I watched this video (below) yesterday, and it gave me all kinds of ideas. It’s mainly exploring the IndieWeb. I feel the best description is capturing the best elements of the “old” internet. Moving beyond the enshittified internet, beyond the grip of social media companies. Remembering the internet that was not heavily focused on maximizing profits, on selling as much stuff to everyone who has any disposable income.
As someone who is quite enamoured with the Open Web, things like Open Source and Free Software, this notion is captivating. And, the more I think about it, the more important I think these tools are, and how critical the IndieWeb will be for the evolution of the web. It’s a critical tool in wresting control back from corporations. I’m just starting to explore this in depth, so let me point you to Dan Gillmor’s post from 2014 about the IndieWeb. His post summarizes my ideas nicely.
I’m reminded about the ways we navigated back in the early days of the web. Before the days of Google, and the other webcrawler technologies, things like link pages, blogrolls (here’s mine), and webrings were THE way you discovered new content. In a world where search is dominated by paid placements, I think blogrolls and link pages are extremely important. (Side note: I just discovered Wiby, which looks like it might be a powerful tool in this as well. I’ll need to explore it further, though.)
This brought up another thing I’m now: WordPress vs Handcoded. As you’re on my WordPress site, you can check out my hand-coded page here. That one started when I was studying Web Development back during the pandemic. Anyway, I see a lot of value in taking full control of my content. But, with decades of life on WordPress, I’m unsure how much effort I want to expend in extricating myself from the WordPress ecosystem. Hmmm…I might explore doing a bit of both. Stay tuned.
Anyway, check out this video. It’s only 12 minutes and has interesting insights.