Has the IndieWeb Become Irrelevant?

Previous Posts on the Subject

I had read “IndieWeb’s 3 Body Problem” by @stranger back in May. I had refrained from writing a response because I had wanted to think it through and not just go off ranting on a wild hair. I never got around to it.

However, Simone Silvestroni reminded me of that post—most likely without intending to do so—when he wrote “Smaller”. Likewise—and possibly without realizing it—he touched upon several flaws in the Fediverse that I had observed back in 2019 because Fediverse software imitates corporate social media.

Let’s talk about what @stranger has to say first:

As @stranger themselves observed, they were having a lousy day when they wrote this. Anybody visiting their site can see that they don’t give themselves nearly enough credit. I would suggest that anybody congratulating themselves because they've successfully followed the IndieWeb Camp’s suggestions and implemented their formats and protocols isn’t as smart as they think they are, and I will explain why in due course.

Now let’s get Simone’s take.

I suspect that he’s referring to something I had posted on Mastodon, but I had also talked about RSS and Atom being enough in “RE: Does a Blog Need to Integrate?”. However, that was in reference to people suggesting that personal websites should interoperate with the Fediverse—AKA quasi-decentralized parasocial media—by implementing the ActivityPub protocol.

Never mind that many personal websites, mine included, can’t actually do this because they’re static websites with no server-side code. Many, mine also included, don’t use JavaScript, either.

Likewise, these same personal, independent websites can’t fully integrate with the IndieWeb for the same reasons. Why is this the case? My opinion is that the IndieWeb is not about websites at all.

More on this, as well, but first I’d like to acknowledge Lily Mara’s take:

I agree with Lily here. It is still harder than it needs to be to have your own internet presence for a panoply of reasons that really ought to be discussed elsewhere, and perhaps by somebody who isn’t a long-haired metalhead who codes for a living and suffers from delusions of erudition and literary talent.

For example, it is harder than it ought to be to run a website if you don’t speak UNIX. For Crom’s sake, you still need to understand files and directories if you want to build a website, and in the US we have public schools assuming that kids are computer-literate if they can cope with Google Docs or Office 365. No wonder these kids end up on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.

And I’m saying this as somebody who could—if I were enough of an asshole—indulge in the sort of technoelitist dick-waving Lily Mara is talking about. If I wanted to, I could do a full IndieWeb implementation of my own, with microformats, webmentions, all kinds of different post formats, RSVPs, the whole nine yards. I could do it with C# and .NET Core and Azure since I use that tech at my day job. I could brush up on PHP and do it with the data stored in SQLite, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL. Hell, I could probably do it with Django if I wanted a better excuse to learn Python than my day job has offered thus far. Or, I could go back to running WordPress, dealing with its Gutenberg interface—which was apparently built with React, which explains so fucking much—and use plugins and themes to implement both IndieWeb and ActivityPub support.

You’d think that since I’m the sort who could get a monumental hard-on from building this website with a makefile and some shell scripts that use sed, awk, m4, and a bunch of other command-line utilities that the IndieWeb would be right up my alley. Well, you’re gonna love this: I've come to think that the IndieWeb’s very existence was a mistake.

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WTF is the IndieWeb Anyway?

First, let’s deal with what the IndieWeb isn’t. It isn’t personal websites on NeoCities, though you can incorporate some IndieWeb stuff there if you want. It isn’t a developer blog you build with Hugo, Astro, or whatever new SSG is trending on Hacker News so you can build clout and get a job at some startup that will most likely go out with a whimper and leave you holding the bag.

Being part of the IndieWeb is about building a personal web application, not a personal website. It means having on your own website, all of the functionality one might expect from a corporate social network like Facebook. Apparently all of this functionality is necessary in order to integrate with corporate social media platforms using the POSSE approach: publish on your own website, and syndicate elsewhere.

This made sense back in 2011. And the DIY ethos that has driven IndieWeb is admirable. However, I think stuff like microformats and webmentions are over-engineered and over-complicated, and I’m not sure that anybody thought any of this through with sufficient rigor.

