A friend whose website I look after asked me if I could remove the “Blog” section from said website. I pushed back. Posting on our own websites is the way we have to counter Big Tech / Social Media conglomerates. We should all be doing it. You own your content, and people can subscribe to it, and you can follow their blogs / websites / instances as well. The alternative is an amalgamation of “content” tailored to make the uber-rich richer, and the regular people slaves to the algorithms and screens.
I dream of a web that fosters healthy conversations, together with personal and intellectual growth. The world is diverse and fascinating, and we can be information explorers together.
Whenever I write a longform blog post and share it with the world (on my RSS feed, on Mastodon / ActivityPub or on Reddit), I get people recommending me similar reads, which in turn I use to improve the original blog post (and my own personal knowledge). I love it when people challenge my ideas — as that opens my mind to unseen perspectives — and I wish the web was a safe place where this could happen much more often.
Similarly, one of my favourite pastimes is visiting someone’s digital garden (there are search engines and directories just for this, go explore!) and click around. Discover their interests, what and who they link to, who was there before me. What cool side projects have they been creating. I favour a kind of active serendipity as opposed to a passive one, promoted by the brainrot child of TikTok’s and Instagram’s doomscroll (ideas for names for a metal band, anyone?).
Even though the internet and the World Wide Web are now decades old, owning and expanding on a website is still a practice reserved for the privileged few of us. One of the missions I pursue in my career as a web builder is to give friends whose work I admire a place on the web. These people are bringing amazing ideas to fruition every day, and yet had no way of showcasing them except by sharing on social media and thus being subject to the whims of a much obscure algorithm, or worse, being forced to pay for reach, using the platform’s ads.
If you are a web developer (or you can simply write HTML and CSS) and you are reading this, try reaching out to a non-geek friend with a lot to say, pay for their hosting, build them a website, and educate them on the art of the IndieWeb. Automatically post to the Fediverse / Mastodon using ActivityPub (WordPress and Ghost both let you do this easily), make sure they have an RSS feed that is easy to find on the website, expand their discoverability by sharing the URL on personalsit.es, indieblog.page, Feedle, et al. Plug them directly into the small web. The Real web, as Kinopio‘s creator Piri beautifully phrased it:
If you are not familiar with web development, you should learn. It’s not that hard and it’s fun. If you’re in a rush to be online and experiment with all the beauties of being retrievable and have your ideas expanded upon, some platforms allow you to do that easily, today. Weird.one, Bear Blog, WordPress.com, write.as, micro.blog are great places to start. Always make sure the output of said platform is standard HTML and CSS (maybe some javascript), so you can migrate and fully own your content should that platform cease to exist or practice some ethically questionable move in the future.
Share other tools you know in the comments below.
Link, and thou shalt be linked
The antidote to ultra-capitalistic platforms whose main goal is to keep you inside their walled gardens can be traced back to the very origin of the World Wide Web; the humble link. Hypertext is the HT in HTML.
Ever noticed that Instagram doesn’t allow for links, except for the one Link In BioTM? Did you know that LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter X will demote your post on their platforms if it contains a link (any link) to an outside resource or website? (This is why you will see people adding links to threads or comments on the post, not the post itself.)
If you want to make Big Tech tremble, link out of your web property. Ask people to link back to you, and be fearless about following links. This is how we keep the web buzzing with connections and community, where ideas can thrive and be found. (If this post were an email, it would surely be flagged as spam because of all the links.)
Build it and they will not come
As I alluded in a previous post, owning a website and your data is amazing, fundamental, liberating and life-changing… if people notice you. Being online is the first (necessary) step, but you will still need to get your content out there since that’s when the fun begins. Remember this is a long game, and heed some tips from a seasoned web publisher (me), who is still only beginning to learn:
- POSSIE (Publish Once, Syndicate Everywhere, automatically)
- You can post a copy of your text that links to your original text on platforms such as Medium
- Submit your website to indie / smallweb directories, such as:
- feedle.world
- personalsit.es
- blogofthe.day
- smallweb.cc
- Pablo Econ kindly shared more of them on his website, in response to this post
- Write honest and heartfelt posts and then share the link on Reddit and Lemmy. Find the sub-forum that hosts content on that topic. Play nice and reply to all comments in a civilised manner.
- Maintain a healthy mailing list of your friends, family, colleagues, neighbours, webizens, and ship out a sporadic email reminding them that you are doing cool stuff, and asking what they are building themselves. Link to them. Again.
- Interact online in an honest and altruistic fashion on Discord, forums, Mastodon, Bluesky. These interactions will turn into connections. Delete all things Meta and X.
- Get on a webring. These are closed loops (rings) of websites, each directing to the next, until you reach the last that links to the first. A great way to foster an improbable community. I’m on CSS Joy, as you can see in the footer below.
The small and indie web are topics that are very dear to me. I am constantly reflecting upon them, and this Kinopio space is where I expand the mind map that helps me connect the many pieces.
Meanwhile, I’ll let you know if my friend is keeping his blog or not.
Thanks for reading this far. Unfortunately, I lost the battle and my friend is, in the end, killing his own blog. Hey, I tried.
More amazing reads, by very talented neighbours
- Digital Gardening Chris Armstrong, who in turn links to:
- How the blog broke the web. Amy Hoy
- A brief history & ethos of the digital garden Maggie Appleton
- My blog is a digital garden, not a blog. Joel Hooks
- Planting your digital garden. Conor Dewey
- Reweirding the web John Allsopp
- We can have a different web Molly White
- Everybody’s Free (To Write Websites) Sara Joy
- The open web as gift economy (Part 4) Tracy Durnell via Anne Mueler via Dense Discovery
Discuss on the socials
Keep the conversation going by leaving a comment below, interacting with this post on Mastodon or Bluesky or Lemmy.
I dream of a web that fosters healthy conversations, together with personal and
intellectual growth. The world is diverse and fascinating, and we can be
information explorers together.
Thank you for your work, it is much needed!
Thanks, Marta! Lovely to know you are reading and appreciate the content. Keep coming back, and keep leaving thoughtful comments. 🙂
Thanks for the article! Added your RSS feed to my reader, you’re the 412th independent blog I follow.
The more the merrier! Thanks, Ben!
Great article, but in the end I’ve got the same feeling as you, that most people is killing their sites and blogs and depending only on big tech social media.
But the few ones that survive are worth the RSS following.
Ah yes, the “good ol’ days” of “Web 1.0” 😁
I ran two blogs at that time: one personal and one for my hobby (Guggenmusik, kind of Carnival Brass Music).
However, when I moved in 2010 I stopped blogging altogether, in favor of “microblogging” on Twitter, and became a “heavy user” 🫣
Until 2022, when I deleted my Twitter, Instagram and Facebook (already 2016) and entered the FediVerse.
Now, some weeks ago, I read something about the “Small Web” (and gemini://) and got hooked.
As a “web builder” myself, I always preferred to build small-ish websites, using HTML and CSS only.
During the weekend I created my new blog on bearblog.dev 🙂
I still need to figure out how to use it, though, as my main activity will be in the FediVerse, I guess.
I’ll put your blog in my feed reader, as I like the topics you write about.
Cu, fasnix
So cool, fasnix, welcome back to the real web. 🙂
I’ll share the link to your new blog here, so it’s easier for people to spot you:
https://fsnx.bearblog.dev/
Yeah, we all got a bit mesmerised by the (undelivered) promise of social media for writers, back in the day. Fast-forward all these years and it’s a lot about shouting and shaming. What a shame!
Good thing we can build sustainable and humane alternatives together, now!