The Internet Is Becoming Unusable and Thoughts for the IndieWeb

[grayestofghosts]

The internet (or, well, maybe, mostly social media) is quickly becoming unusable for me because of the rampant amounts of antisemitism literally everywhere. It is honestly worse than my experience with transphobia online and I say this as a trans person.

My other thought right now is about the indieweb as an alternative and there seems to be significant problems to the point that I'm thinking of writing an essay. As with most things in tech there seems to be a major disconnect in what people want and what tech people want to do. So much of the face of the indieweb is retroweb material built by high school and college kids who can design beautiful retro aesthetic layouts because, frankly, they have so much free time on their hands and no real responsibilities. We know right now probably more than ever that grown up adults with jobs and such have interesting things to say and especially because the indieweb does not generally have straightforward monetization opportunities, they should be able to publish simply without sacrificing all of their precious free time.

And in saying this I think there needs to be more focus on really simple text-based websites that people can just bang out if they have something to say and just need somewhere to put it. The competition with non-indie sources is really fierce for this niche but I think at least some people can be pulled, especially given the privacy garbage happening on social media. While I know the back end of, for example, Ao3 is quite complex, the front end being well-formatted text shows that sites that are simply well-formatted text are worthwhile in themselves. I feel like Zonelets is probably the most complexity one can realistically ask of people, and even that might be too much because it is still Javascript. But still having packages like that for people who aren't super tech-minded to be able to deploy simple, text-based static websites that are usable on mobile to a host of their choice should probably be the priority.

Comments

[axolotls]

So much of the face of the indieweb is retroweb material built by high school and college kids who can design beautiful retro aesthetic layouts because, frankly, they have so much free time on their hands and no real responsibilities. We know right now probably more than ever that grown up adults with jobs and such have interesting things to say and especially because the indieweb does not generally have straightforward monetization opportunities, they should be able to publish simply without sacrificing all of their precious free time.

That's interesting to hear, because what I often think about is the kind of webpages people who contribute to the IndieWeb wiki have (e.g. Tantek) – simple, often black on white with relatively few elements on each page.

[grayestofghosts]

I think the thing is that it's not that this doesn't exist but rather that so much of that side of the indieweb is devs with strong feelings having dense tech discussions which makes it feel more inaccessible than the stuff the high schoolers are doing even if it's really not.

I really liked mikegrindle.com because he had a decent amount of non-tech posts (the site went down, but you can find it in the way back machine starting September of last year). Like when you look at Bearblog's what's happening it's mostly people blogging about blogging. So it's not unrelated to the "indieweb is just people talking about indieweb" issue.

[axolotls]

Oh yeah, I get that. I think there are just several not-entirely-overlapping spheres within the independent web space essentially, so depending on the person, they may be seeing only some of them or more of one than the other.