Finding the indie web is hard
— published on 12·06·24Those of us unhappy with the way the internet is becoming nothing more than a replacement for five big platforms to rule them all have ran for the hills, in a never-ending attempt to each make a hobbit hole and communicate in a more down-to-earth way both with people we know in real life, and those living on the opposite end of the globe. For some, this means only allowing a handful of digital networks or a handful of contacts we personally trust. For others, it's complete personal erasure from the web, only making use of it for non-personal stuff. And for the rest?
While I can't possibly speak for everyone, I'm fairly confident at least part of the rest of us have renounced to complete web oblivion, seen the internet as something that can be great, and constructed from scrap parts or with very powerful tools our own little place, a website just for us. One that reclaims the space we've lost by making the web more personal, people to people. As the web becomes progressively enshittified each step into personally owning your content and claiming a space for yourself is a welcome revolt, plunger in hand.
Criticism of the state of the web abounds, of course. As stated by a teacher at WDKA Rotterdam a few years ago for an exercise in tackling current events, "The internet happened. Social media is bad. We get it. Talk about something else." Everyone and their grandma and their dog is talking about social media's bad influence. But do they do anything about it, or do they boomerpost comic strips about more and more kids staring at their phone and waiting for likes? All done through the iPhone Facebook app of course. Anyway this post is not about them. So many more things are wrong with the web, even when you banish yourself from the endless feed of pictures and videos taking up your screen.
One of those is search engines. Let's say you've done the big move already, uninstalled and unpinned (if not deleted) every social media app, and now you have a blog. On Wordpress, on Wix, on HotGlue, or on a personal site you made from scratch. You write about stuff, or post pictures, just like me, and want to get it out there for people to read. You also want to read their content. Well how do they find you and how do you find them?
The state of connections on the web today
You've got a handful of options for reaching out and finding other netizens (people who go online, basically). But none work great.
You could write a few search terms, and add "blogspot" or "wordpress" to point your search towards sites hosted there. But this only gets you as far as those platforms, which, if not evil and super problematic, don't embody peak independence of their users. In a strictly functional sense, anyone with a blog on a platform depends on that platform, and migration from one to the other is a pretty big task if you haven't dabbled in the tools that make the web happen. You could always append a very broad "blog" to your search, but virtually every website has a blog, or ten, so that doesn't get you closer to personal sites.
As the IndieWebCamp explains, you could POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. This means having a site, writing content there, and linking to it (or embedding it completely) via posts on multiple social networks, mailing lists, etc. The social feature of social networks allows your friends to be notified of your new posts this way. Group features, such as FB Groups or the whole concept of Reddit allows you to be discovered by the people who sould hear you out. Yet, that entire way of working still makes using social networks a major requirement. You can't just not exist on there. And with the way social media platforms have evolved, if you don't engage on them often and you just link to your site, almost no one will see your stuff. Is that really Indie? or are we just... struggling? I do that too by the way
The same organization cited above also suggests marking the content on your site with microformats2 and webmentions. This is a brilliant way to notify sites you link to that you exist, and to allow reposting, commenting, and replying on the wider web without relying on big platforms. It doesn't directly allow you to be discovered or to discover other personal sites, but makes it easier for your site to show up on other people's sites, and slowly but surely attract attention by readers. There's one big caveat to this: it's only understandable by people with knowledge of web development. Heck, even I can't understand it as it is, and I play around with the web quite a lot.
In a similar fashion, albeit less technical, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds allow people to subscribe to the feed of a blog and be notified when something new comes out. All one needs to subscribe is any Feed Reader. Implementing it on your site is a little more complex depending on what your site is made with, but it's so well documented that it's not exactly the hardest thing. When a site you're following cites or links to another personal site, you can meet new netizens. Again, this option has one drawback: RSS allows you to be notified of new content, but not to discover new content.
You could always nudge your friends and acquaintances to check out your site, but be discreet and gentle about it. You don't want to force them and make them feel like you're pushing a business card in their hands.
