Where are we going, IndieWeb?

My dear internet friend and intellectual sparring partner V.H. Belvadi is hosting things month’s IndieWeb Carnival and is asking us: where do you see the IndieWeb in 2030:

Welcome to the last IndieWeb Carnival of 2025. Having been a part of this wonderful community for years now and having thought about the IndieWeb from various perspectives, I have plenty of ideas about where I hope we are headed in the near future. And I am sure you do too. So tell us, where do you see the IndieWeb in 2030, just five short years from now?

My relationship with the IndieWeb community has been rocky and ever-evolving and it was pretty much this IndieWeb Carnival thing that finally brought me into the community and got more excited about it. Even then, I think “indie web” as an alternative to building your online presence outside from commercial platforms is more important than “IndieWeb”, the specific community.

One of the related key questions that I’ve been pondering a ton lately is what does the categorisation of “IndieWeb” mean so let’s start there.

Category through belonging or focus

Whenever we build a community (or one forms accidentally by likeminded people gathering together), there are some sort of borders around the community. There are people who are part of it and people who are not. This definition then often influences what actions are taken, who is accepted into the community and where the community wants to go.

A lot of the discussion related to IndieWeb happens around this definition too.

I see two ways of defining a community’s boundaries: 1) who gets to be part of it and 2) what the community’s focus is on. In public discussions, these two ways unfortunately mush together.

Belonging: who gets to be part of IndieWeb

I want IndieWeb to be a community that’s welcoming everyone who wants to be part of it — regardless of their current situation. It’s really difficult to draw the line between “Indie” and “non-Indie” for example in case of a personal website.

For example, where would you draw the line in this spectrum of options with blogs as an example:

• Writing a blog in LinkedIn or Medium
• Writing a blog in hosted WordPress, Pika, Bear or other
• Writing a blog in self-hosted WordPress
• Writing a blog in hosted service but with your own domain
• Writing a blog with static site generator and hosting it on Netlify
• Writing a blog with static site generator and self-hosting it on a VPS
• Building your own blog engine and self-hosting it on a VPS

IndieWeb wiki defines itself as

We are a community of independent and personal websites 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.

I like those principles (and have written my thoughts on all 12 principles) but even then, they are more aspirational than gatekeeping. You don’t have to own your own domain to get started with the community, you don’t need to implement Webmentions or microformats or many of the other technical wonders us IndieWeb folks rave about.

I want IndieWeb to be and to remain an open community where people can decide to be part of, regardless of how their website is built or hosted. I want the community to be inspiring and aspirational with its ideas and technical possibilities rather than limiting or gatekeeping.

Focus: what is the community about

Focus and belonging can sometimes be at odds with each other on a face value. The tighter the focus on a single topic is, less open it would have to be to new people.

I often hear opinions that “IndieWeb is too technical” and that it’s keeping non-developer folks out.

I think that’s okay.

First of all, IndieWeb is not the one and only option to corporate web.

I’ve been thinking a lot whether we can have the “Indie” part without the “you need to make it yourself” part. At what point, does it turn from indie to commercial when we build tools and services that reduces or removes the technical portion.

I don’t mean this as a gatekeepy “you need to be this technical to get in” or “only real developers can be part of indie web”. Not at all.

I see two main technical challenges one needs to overcome to build and host their own website: they need to build the site and they need to deploy it somewhere. It’s really difficult to reduce these to a minimum without turning the entire thing into a commercial-ish service — and we have a lot of those ones already.

If you just want a website and not worry about the technical bits, you could buy WordPress hosting from someone who sets WP up and start writing.

I don’t consider that any less indie in the terms of beloging (as I discussed in previous section) but there seems to be a big desire to have some options that would be “more indie” without being any more technical.

I like the technical parts of IndieWeb

I’m a technical person and I love building my own tools and tinkering with stuff on Saturday evenings. For me, IndieWeb is a community that encourages that and helps me find other people who care about the same things.

It’s more of a mindset than a skill check.

I hope to invite new people into the community who want to learn how to build websites, to learn programming through building the websites and tools to run them and have an interest towards learning new things in general — and to share what they have learned.

The best outcome is when the people involved in the community build better tools for everyone to use to make it easier to build and run their own sites.

5 years from now?

I don’t know what we’ll be specifically in five years as Belvadi is asking. My “membership” of it is so loose that I don’t have strong opinions on anything practical.

I hope that the community stays open and welcoming.

I hope it continues to encourage and inspire people to learn how to build the tools they need.

I hope it doesn’t take itself too seriously as the only or best option to commercial web.

And I hope I’m still as excited (if not more) about building websites in five years.

Thanks V.H. for hosting this month’s Carnival!