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Should the indie web make a comeback?
In the fight against Big Tech, a collective of internet-utopians are making coding cool again.
Although late members of Gen Z (like myself) weren’t alive to see it, the internet was once quite different from the minimalistic, sterilised spaces we use today. Take it all the way back to the days before MySpace was established in 2003, and users would own a personal domain and website rather than adopting a social media handle. With a beginner’s knowledge of HTML and some spare cash to buy a domain, you had your own little corner of the early internet. Perhaps these first internet explorers would add a blog post here and there, a link to a friend’s website, and a guestbook. Naturally, most of these websites didn’t give much consideration to user experience, with clashing bold colours and jumbled fonts.
But the entrepreneurs over at Silicon Valley couldn’t leave it there, and soon we had Myspace in all its camp glory. Setting your profile to automatically play the Foo Fighters? Yes please. Facebook came next in 2004, and by 2009 its 300 million users could post on their Facebook Wall, get the app on their iPhone 3G, and make their posts visible to any user. The next year saw the birth of Instagram, and most of our online personas have been neatly uniformed into square picture grids and scrollable feeds ever since.
Turns out, the handmade websites of the nineties never disappeared. Under the currents of our modern centralised platforms, digital bohemians have been resisting the reign of algorithms – one handmade website at a time. Armed with some coding know-how, these creatives have flocked together to form a movement advocating for a better web. If a pen is mightier than a sword, then a keyboard is pretty formidable.
Known as the Indie Web, this growing fraction of the internet is made up of individual, hand-coded websites. Whether you’re attending Indie Web meetups or just happen to spend your spare time coding websites under your own domain, consider yourself part of the collective.
“There’s some artistic freedom in controlling how you represent your ideas on the web,” says Elliott Cost, co-founder of community and movement, HTML Energy. “HTML is the fundamental language that permeates through every website we use today, it’s not an outdated language.” Created by designers and artists instead of programmers, HTML Energy aims to reignite excitement about hand-building websites. You might expect coding advocates to fit into a stereotype more akin to The IT Crowd, but it turns out a large portion of the Indie Web is occupied by artists, poets, and designers.
The Indie Web community connects creatives globally, from Rotterdam with Elliott’s roster of initiatives like HTML Energy, to Naive Weekly, a newsletter ran by Kristoffer Tjalve as he hops around islands in Greece. Kristoffer prefers labelling the community as the ‘small poetic web’, highlighting the beauty that can be extracted from code.
Over in Ontario, multidisciplinary artist Tiana Dueck acts as community manager of Sunday Sites, a monthly club where members get together and code to leftfield prompts. “It's empowering to have your own homestead on the internet and make a place your own,” she says.
Rather than turning to the Indie Web out of exasperation for our current internet, Tiana was drawn to personal websites for their own merits. “They’re for you, and don’t need to make sense to anyone else. We can throw everything we know about user and interface design out the window.” Tiana finds relief in rebelling against the set rules and expectations of web design, including basic coherence, treating her website as a place for her own unadulterated expression. “All the text on my homepage is in Dutch and nobody who goes on that website is Dutch. I hardly know what any of it means half the time,” she says.
The Indie Web also remedies the unfortunate issues around internet servers: servers cost money, so if you’re using a company’s servers without paying them, they have to make money out of you. It’s a well-known concept by now; if you’re not paying for a product, you are the product. As whistle-blower Jaron Lanier puts it in You Are Not a Gadget (2010), the financial function of a social media platform is to keep you looking and engaging so they can sell your eyes to more advertisers. The Indie Web presents a pretty easy solution: just pay for the product by buying a domain.
That isn’t to say Indie Web newbies have to delete their social accounts. Instead, social media can be nudged to the side and used as a tool of community and communication rather than an endless boredom buster. It might be difficult to kick social media use completely, but these platforms can be used as a highway to find individual websites. “Often, you'll find a personal website through Instagram. If you're lucky, you'll get off the app through a link to something more interesting,” Tiana says.
“The internet is inherently decentralized. It’s just a collection of wires under the ocean that somehow create this tool for us to all come together.”
Social media dominates our online space, with the market estimated to grow from $219.06 billion in 2023 to $251.45 billion in 2024. But as the artists and creatives behind the Indie Web has shown, that doesn’t mean social media is all the internet has to offer. “Instagram gives you the place to post something and that's it. That has its purpose, but it's just a shallow beginning to what you can do on the web,” Tiana says. “The internet is inherently decentralized, and you can just go ahead and put yourself on it if you buy a domain. It’s just a collection of wires under the ocean that somehow create this tool for us to all come together. It's the perfect spot to live out your anarchist dreams.”
For an outsider, this anarchist dream might sound great, but also elusive. How can casual internet users break into the Indie Web? Luckily for us, the community has no shortage of resources, directories, and digital community spaces:
Get click happy and descend down the Indie Web (and not algorithm-curated) rabbit hole.