IndieWeb

The IndieWeb is a community of people with independent and personal web pages.¹ The community places emphasis on using your website as a central part of your identity on the web,² and helping to connect websites together both technologically through open standards and through community.³ The term has also been used to refer to non-corporate social media services such as Mastodon.⁴

Sites on the IndieWeb are often known for their lack of formality, and are user-centered in nature, rather than being optimized for search engines or other metrics.⁵ Tools such as Webmention⁶⁷ and microformats⁸ are sometimes used by webmasters on the IndieWeb in order to allow for distributed social communication and distribution of content.

The IndieWeb is known for defining the term POSSE (Publish on Your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) which advocates for using a personal website as the primary place to publish on the web, and syndicating to other services where desired.⁹¹⁰

The history of the web is intertwined with the history of personal websites,¹¹ enabled by both the technical architecture of the web¹² and user-facing tools such as GeoCities and Friendster. GeoCities was a free web-host that hosted millions of personal HTML-based websites. In 2009, when GeoCities was shut down by Yahoo, many websites disappeared with it. However, many of the sites were archived through the GeoCities Gallery, albeit with broken links and missing images, rendering most of the sites incomplete.¹³

The concept of IndieWeb was first developed in 2011 at a series of conferences known as IndieWebCamp by Tantek Çelik, Amber Case, Aaron Parecki, Crystal Beasley¹⁴ and Kevin Marks.¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷

On June 28, 2013, Kyle Drake officially launched NeoCities, a self-hosting service with the expressed goal "to rebuild the web we lost to algorithms and monotony, and make it as fun and creative as it was back in the '90s."¹⁸

Two-day IndieWebCamp events have been organised where people work on their personal websites in 19 cities,¹⁹ as well as online.²⁰

One of the principles of the IndieWeb is plurality,²¹ meaning no one tool for running a website is recommended but the use and development of different tools is both supported and encouraged. The community tends to use many tools and strategies for operating personal websites.²² Means by which people run personal websites include managed tools like Micro.blog,²³ NeoCities, and Nekoweb,⁵ and self-hosting.

The IndieWeb has developed a shared culture among its users. Many users of the IndieWeb are anti-AI as well as anti-social media.⁵

According to Indieweb.org, the IndieWeb²⁴ is based on 10 core principles:²⁵

1. Own your data.²⁶
2. Use & publish visible data for humans first, machines second.
3. Make what you need.
4. Use what you make.
5. Document your stuff.
6. Open source your stuff.
7. UX and design is more important than protocols, formats, data models, schema etc.⁸
8. Modularity.²⁷
9. Longevity.²⁸
10. Plurality.²⁹³⁰

and an informal eleventh: "Above all, Have fun."