Culprits of the great divide
I remember a time, somewhere in the back of my head, when using search engines didn't involve countless tricks. I used to accidentally fall on many smaller sites. AND I'M NOT THAT OLD, I promise. Okay I was there when "viral videos" was still a term in use and before "Chocolate Rain" was completely forgotten. I've just had a computer from early age. But something was different. I remember surfing, actually surfing from link to link, from site to blog to web altar. And it took just a search or two to get started. Now? Searching has become a giant sore, filtering through 10 results on the same domain, same big names popping up every time, desperately looking for a completely unfamiliar domain name to read something interesting. "You could hide a body on page 2 of google search." If that were true I'd be a decorated detective by now. The only thing you'll find on page 2 is AI-filled articles for questions you could answer with one sentence.
Everyone agrees search engines are getting sicker by the minute. Two tumors I could identify are bloat-content written to keep you on a site longer so you see more ads, and annoying SEO practices that make the same 100 sites pop up in the first results of every god-forsaken search you do. I don't care what you think about psychoacoustics, Lifewire.
(Still) looking for solutions
Scavenging is a far better word, actually. I feel like a Fallout character looking for scraps to keep afloat and in contact with other indie webbers.
Some people have resorted to switching to Gopher or Gemini, extremely simple networks that are not the web but are on the internet. This isn't the darkweb your true-crime aficionado friend warned you about. It's just a group of people tired of the same things as all of us who put their time and energy into creating, maintaining or migrating to minimalist networks that do a way better job at connecting people in a more human and non-invasive way. They're still very small networks, but their architecture is promising. Because they're not intended to be dynamic and reduce human-machine interaction, they won't make a good place for ads to track you. We never know what will happen, but for now at least they consist of personal or project pages, feed aggregators that allow you to discover and be discovered by other people, and a handful of text-based games for harmless fun.
I've been there myself. It's a wonderful and slow-paced place. It won't tell you you have 2 days to live because your wrist hurts, it won't spam you and track you. But it also isn't the web and it won't fix its problems. Just like living in the countryside won't make the city less grey.
We have a web already, and we should take care of it.
Even if you decide to be on Gemini or Gopher, pushing for a human-first web still makes sense. Surprisingly, many of the tools that could help us are already out there, and have been for almost two decades.
RSS still is one of the best ways to get your online newspaper delivered without blowing up your mailbox (it doesn't even need it). So if you have a site, if your friend has a site, if an organization you like has a site you visit regularly, you can push towards adoption of RSS Feeds. Most blog or site providers readily provide one. Stop using the "newsletter" for regular updates. If you have a newsletter already, switch to using it for more "special" content, at larger intervals. Grab one of the many free RSS readers and enjoy reading articles next to other articles, not next to that WeTransfer download notification your colleague sent you.
Before search engines, there were Web Directories and Blogrolls. Web directories are a big curated collection of websites, usually split into categories. Yahoo! was a web directory site before becoming a good search engine before becoming a very bad search engine before becoming... whatever it is now.
Yahoo in 1994
Blogrolls are more specific but the same principle applies: a list of blogs or sites the user thinks are nice, helpful, or worth the time.
There are still web directories here and there, I can point you to my own, which is just all my bookmarks but naturally they're harder to find. So if you have a site, if your friend has a site, you can easily create a web link directory or a blogroll. This won't impact your site directly, but it will heal the wounds of the disconnected web and make it normal to surf again.
If you like that idea, keep a list of any web directory or blogroll you encounter and make it a web directory of web directories!
Webrings are another feature of the past that finds a vibrant community today. They regroup various personal or collective websites focusing on one topic, in a ring, each a chainlink to the one before and the one after it, circularly. One site may be part of as many Webrings as its maintainer wants. This means that if you like dogs, write science-fiction, and enjoy taking photos of the various beers you drink, you don't have to join a webring for drunk Trekkie dog-parents, you can join three separate webrings. It's a nice way to know you belong to a few communities, to keep in touch, and to link up across the web.
Webrings are a tad more complex than link directories, but they're far from difficult to join, really. And they're a much nicer and cozier way to set your mat in the webspace.
Where to now?
Even with those solutions, unless more people join up, it will still be hard to find and connect with personal and indie sites around the web. But with the effort of the Indie Web Camp, IndieWebify.Me, PersonalSit.es, Discover the IndieWeb, and you and me, we can at least nudge in some space for those of us who want the internet to live again.
By all means, if you want to have a blog out of TikFaceTwiXInstaMastoBlr, look into how you can build your own site. For the most part, it's accessible. It sometimes costs more than platforms (for which you pay with your data, attention, and conflicting emotions), but it's a place for you.
Include me in your blogroll or send me a message to check out your new site!

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