on this page (15)
TL;DR: own your domain, own your content, and above all, have FUN!
while this is a deep-dive into my own (highly subjective) experience, things don’t have to be this complicated. going indie, in any area of one’s life, is like peeling an onion1 as in, it’s a layered process, but I suppose it does make your eyes burn. only in the beginning, though, not as you progress. I don’t think using an onion is the wisest analogy here 🙈 . there’s a spectrum of involvement and there’s no need for you to jump into the deep end on day one (or ever—getting your feet wet in the splash pool’s cool, too! literally ANYTHING is better than Big Tech owning your whole entire soul).
it’s the confusing stuff that kept me away for so long from being as active as I’ve now become. that doesn’t need to be you! so, echoing Paul Robert Lloyd, the core principles are simply to:
🥸 Own your identity
An independent web presence starts with an online identity you own and control. The most reliable way to do this today is by having your own domain name.😌 Own your content
You should retain control of the things you make, and not be subject to third-parties preventing access to it, deleting it or disappearing entirely. The best way to do this is by publishing content on your own website.🥳 Have fun!
When the web took off in the 90’s people began designing personal sites with garish backgrounds and animated GIFs. It may have been ugly but it was fun. Let’s keep the web weird and interesting.2 read his essay here: IndieWeb principles
from wtf is this to wtf didn’t I start sooner
the first time I read the IndieWeb principles, back in 2019, it convinced me that this is a place I belong. only, it was too easy to feel that I didn’t, because there was so much I just couldn’t make heads or tails of. the indieweb, I decided, was a gathering of hardcore techies with whom I was but philosophically affiliated.
aspirationally, I hoped that it would—one day—make as much sense to me as it did to these crafty heroes of mine who not only felt the way I did, such as feeling that Google’s demotion of their OG principle, ‘Don’t be evil’, was a dark harbinger of days to come, but had the magician’s craft to do something about it.
to carve new paths through the wilderness, forging access through the wilderness and onto new lands, in the process defying acceptance of one’s only choice online being either to serf the unholy lands of the platform kings, or be eaten alive by the creatures of the jungle that threatened to sting, slither, and slice you back into wilful obedience in the direction from whence you came.
sadly, I don’t think much of that has changed. the indieweb is still a beautiful philosophy that’s, to the average person, nothing but Greek and binary code.
however, putting aside my equal access activist’s hat, I myself am a human transformed. years invested into learning how to make magic, I no longer consider myself “not technical”. in spirit, yes—I am a Humanities gal who has no business entering the Engineering department, because I care not for how the wheels turn but whether it makes stars sparkle on the inside of my skin. but by channelling my never-say-die stubbornness into a sheer determination that I, too, shall know what the heck I’m doing, I can do things now. I have become a code bender. a baby code bender, yes, but bend it I can.
now, a month into publishing regularly again on my blog (which made all the difference to the nonstop manic-compulsive rebuild-my-site mode I’ve found myself in all year), I figured I’d inaugurate an annual audit of where I stand on these principles.
on the IndieWeb website, they’re “numbered for reference, not necessarily for any kind of priority,” but I want to reap in years to come the personal insights gained from ranking their importance each year, as that too will be a revelatory narrative of my own development and growth in code bending. so I’ve reordered them below by how important they feel to me right now (with the exception of the 11th principle, which fittingly goes to eleven—and is also the most important thought to close with!)
my 2026 IndieWeb principles audit
1. own your domain & data
“Your identity, your content, your metadata.”
I’ve had this domain for 11 years, so I’m totally down with that idea.
my data ownership ‘enlightenment’ is relatively newer; it wasn’t until I started using Obsidian five years ago that I truly appreciated what it means to have your files outlast the platforms they’re on. but the cost of a lesson learned is often priced through a big loss, so it wasn’t until I lost my WordPress site and suffered through the pain of years of writing gone with the wind that I genuinely understood what it means to need a safer, more secure longevity approach.
however, I was this month old when I had my aha! moment as far as social media’s concerned. since I stopped using mainstream social platforms two years ago, I stopped posting altogether. now that I’ve my anti-social social stream set up, I can post shortform thoughts and photos at any time, resting in the surety that I own my content, control where it lives, and can take it elsewhere if I need to—and there shall be social-platform account to be shadow- or outright banned by a moderation system I can’t appeal because there’s no humans to talk to 🙄
2. make what you need
“Make tools, templates, etc. for yourself first, not for all of your friends or ”everyone“. If you design for some hypothetical user, they may not actually exist; if you make for yourself, you actually do exist.”
how often do we use an app thinking, “if only it had XYZ” or “I hate ABC feature I can’t switch off!”.
unless you’re the ideal customer persona, no externally created solution will ever be a perfect fit. it either caters to the most standard common denominators, or it takes higher-order solutions left when you would’ve rather it went right.
the only person who can give you exactly what you need is you. (cue the sentimental motivational speech music.)