First, there’s IndieAuth. It’s like OAuth, but for IndieWeb sites. It’s not a terrible idea, and not even that hard to set up. Damned good thing, too, since indiewebify.me treats it as the second step after getting a domain name. You set it up by linking to a social media profile that links back to your website. Fair enough, but if you’re not on any sort of social media, not even Mastodon, then you’re going to have a hard time setting up IndieAuth. And I have no idea if you can use an alternate git forge like SourceHut or Codeberg instead of Github if you’re a developer who isn’t otherwise on social media.

Next, there’s microformats. Yes, let’s embed metadata about a webpage, a website, or its operator in HTML markup within every page’s <body>. Never mind that there is already a place for such metadata in a webpage: <head> and an element as well: <meta>, though the IndieWeb people call this "invisible metadata" and consider it an "anti-pattern". Suppose they’re right, and we should clutter <body> with metadata using microformats that viewers still won’t necessarily see unless they use "view source". Worse, we’re supposed to put them in HTML elements’ class attributes? Apparently because data- attributes hadn’t been standardized yet when the IndieWeb people came up with microformats? Whatever. At least you can parse microformats with hxselect, but why would you bother? It’s not like Google gives a rip about your microformats; they want JSON+LD, which is more invisible metadata.

Finally, there’s webmentions. Because pingback and trackback weren’t enough. To be fair, webmentions just use HTTP and x-www-urlencoded data instead of dicking around with XML remote procedure calls. Nevertheless, they can still be used for the same sort of spam you get using pingback and trackback. The only reason webmentions haven’t become the spam vector they could be is that spammers don’t give a damn about IndieWeb; it’s more profitable to keep pounding WordPress sites since there are so damned many of them.

Admittedly, it isn’t that hard to implement microformats, even in a static website. I currently do it, which like Simone Silvestroni I am reconsidering. Nor is it wholly impossible to implement webmentions on a static website.

The question with which I struggle in both cases is, Why in Crom’s name should I do this? Who benefits from my website providing carefully formatted metadata about my web pages, my website as a whole, or myself for convenient processing? Who benefits from my website automatically pinging your website to tell you that I had linked to something you had written and quoted it?

In the case of microformats, I think they provide greater value to Google and other commercial/corporate operators than they do to webmasters like me. As for webmentions: I would much rather get an email from a webmaster who has linked to something I've written and quoted it. It’s more personal and more human. And I would much rather send an email if I really want somebody to know that I've linked to their website and quoted them.

I’m not sure we ever needed IndieWeb to build a social web. We don’t need microformats for subscriptions like h-feed; RSS and Atom feeds are proven technologies still in widespread use. Likewise, people can communicate by email. All this technology predates IndieWeb.

If we put aside microformats and webmentions, I think the main draw of the IndieWeb project is the POSSE concept: publish on your own website and syndicate elsewhere. My understanding is that microformats were supposed to aid this, but I think this notion is arrant foolishness. The likes of Facebook, Twitter, and even the Fediverse don’t care about your website. They don’t care that you've implemented microformats to present your website’s data for convenient consumption by these silos. They don’t want to admit that there’s an internet outside their walled gardens.

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Integration is not your problem.

Webmasters need to stop taking the onus of interoperability upon their own shoulders. Does your website have a RSS or Atom feed? Do you provide a full-text feed as well as a headlines feed? Are you providing your full archive, even if only as headlines and summaries?

If so, then congratulations: you did your part. Go have a beer or hug a kitty or kiss somebody who wants to be kissed by you.

The onus of integration and interoperability properly belongs on the shoulders of platforms. If they seriously cared about syndication from websites and blogs, they would do a far better job of supporting RSS and Atom feeds. When you create an account on a social media platform—whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, or anything else—you should be able to provide your website’s RSS feed. The platform should grab your feed, parse it, and treat every entry as a post. You should not have to write a bot that will read your feed and post on your behalf via a platform’s API. The existence of a service like EchoFeed should not be necessary.

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Fuck the Platforms

However, platforms don’t want you to syndicate from your own website. They don’t want you to have a website at all. They want you to spend all of your time on their platform, and not own your own.

