…s on HotGlue; and much more. Over on the IndieWeb wiki, Tantek Çelik claims the small web is just what they’ve been doing, under another name. Uh, no. Hands off. You already have a community, with a fancy brand name, international events and so on. Leave us alone. The small web is for the rest of…

This feels silly on all sides. The IndieWeb’s ideologies are way too specific to encompass what’s nice about e.g. Neocities, and a lot of the more specific stuff isn’t adequately argued out1. On the other hand, if you look at the IndieWeb and see “ah, yes, corporatism” because… they have a fairly nice-looking logo… or something… then you are probably not looking in good faith. Also, the claims over on the wiki are more about, well, this guy’s particular attempts to use “small web” as a term2.

…nts and so on. Leave us alone. The small web is for the rest of us. Those of us who don’t live in America (or Germany), don’t make six-figure salaries and can’t even dream of flying to a meetup on another continent. Those of us who struggle to be heard at all. Even better, we on the small web…

Analyzing the exclusivity of altweb movements in material terms divorced from “can a non-technical person get into this” seems silly to me, given that… well… with the meaningful exception of their insistence on personal domain names, all the IndieWeb stuff is provided free or self-hostably too. They don’t make you fly to central Europe to try out webmention.io or whatever.

…early on.) There’s still more. To my surprise, IRC is making a comeback (partly due to the aforemention…

that thor gif: "Is it though?"

  1. If you’re trying to be friendly to non-technical people, why have you decided to make permalink ideology a cause worth linking from the front page? Why are you defining “owning your data” as needing to rent a domain? Why does every website need to be judged against the feature set of Twitter? Navigation must be chronological? “Convenient indieweb site search is a very commonly requested feature by readers / users of indieweb sites” needs… a citation, to say the least. Should everything need to have comments? You see, as much as I love the indieweb, I have my own axe to grind here too. ↩

  2. From the outside, this all seems kinda dumb to me, given that the actual energy in the space seems a lot more vibrant in the Multiverse/Neocities yesterweb area where a bunch of people in their early twenties (who mostly just know some HTML and CSS3) are having a party. But I acknowledge I don’t understand a lot of the ethic of Tech Thought Leadership. ↩

  3. I don’t mean this derisively – if your “movement” needs people to run through CS coursework to participate, it’s never going to catch up with what less technically educated folks are doing on the real cultural cutting edge. ↩