I’ve been wanting to build an Obsidian plugin since forever. I knew at the back of my mind that it was a daunting process that terrified me—a viewpoint I held because I never even bothered looking into the basics of what it would require, because who the heck am I to build such a thing?!
but the truth is that I got stuck way before that: what would I build that The World at Large would want to use? so glued to that point was I that I never even asked myself what it was I needed.
then came my interstitial reading heatmap, which I figured would be a walk in the park as long as I could keep my head about me while navigating all the intricacies between the various elements I was glueing together.
and what I was aiming to do really wasn’t that complex. update a single markdown file on Obsidian, publish it via Quartz Syncer3 this Obsidian plugin should be granted saint status to one specific page.
except that I had very particular requirements which made it super tricky to implement. the only solution, it seemed, was to build myself a plugin just for my own Obsidian installation. And voilà! bucket list item checked. doubtful I’ll ever put it on the community plugin marketplace, but it’s doing great in my workflow which is where I need it to work its magic.
I didn’t need to be an Obsidian plugin expert. that part was figure-outable. I just needed to be an expert on what my needs were.
3. use what you make
“Whatever you build you should actively use. If you aren’t depending on it, why should anybody else?”
earlier this year, I created for myself a hackathon-at-home challenge during Lovable’s all-credits-free-for-24-hours International Women’s Day event.
as a business advisor working with clients who are increasingly seeing their products threatened by vibe-coded alternatives, I wanted to understand viscerally the state of vibe coding vis-a-vis the AI bro promise that LLMs can replace SaaS as a whole.
I stayed up the entire 24 hours, building in the process 24 apps. impressive, big wow, AI will outlive us all—that’s certainly a seductive easy-way-out take.
guess how many I still use today? a big, round zero. with the exception of an event management app that we did leverage for an event, guess how many I used even a week day after creating it? yeah. ditto.
(this isn’t a debate on AI-coded apps. AI is a great tutor, provided you use it to help you learn, develop, and grow your own skills rather than lean back with a cocktail and close your eyes to the sun so an LLM can do all the work—and thinking—for you.)
my purpose having been educational, it served its purpose successfully, but my hackathon taught me that there’s no point to making something if you’re not going to use it. just because you can doesn’t mean you should. building to learn is one thing; building something you actually intend to use is a horse of a different colour.
by contrast, the content production workflow I created to publish from Obsidian to Quartz (blog + digital garden) and Eleventy (social posts) is something I use multiple times each and every single day. not only that, but it brings me tremendous joy. now that’s time making stuff that was well-spent!
4. pluralism
“With IndieWebCamp we’ve specifically chosen to encourage and embrace a plurality of diverse approaches & projects. This background makes the IndieWeb stronger and more resilient than any one (often monoculture) approach.”
I’ve always gravitated toward communities that are not only welcoming towards, but purposefully built on the ethos of ‘come as you are4 maybe I’ve Nirvana to blame/thank 😅 ’ and ‘do what works for you’. I loveLoveLOVE that the IndieWeb doesn’t prescribe, doesn’t dictate, but welcomes you doing you.
I’ve much to say on this topic, enough to warrant a Homebrew Website Club anniversary post. off to the post backlog with you, Yet Another Topic!
5. longevity
“Build for the long web. If human society is able to preserve ancient papyrus, Victorian photographs and dinosaur bones, we should be able to build web technology that doesn’t require us to destroy everything we’ve done every few years in the name of progress.”
I’ve experienced site death more times than I care to count. each of ‘em hurt like hell. heck, it still does. I IndieWebified my site because I never want to go through that ever again!
6. modularity
“Build platform agnostic platforms. The more your code is modular and composed of pieces you can swap out, the less dependent you are on a particular device, UI, templating language, API, backend language, storage model, database, platform.”
I’m hoping I’ve built my Eleventy components modularly enough that I could port them somewhere else—though right now it’s all but impossible that I would ever want to switch again. as for Quartz, ditto—since I know for as close as I can get to a fact that I’ll be using Obsidian for life 💍
both 11ty and Quartz are static-site generators that rely on, essentially, text files, so I’m very likely already much safer than any previous version of my site ever was!
7. document your stuff
“You’ve made a place to speak your mind, use it to document your processes, ideas, designs and code. Help others benefit from your journey, including your future self!”