But if you are going to insist on having your own website, they still want you to feed them "content". They just don’t want to make it easy for you or convenient. And they certainly don’t want to compensate you for the work you do to make your website suitable for commercial use. Is Google paying you to do SEO, or paying for the privilege of indexing your website so they can serve ads on search engine result pages? Do platforms like Twitter and Facebook pay you to set up Twitter Cards and Open Graph metadata so that they can provide link previews when they bother to show links to your website to other people in the first place? Does Reddit pay for the privilege of linking to your website so that it can show ads to its audience? Are any of these platforms paying you to deal with the abusive bozos they will inevitably send your way?

No. They do not. They expect to be able to make commercial use of anything anybody publishes on the internet, even if they do so under a Creative Commons license that says "no commercial use". Don’t even get me started on OpenAI and its competitors again.

Nor is the Fediverse any better, since Fediverse platforms are nothing but poor imitations of commercial social media platforms. Ideally, these platforms are run on a break-even basis, or a much more modest profit—just enough for the operator to not need a day job. But the Fediverse is not necessary. We had the technology to build a social internet long before the Fediverse was a bunch of GNU Social servers talking to each other using OStatus protocol, let alone a bunch of Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, Funkwhale, Pillowfort, Lemmy, and Crom knows how many other different platforms talking to each over using ActivityPub.

And we sure as Hell never needed Bluesky. ActivityPub might be a shitty standard that purely static websites cannot meaningfully implement, but at least it’s the W3C’s shitty standard. ATproto is just more incompatible, proprietary shit.

So, the Fediverse, Bluesky, and the rest can eat the corn out of our shit. We owe these platforms nothing but an upraised middle finger.

• You are not obligated to integrate with them.
• You are not obligated to provide them with "content".
• You are not obligated to acknowledge their very existence.

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Fuck the IndieWeb, Too

I have come to think that the core proposition of the IndieWeb movement is an attempt to have one’s cake and eat it, too. They want you to own your work by pubishing on your own website, first. But they still want you to have the alleged benefits of social media and maintain contact with friends, acquaintances, and associates who still use social media and don’t have their own websites. And they want you to have bullshit from platforms such as “likes” and comments show up on your website, privacy implications be damned.

This benefits social media platforms more than it befits you as a person or as a webmaster. It doesn’t do the open web any good, either, if that sort of thing matters to you. It matters to me because I don’t think we should be making it easier for corporations to make commercial use of personal websites. All they offer as payment is ‘exposure’, and exposure isn’t going to pay your web hosting bills, let alone your rent or mortgage.

I have come, therefore, to think of the IndieWeb movement as an example of how resistence to capitalism becomes commodified. By attempting to accommodate and cooperate with corporate social platforms, IndieWeb became an over-engineered and over-complicated mess. It did so by dismissing fundamental internet technologies as "not invented here" (NIH).

And for what? So that you could write a blog post and then paste a link into Twitter and have bullshit from a platform’s reply guys show up on your website? Is that really worth all of the effort it can take to implement IndieWeb tech on a personal website?

I don’t think so. And I know I am oversimplifying what IndieWeb is about and what it does. All of the above is my opinion, informed by my understanding of the facts.

If you have your own opinions about this post, or about the IndieWeb, by all means express them on your own website. Or, you can just email me and tell me I’m a fucking dolt who ought to be sweeping floors and scrubbing toilets instead of working in tech. However, if you did the joke would be on you: if being a janitor paid as well as being a techie, I wouldn’t be in this trade. Unlike programmers and sysadmins, janitors are smart enough to have a union.

If having a static website that’s nothing but read-only HTML styled with CSS makes me an "internet peasant", then I’m OK with that. I don’t need to impress anybody with my technical prowess. Even if I needed to impress people in order to get a better job than what I've already got, overengineering my personal website isn’t gonna do it.

The IndieWeb, therefore, is mostly irrelevant to me aside from its monthly blogging carnival. I think that encouraging people to write and meet each other online is what the IndieWeb should be about, not catering to corporate parasocial media platforms or providing another venue for techies to engage in dick-measuring contests.

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