The Web They Took Back

I say that with love, because the IndieWeb is one of the few tech movements I still root for — and rooting for it means being honest about what it costs. Andros Fenollosa spent a few months joining it and wrote up the ledger: the protocols he adopted, the ones he threw out, and the part nobody puts on the brochure. It's work. Real, unglamorous, maintain-your-own-plumbing work.

Here's the pitch, and it's a good one. Own your domain. Publish on your own site first, then syndicate copies out to the networks — POSSE, "Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere," a term Tantek Çelik coined back in 2012. Mark up your HTML with microformats2 so your page becomes its own API. Wire up Webmention — a W3C Recommendation since January 2017 — so replies and likes flow site-to-site with no platform sitting in the middle. IndieAuth turns your URL into your login. It's a whole social network reassembled out of small, boring standards, where every site is a node and nobody owns the graph.

And here's why it isn't nostalgia: the silos die. GeoCities — Yahoo pulled the plug on October 26, 2009, and some 38 million user-built pages went with it. MySpace lost more than 50 million songs from 14 million artists in a botched 2019 server migration; twelve years of uploads, gone in a data transfer. Google+, Vine, Posterous, FriendFeed, Cohost. The IndieWeb keeps a running obituary called "site-deaths," filed under the exact corporate euphemism these companies always reach for on the way out: our incredible journey. And it isn't only the spectacular collapses. A 2024 Pew study found 38% of the web pages that existed in 2013 were gone a decade later. The default state of anything you post on someone else's domain is deleted, eventually.

So the movement's real thesis isn't "quit social media." It's smaller and harder: make sure the canonical copy of your words lives somewhere you control. Rent the reach. Own the record.

Owning it doesn't defeat deletion, though — it relocates it. That same Pew number swept up self-hosted sites too; a domain you own still dies when you lapse the renewal, stop paying the host, or die yourself and nobody picks up the bill. Sovereignty doesn't cure the neglect. It moves it into your hands, which is the whole point and also the whole risk.

If that sounds familiar, it should — it's the same bet a sovereign system runs on, just shrunk to the scale of one person with a blog and a webmention endpoint instead of a whole operating system. Own the layer, rent the brain. The IndieWeb dialect is: own the layer, syndicate the reach.

Now the deflation, because I promised you the receipt. The reason this is a movement of a few thousand tinkerers and not the default web is that ownership has friction and renting doesn't. The platform's entire value proposition is that it does the plumbing so you never have to think about it. But that plumbing was never free — it's paid for by surveillance, in the currency of you. "You are the product" isn't a slogan; it's the invoice. Which means the IndieWeb's Saturday-afternoon microformats labor isn't a new tax decentralization imposes. It's the same bill you were always paying, finally itemized and handed to you to settle in time and effort instead of attention and data. The IndieWeb asks you to run the endpoint, verify the mentions, and fight the spam yourself (there are literally extensions named Vouch and Salmention for exactly that fight), all for a readership that might be three people. Fenollosa did it and called the experience "very positive." I believe him. I also notice he's a developer who enjoys this sort of thing, and most people trying to get their identity back from Meta are not going to hand-roll microformats on a Saturday afternoon.

That's the whole tension in one line: sovereignty is a skill, and convenience is a default. The web didn't centralize because someone won the argument. It centralized because owning your layer was work and renting it was free-at-point-of-use — and free-at-point-of-use beats correct-in-principle every single time, right up until the incredible journey ends and takes your archive with it.

The IndieWeb won't win by scaling, and it was never going to. It'll win the way a seed bank wins: by keeping the practice alive and the standards documented, so that when the next silo dies — and it will — the exit is already built and the copy already exists. Keep the web weird. Keep a copy.