I’m new to this, having just started documenting how I redid this site (starting with why I’m using two static-site generators). I’ve a list to work through (which, naturally, makes me rebel against wanting to do it at all). what I’m most curious about is how high I’ll rank this principle in 12 months’ time, as at the moment I’ve such a backlog that it seems an insurmountable chore that brings no joy except while firmly inside the writing flow, yet many beat-me-ups over adding it to each day’s to-do list and then never actually getting to the next post in the series. so come this time next year, I’ll be in a much better position to talk about this. mostly through semi-successfully (and rather miraculously) sweet-talking my PDA 😅
having said that, I’ve been documenting more than I give myself credit for. keeping a changelog definitely counts! I guess there’s more to documentation than wearing a 1,500 word blog post costume!
8. UX & design
“is more important than protocols, formats, data models, schema etc. We focus on UX first, and then as we figure that out we build/develop/subset the absolutely simplest, easiest, and most minimal protocols & formats sufficient to support that UX, and nothing more.”
I spent an obscene amount of time thinking about this, planning and plotting, drafting and refining—in the process coding a gazillion different drafts that were tossed in the recycle bin, so I’m too traumatised to even think about this 😂
for the moment, I’m happy with the results. there will always (always!) be more I can do, but the foundation’s been dug and the bricks laid; from here on out, I’ll be focusing on incremental refinement rather than a big do-over.
I’ve also learned that there’s no therapy better than that of code bending; a down day needn’t involve ice-cream when you have the ability to transform your mood by virtue of adding weekly stats to your reading tracker!
9. use & publish visible data
“for humans first, machines second.”
seven years ago, I threw in the towel and signed up for a micro.blog5 https://micro.blog/ is a great place to ease into the thick of things without getting totally and utterly lost account instead, because I hadn’t a clue what microformats, Webmentions, and all that other technical jargon was all about. even reaching out to members of the community led me straight back to nowhereland; the level of technical comprehension they assumed I had went right above my head, and I wasn’t even able to verbalise to myself at which point the confusion had set in.
but the act of paying $5 a month for a subscription service and boom! you still have no clue what you’re doing but you’re a supposedly groupie now didn’t make me feel like I was part of the IndieWeb movement at all, and so I put the concept back on the shelf. much like I did with Bitcoin back in 2012, I decided subconsciously that, rather than break my brain, I would instead become the type of person who could comprehend it. that’s how my brain’s R&D department works: see, feel clueless, study, conquer 😆
today I’m happy to wear my badges the way a scout proudly displays earned proof that they’ve walked the talk. I get it now: when humans use machines to talk to other humans, the machines need their own language, just like we have ours. microformats let them make sense of the same content we humans see on the page.
and Webmentions let responses elsewhere on the web find their way back to the writing they’re responding to. the technical bits enable conversations between our own little homes online. (though I’ve yet to actually start using it, so send me one why dontcha!)
10. open source your stuff!
“You don’t have to, of course, but if you like the existence of the indie web, making your code open source means other people can get on the indie web quicker and easier.”
this I’m so far away from I can’t even imagine it just yet 😂 let’s see how confident I feel about ever getting here come 2027.
11. above all, have fun
“When the web took off in the 90’s people began designing personal sites with tools such as GeoCities. These spaces often had Java applets, garish green background and seventeen animated GIFs. It may have been ugly and badly coded but it was fun. Keep the web weird and interesting.”
fun is what makes the world go round. I’m too old to do things that aren’t fun 🤷♀️
want proof? I put my website in a Halloween costume. ‘nuff said. I’ve spent a frankly unreasonable amount of time making little squares tell the story of my reading life. none of this was needed. I wanted it to exist, and making it exist makes me happy (in that stupid grin you can’t wipe off your face kinda way 😁)
when in doubt, reach out!
if you’d like to get more indie with life online but this stuff goes over your head, feel free to reach out to me! I’m more than happy to help get you over that seemingly insurmountable hurdle of ‘what the heck is all this, anyway?’ believe you me, once you’re on the other side, you’ll realise that Atlantis is not a myth, and Shangri-La is as real as your backyard.
come indie with me! 🖖
footnotes
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as in, it’s a layered process, but I suppose it does make your eyes burn. only in the beginning, though, not as you progress. I don’t think using an onion is the wisest analogy here 🙈 ↩
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read his essay here: IndieWeb principles ↩
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this Obsidian plugin should be granted saint status ↩
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https://micro.blog/ is a great place to ease into the thick of things without getting totally and utterly lost ↩