2024 is the year of the indie web and the blog. Just like 2023 was. And 2022. And 2021. In fact, how far can we stretch back?
Oh you're blogging again? Cute. WELCOME BACK MOTHERFUCKERS.
— Jason Kottke (@jkottke) August 29, 2014
At least ten years, and that’s without having to look very hard.
To be sure, perhaps 2024 has a little more momentum than most. There has rarely been a more high profile piece – at least in terms of getting the idea out to a wider audience – than Anil Dash’s article in Rolling Stone, “The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again”:
“Across today’s internet, the stores that deliver all the apps on our phones are cracking open, the walls between social media platforms are coming down as the old networks fail, the headlong rush towards AI is making our search engines and work apps weirder (and often worse!). But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent. We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before.”
Yet there is always a wrinkle when it comes to this kind of writing. Are we talking about something new, or is it already there? The headline of Anil’s seems to indicate the former, the opening hedges its bets a little, and then the rest of the article seems to indicate the latter:
“What’s more, the people who had been quietly keeping the spirit of the human, personal, creative internet alive are seeing a resurgence now that the web is up for grabs again. Take someone like Everest Pipkin, an award-winning digital artist and activist who has been making games, videos, interactive sites, and video streams all exploring the boundaries of digital culture. They evoke the open-endedness of the Nineties internet, but with the modern sensibility that comes from someone who wasn’t even born when the web browser was first invented.”
Anil goes on to give many more examples. Examples which are wider than a strictly blogging or writing mindset, but essentially all part of the same thing: the indie web.
This dichotomy – is there a potential resurgence of this kind of web, or is it already here? – keeps coming up time and time again with these kind of articles. In his piece “Where have all the websites gone?”, Jason Velazquez at first indicates the indie web has essentially died, replaced with social media:
“No one clicks a webpage hoping to learn which cat can haz cheeseburger. Weirdos, maybe. Sickos.
No, we get our content from a For You Page now— algorithmically selected videos and images made by our favorite creators, produced explicitly for our preferred platform. Which platform doesn’t matter much. So long as it’s one of the big five. Creators churn out content for all of them.”
And yet when he tries to answer the question posed in his headline, we get:
“The good news is that websites didn’t go anywhere. There are currently one billion websites on the World Wide Web. Here’s a few from my bookmarks that are amazing.”
He then proceeds to do just that.
All this is perhaps a sore point for those of us who have been plugging away at our projects online for years. We keep being told that “this is the year of the indie web”. Oh, really? Some of us never left the damn thing. I’ve been writing continuously online now on my own websites for 20 years, 14 of them right here. I published 100k of words on Dirty Feed in 2023 alone.
When Cabel Sasser decided to revive his blog last year, he wrote the following:
“My name is Cabel and you probably came here from Twitter? Maybe? For the past too-many years Twitter absorbed all of my “blogging energy” — it was so fast and efficient to dump out some random or mildly interesting thing. I liked Twitter. And I truly (mostly) enjoyed connecting with people on there. But I’m not feeling real great about the situation over there. Time to diversify.
So, here we go. 2023, the year of the blog???”
Cabel has proceeded over the past year to post some quite wonderful things, so he certainly followed through on his promise.
But for those of us who kept the faith – who always used Twitter as a scratchpad, and then wrote things up properly on our own blogs – it can feel mildly irritating. Twitter and social media in general was always a bad replacement for a place of your own where you could write. I never needed a big realisation on this score; it had always been obvious to me.
The indie web shrinking wasn’t really the fault of social media companies and other “big tech”. It was the fault of people who abandoned their own little place on the net.
Anil Dash:
“For an entire generation, the imagination of people making the web has been hemmed in by the control of a handful of giant companies that have had enormous control over things like search results, or app stores, or ad platforms, or payment systems. Going back to the more free-for-all nature of the Nineties internet could mean we see a proliferation of unexpected, strange new products and services.”
I don’t entirely disagree with this. And it’s especially relevant to people who actually want to make a living with their web projects, rather than just having fun in their spare time. But we also have to admit that anybody who deserted their corner of the web, did so by choice.
If you stopped cultivating your own website because you really liked Twitter, or because Google Reader was shut down, did you really care about it that much in the first place?
* * *
Such questions are impossible to really get a grip on. When you take wider questions about web culture and try to apply them to specific people and specific websites, you’re always going to run into trouble.
The real question is: what do we do now? If we accept that there is a genuine tipping point in 2024 when it comes to the indie web, rather than just the same old nonsense we’ve heard for the last ten years, how do we turn that tipping point into our new, promised era? The one which some of us have been living in for the past decade anyway, but it’d sure be nice to have a few more people come our way?
Many people think the answer is simple: more people should write blogs, or do some other kind of creative work on the web. I’m certainly not going to disagree with that. There are so many people out there with original voices who I would love to hear more from. If just 100 extra people made and published one new thing every month, you’re looking at 1,200 new pieces of work online in a single year.
Jason Velazquez has a slightly different answer, which also makes a lot of sense:
“Somewhere between the late 2000’s aggregator sites and the contemporary For You Page, we lost our ability to curate the web. Worse still, we’ve outsourced our discovery to corporate algorithms. Most of us did it in exchange for an endless content feed. […]
So when we wonder where all the websites have gone, know it’s the curators we’re nostalgic for because the curators showed us the best the web had to offer once upon a time. And the curators – the tenders, aggregators, collectors, and connectors – can bring us back to something better. Because it’s still out there, we just have to find it.
Here’s the best part. You can be that curator right now, at this very moment. You can start to rebuild the interconnectivity that made the web fun to explore. And you don’t need to be a computer scientist to do it.”
I think this is also true. But I’m going to throw into the mix an even easier idea. You don’t necessarily have to write, or create, or even curate.
Click around. Or tap around. Or do whatever you need to do in the browser of your choice. If we want the indie web to flourish, the very first thing people need to get used to is actually browsing the web again.
It’s something which I never stopped doing. Oh, this article on this person’s blog that somebody linked to is quite good? Well, what else has the author written? I’ve found so many people’s wonderful archives that way. I can spend a whole afternoon clicking around, without social media or a walled garden anywhere in sight.
How many people still do this? It’s impossible to say. I can tell you through my stats that virtually nobody does that here on Dirty Feed. Oh, I’ll occasionally get a lovely email from someone telling me how they found my website, and spent many happy hours reading my archives. But for most people, visiting here is a one shot deal. An article gets linked to from elsewhere, they read it, and then they move on.
And no, I’m not going to fall headlong into a modesty trap. Not this time. I know this place isn’t for everyone; hell, it’s not for most people. But I know that there are people out there who enjoy my writing here. And yet it’s clear that most people don’t even try to click around the archives. I’m sure plenty of other blogs and indie web projects suffer from the same fate. One click… and then scurry back to the safety of their main social media feed. Even right now, when – as Anil says – various parts of that ecosystem are in flux.
If you care about the indie web growing, by all means write, by all means create, by all means curate. But most of all, just read. Or listen, or experience. Spend an afternoon clicking around, like everybody used to. The more people who do that, the more everything else will slot into place without even having to think much about it. If 2024 truly is a tipping point into a new world, then it can’t happen in a vacuum.
Because the brave world of the indie web means nothing without people bothering to experience it. Stuff you love is already out there, right now. And spending an afternoon in someone’s archives, rather than the maelstrom of social media, sounds to me like one of the nicest things in the world.