IndieWeb

tl;dr - Check IndieWeb and join the party :)

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I’ve always loved the idea of having my own website. Sharing my thoughts in a structured place that was made by me, with my very own identity imprinted in the UI. I had some blogs along my journey on the web, specially when I was a teenager, where I’d write long texts about things I was slowly learning about life.

This journey was supported by a series of platforms. I can remember Wordpress.com, Blogger, Tumblr, and (ugh) Medium. Also hosted a couple of Wordpress instances in free web hosting websites like Altervista.org. I still have some of them. Some cringe posts are still live and available for anyone to see in the world wide web. I have a post about Deism that I wrote when I was 14 and I can find it on Google. Some people have commented on it along the years, genuinely interested on what I said. It’s funny, and it’s awesome.

I’m a whole different person today, but it’s nice to have that documented and easily searchable. This is something no social media has given me the power to do yet.

I recently graduated from an undergraduate course in Archaeology, where my thesis included the argument that social media is not the best place for scientific communication. The whole idea was to encourage Archaeologists to leverage the power of websites to showcase their research, mainly for the freedom of the content format and not being limited to what the algorithm wants you to post so that people can receive your content.

Turns out this is the exact idea that the IndieWeb movement supports.

It’s all about stopping letting the big corporations steal your data, creativity and time, and engaging in an interconnected web of creators who write and host their own content, in their own domains, at their own accord, while also having a space you can call yours that represents your identity.

I’m slowly starting to get familiar with the wiki (linked above) and the community.

As a web developer, and someone who has been on the web since the 2000s, I absolutely despise what it has become. From what I’m forced to build for a living, to the social media algorithms dictating what I want to see - it’s a disaster. I’m tired of authwalls, uncrawlable content, JavaScript-bloated pages, companies tracking my movements everywhere I go and sponsored content - just to name a few.

Other people also seem to be tired of this. Cool! That’s more people to start making some difference!

As a follow-up read, I recommend The indie web, by James, where he shares his vision about this topic and the community.

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