There’s no membership card for IndieWeb

Blaugust is an annual blogging festival in August where the goal is to write a blog post every day of the month.

My good internet friend V.H. Belvadi — whose writing always gets my mind excited with his writing — published a great piece on his ideas on re-defining the IndieWeb and I have like half a dozen threads of ideas that sparked from that post. Here’s my first one.

He hosted IndieWeb Carnival last December where a lot of people wrote about their ideas for where IndieWeb is going towards in the next five years. In this post, he takes a look at how IndieWeb movement defines itself and offers his thoughts on some of the issues in that and how he would define it.

While this blog post was inspired by his post, don’t consider this as any kind of rebuttal. There are some points where I point directly to his writing but everything else is just generally my ideas around the topic.

The starting point that Belvadi also quotes is this definition from IndieWeb wiki:

The IndieWeb is a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.

A note on the tech club

In my entry from December, one of the things I said about IndieWeb was:

I’m a technical person and I love building my own tools and tinkering with stuff on Saturday evenings. For me, IndieWeb is a community that encourages that and helps me find other people who care about the same things.

I want to clear up something around that since it was commented on by some people in their blog posts between December and now and as this blog post today is not considering this aspect at all so it might seem contrary.

For me — at least for a long time, I’m not sure how strongly I hold that idea anymore for practical reasons that I’ll go to later — IndieWeb presented as a community of builders who like to tinker and make things and indie/personal/open/small web was a movement that was all about personal websites, separation from corporate controlled environments and all that.

That’s why I don’t consider that view as gatekeeping. The indie web is the important movement that I think we shouldn’t gatekeep. At the same time, I think it’s okay and valuable to have a community for people who like to tinker and build stuff.

And crucially importantly:

It’s more of a mindset than a skill check.

That being said, let’s get to this post’s actual point.

There shouldn’t be a membership card

The title of this blog post is more of my desire than the state of the world right now — depending maybe on whose definition you take to heart.

Coming back to Belvadi’s essay, he starts by pondering how we should reach a definition and if we should do it in inclusionary (what it is) or exclusionary (what it is not) terms.

Should the definition be inclusionary or exclusionary? Some, like Khürt Williams, are especially opposed to the exclusionary definition or what they call ‘Defining yourself by your enemy.’ Others, the majority by a cursory assessment, seem to define the IndieWeb specifically by contrasting its features with that of the CorpoWeb.

I think the exclusionary is the easy way to convey the message to someone who is currently running their online presence in walled, controlled platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok. It doesn’t go much further than that in my opinion though.

I don’t think i necessarily disagree with Belvadi with the definition he lands to. He makes great points at dissecting the IndieWeb wiki’s description for potential inaccuracies and issues and proposes new definitions. But I want to approach it from a very different perspective than what he wrote.

I think the problem with both the IndieWeb wiki definition and Belvadi’s new definition is that they seem to focus on “milestones” or checkboxes you need to fulfill to be consider part of the IndieWeb.

For the wiki’s definition, those are owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content. There are also a lot of other things people in the community like to talk about like microformats and webmentions that many people feel too much gatekeeping or too technical and that people should chill out.

Belvadi’s definition

The IndieWeb is a space comprising websites whose domain ownership and organisational, operational and editorial sovereignty remain with an individual or non-corporate group of individuals, free from external obligations that compromise that sovereignty

talks about ownership, sovereignty and obligations.

One thing I want to focus on and that I strongly agree is when he said

So what is the IndieWeb? I do not believe the IndieWeb is a community.

Even though I use the word community often with IndieWeb to talk about the people who gather together around it, I think the biggest value in IndieWeb is not a membership of such community. There are no membership cards and thus, there should not be membership requirements.

I think IndieWeb should be a set of ideas to work towards. How many of them you fill? Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t make you or your website more or less “IndieWeb”. I don’t think there should be any checklist we go through to assess whether someone belongs or not.

We should focus on sharing and discussing ideas and help build tools so that more people who want to implement them (for any reason they want), can do so.

It’s a iterative journey

A strict definition that excludes a lot of people who could be "almost matching" leads to never getting those people in because you need to fill all the requirements before you're part of the group and the steps to get there can be too much to do at once.

I’ve had a website in the web for about 25 years by now. All of its iterations have been indie web but for some part of that 25 years, I didn’t have a domain or didn’t POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) or didn’t have webmentions or microformats.

Bobby Hiltz in his carnival entry in December wrote

I was pulled into the IndieWeb through Mastodon. I saw people talking about Gemini and had some free time and an extra Raspberry Pi, so I set it up. Then I figured that I could also host a regular static site. I thought it was great to own the words I was sharing and have them as physical files on my computer. Not having an account on some site (WordPress or Blogger) was a contributing factor, being able to ask people on the Internet to help me sort things out was a bonus.

It’s a journey of many small steps. I don’t want us to turn people back when they first learn about IndieWeb ideas because they do not fulfill all the requirements for the non-existent membership.

Too strict requirements can be harmful to the goal. If we want people to start doing more sports to become healthier, it's not a great idea to have tryouts with minimum fitness requirements. If we want people to build more open, personal websites, we don't want there to be requirements for people to join the community so they can start learning how to do that.

In a blog post that has disappeared from the web, someone — let’s call them J — considered it too much work to "set up POSSEing, microformats, webmentions and comments.” They wrote about how they want to be part of the indie web rather than IndieWeb and I can’t fault them for that.

When I first got interested in IndieWeb, I landed on a web page (that I can’t find anymore, maybe for the better) that presented IndieWeb as different levels of maturity. It was such a big turn off for me that I built a bit of resentment for the entire idea and spoke about the difference between indie web and IndieWeb and how the first is what matters more. I still hold that idea but I have found a lovely group of people through the latter as well.

IndieWeb of principles rather than requirements

My favourite part of the IndieWeb wiki is the 11 principles.

The IndieWeb Community is largely based on principles that we practice and aspire to [- -].

I like the “aspire to” part. It’s not a checklist of requirements. It’s a list of ideas that we aspire to do: how many or how well you do them is up to you and not the important part.

I like them so much that I have written my own post about them. In it, I note:

Rather than being a binary yes / no categorisation, IndieWeb is a spectrum of many things where you can decide for yourself which one you care about and how much. There’s no point in evaluating anyone’s rate of participation or pointing fingers to “but you post on social media so you’re not really indie”.

If you have a website or want to have one, I recommend you to check out what ideas and tools float around the IndieWeb: the wiki, the Carnival (I love it!) and forums and social media discussions.

Don’t worry about if you’re “IndieWeb enough”. I’m giving you a permission to consider yourself part of the community. There are many ideas that are great. There are some ideas that I don’t particularly subscribe to but that’s fine, others can build them on their sites.