Apple Annie’s WeblogThis set of bookmarks will accompany a new post published today, where I explore some thoughts about what the indie web means to me. I started this post while reading all of the bookmarks in this link list. Perhaps you've already read some of them, but they're all worth reading again or in conjunction with each other as a set. I will order these by ascending publish date.
In today's post, I share some of my thoughts on IndieWeb, a TV show 3 Body problem, and a little story that happened lately. They're seemingly irrelevant, unrelated, yet I connected them together as a message I wanted to convey. I'm not sure if this is what we call lateral thinking. But it kept floating in my head during a few nights when I was working an overnight shift. This is my way of putting it. It deserved to be written down.
I don't have super coherent thoughts around this, but I started to grow somewhat wary of my own feelings of technoelitism after making this realization. The IndieWeb movement is super cool, full of (generally) very cool people doing cool shit, but there's a massive number of people who lack the knowledge (or inclination) to participate in it, even as an observer!
As (para)social media keeps reducing its appeal on me, including the definition of 'Fediverse', I'm also finding the concept of indieweb, in its current techno-ideological form, uninteresting.
I've come to think of the IndieWeb as an attempt to compromise with corporate silos and their imitators.
Funnily enough, the best modern incarnation of that definition of what the web is are the huge social media platforms. Because those, after all, do enable the sharing of content through user-friendly ways meant to appeal users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists. Kinda ironic, isn't it?
The IndieWeb, as it stands, is a bit... perhaps elitist is the wrong word. It's a club for those that can, and although part of the IndieWeb's broader message is about eschewing the commercial web and owning your stuff, unless you know at least a little bit about websites and how they work, you're gonna be relying on commercial organisations to get you going and keep you rolling in the IndieWeb.
These posts accuse "the IndieWeb" of being elitist, exclusionary, overengineered, complicit, and unnecessary, among many other things.
The goal is not building a smooth product—that's left to folks like Micro.blog—but tinkering with and trying to understand what are the interaction primitives that are offered by web applications that lead to mass adoption.
That is the web I'm arguing for. A web that is intentional, where what you consume is curated by you and you alone, where connections with others happen because you made the conscious effort to connect. And at this point, I don't fucking know how to call that web. Maybe "personal web"? I guess I'll go with that from now on.
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