Why?

I figured it would be nice to have a place to put my thoughts and I'm really heartened by the indie web movement so I figured I'd start a personal website of my own.

I've been on the internet for a long while at this point and I've watched it go from small individual websites for specific purposes to large aggregation sites and social media. I'm not necessarily against large content aggregation sites, I think they can be pretty useful for troubleshooting a technical issue or discovering what's out there but I think the problem is that they've become the sole source of truth for information on the internet.

It also means that rather than having individual specialized websites, we have a single arbiter for what is deemed important and acceptable. This is easily exploitable by people looking to control the narrative or prevent free exchange of information. It also allows for not only the aggregation of content but also user data meaning easier access for invasive advertisement and making it a rich resource for malicious actors. Overall, it'd be best if these aggregation sites were merely repositories of links to other resources that were owned by the authors.

I do understand that it's not reasonable to expect everyone to host their own website or relinquish the convenience that social media provides, but I do have the ability to contribute to making the internet a little more diverse even if what I make here would end up less relevant than if I cultivated and curated an audience on social media.

The Indie Web

I'm not the only one that feels this way. It seems like there's a growing sentiment that the internet has become too corporatized and become a monolith. This is where the indie web movement comes in.

Getting started

I first learned about the indie web by randomly stumbling upon some video from some tech creator a while back. I thought it was pretty neat but didn't really act on it at the time. It slowly bubbled away in the background and made itself present any time I was reminded of the invasiveness and seeming inescapability of the modern web. It wasn't really until I started getting more invested in self-hosting software that it started to click into place. At first I set up a media server to take back my media consumption from streaming services, then I looked into software to organize my libraries, then I was browsing for self-hosted social media servers like mastodon and matrix.

All of these things started to rub back up against the indie web until I finally decided, I can just throw something simple up as a placeholder for when I have more time. It took a while but I'm finally getting around to making something more substantial and personal.

Going farther

My first stop was a quick search on more resources and I immediately found IndieWebify.Me This was an invaluable resource to even see what was even possible and how others were approaching this. It includes a step-by-step process for getting integrated with the indie web from getting a domain name to getting all of your social media profiles connected and setting up capability for the webmentions protocol. I haven't completely implemented all the suggestions there but it's very useful for anyone getting started.

From there I also started digging into what others were doing so I looked around on mastodon to see if anyone else was talking about it. I saw quite a few people posting their own websites and even some search engines for small websites. My favorite being Marginalia Search so far.

That's about as far as I've gotten, I'm working on it as I write this article (mainly to have some content to test with lol). I'm looking forward to exploring more interoperability with other #indieweb pages and making the internet more fun to explore.

What I want

I'm hoping to make this a little area I can put my thoughts and interact more globally with the indie web overall. Eventually I'll get some kind of webmentions display on here :3

That does kind of lead into my philosophy and how I'm going to handle this website. Mainly I'm pretty into minimal vibes and really want to keep javascript away from the source code of this website as much as possible. I realize that makes dynamic content kind of hard so I think I'll just keep it isolated to a couple pages that absolutely need it.

We'll see how my attitude on that changes but for now I'm gonna stick to plain old html/css, maybe some images. I am using a static site generator now (11ty if you're curious) so that does afford me the ability to maybe fetch some dynamic content on each build. I don't want to burn myself out on this though so we'll see how far I take that.

Ultimately, I see this as a place to build an online presence away from big platforms and inspire others to make a little home on the internet. I hope you consider doing so as well <3

Thanks for taking the time to read this :3