I learned

Hi! I started a startup, Known, that did exactly this in 2014, explicitly as part of the indieweb movement. The open source code is still around.

The trick is the economics here. A one-click solution is great, but right now the indieweb solves an ideological but not a hard _user_ problem. There isn't enough "there" there to either justify investment or get enough customers to cover the costs of a service.

The closest is micro.blog, which is a genuinely great service that bakes in this tech under the hood. But the tradeoff is that you can't run it on your own infra; it's a centralized service that is compatible with the protocols but isn't quite a genuinely indieweb tool.

I've wondered if there might be something around providing better tools for logging an agent's activities, or for publishing from a sensor / server / etc, but that's all speculation. Without a genuine hard user need, it's hard to imagine how this would work as a turnkey service.

They realize it's "unworkable for 90% of users" and they don't care.

Part of the Indieweb philosophy, like Libre software, is to "scratch your own itch" - no one's paying you. You do the stuff that's interesting to you. It's not a business. The point is not to take over the market.

The planet needs fewer marketing pinheads, not more. I would like it if we passed various laws that killed off a lot of the marketing pinheads, basically eliminating their jobs one way or another, and encouraged more people to create the things they want, rather than submit to the things that are popular.

The pinheads rarely create much of substance and mostly just sit around strategizing all day on how to rent seek. They have a lot of free time and money they can use to lobby the government and make it worse. They dress this all up as capitalism though it isn't really. We should strike back.

If you spend time in IndieWeb discussion circles, such as chat.indieweb.org or the get-togethers listed on events.indieweb.org, or if you spend time wandering through the indieweb.org wiki, you will find evidence that many of us share the view that UX must come first[1].

There are one-click-setup IndieWeb entry points. The most prominent is micro.blog which gives you a personal blog/site with all the latest IndieWeb goodness and costs $5/month.

But most people interested in the IndieWeb these days are devs, i.e. nerds, and want to roll things themselves, which is why IndieWeb-related blog posts can feel like tech soup.

This is something IW members would gladly see change! Adoption by non-nerds is something the IW cares about. David Shanske[2], for instance, has spent much time in the last decade on Wordpress plugins that gives you much of of the IW tools out of the box [3].

Finally, you don't need to use all of the tech to be "doing IndieWeb". Having your own domain is the first and most important step. Then maybe you[4] try making a few pages: raw HTML, generated from Markdown, Django, whatever. Then you can add Microformats. Then maybe add a script to send WebMentions, or use a free hosted service to do it for you. Then branch out in whatever direction you choose. At all of these stages, your site is still IndieWeb.

[1] I'm not as active in IW circles as I was a few years ago but still consider myself part of it: my personal site has microformats, I use Micropub to update it, etc.

[2] david.shanske.com

[3] https://profiles.wordpress.org/dshanske/#content-plugins

[4] Generic "you".

the irony is that the scratch your own itch mindset also explains why indieweb struggles to grow.

there’s nothing wrong with building software for yourself. but if your stated goal is giving everyone ownership over their online identity, then usability stops being marketing and starts becoming part of the mission.

good ux isn’t selling out. it’s removing accidental complexity so more people can benefit from the ideas. otherwise you’re not building an alternative to big platforms, you’re building a club for people who enjoy configuring web servers.

The Internet is already independent - warez and torrents amd smuggling sites and groups prove this

Anyone can go right now to a DNS registry and set up a url with tld and as many redirects as needed and host locally or remote servers.