The Indie Web

You hear a lot online today about "enshittification". The concept is simple; a company releases a product or service that you feel is pretty good. Either it solves a problem you once had, or it provides something new and fun. It could be a way to connect with friends, a harmless time-wasting game, or a new way to find out about the world. Either way, it's decent enough for you to start including it in your life. Then slowly over time it just... gets worse.

You may be tempted to believe that. However, very little online has genuinely become worse than it used to be. In fact, most big services like Facebook, Google, even Microsoft Windows, have got a lot better over time. The issue is, you were never the customer in the first place. Although your experience has gone downhill, those products can do what they were designed to do in the first place in a much more efficient way than ever: extract data from you and sell it to their real customers.

Of course, this isn't the case with everything. Enshittification affects a lot more than just services where data can be collected. Physical products are affected too. Cars, phones, even things like doorbells and watches, are all becoming worse products than before. They're no doubt harvesting data too, but as data collection is still somewhat limited in these products they can instead just try to squeeze more money out of you. Premium features that were once a part of the device, for example. Built-in hardware extensions that require a paid subscription to activate. However, for this post I'm concentrating on the internet.

So can we fix Facebook? No. It's not ours to fix. It belongs to Meta.

Can we replace Facebook? Well, attempts are being made. The Fediverse is one of several attempts to create social networking alternatives that provide the same function as the large company-owned silos, while never being owned by any one entity. However, if these don't get the users they'll never compete.

Back when I first ventured out onto the internet, we didn't have search engines. Instead we used to rely on the concept of a "web". Sites linked to other sites, and we'd follow those links and explore. It seems strange today, but we used to buy paper web directories - magazines filled with links that we'd dutifully type into our browsers. There were also online directories, and these were often hand-curated lists of websites categorised by subject.

Finding things on the internet was an issue if you needed a specific page, sure, but there were advantages to this too. Browsing the internet was exploration. You'd find sites linking to other sites, and venture down rabbitholes that seemed bottomless.

The indie web is a movement to recreate that. Let the social media silos do their thing, while we do ours. Personal web pages that link to others, and insights into people's lives. All we need is enough people to get involved to create that warren, and the rabbitholes will re-emerge.

You've found one website that aims to be a part of that. At the time of writing this, the site is hosted on Neocities - an attempt to recreate something akin to Geocities where a lot of those old personal websites used to reside. Why not have a browse and see what else there is here?

I hit upon an important point when I said "at the time of writing this". Sure, I'm using yet another service. How different is Neocities to something like Facebook? Well, it's different in terms of ownership. I can, if I wanted to, migrate to another similar hosting platform. I have the HTML. I have the source code that I fed into my site builder to generate that HTML. I can always upload that HTML somewhere else.

If I continue with this I may decide to purchase a domain name. Again, the registrar is a company, but I could potentially migrate the name to another if need be. However, by purchasing a domain I can then point it to wherever my site happens to live.

I don't intend to move from Neocities any time soon. As it stands, it's a great service and the owner seems to understand what this movement is all about. It's not about a lack of trust, it's about never needing that trust in the first place.

At the end of the day, we don't need to replace the corporate internet. It's not going to go anywhere, and enough people will continue to use their services. However, what we do need to do is spread the word that the indie web can live alongside that mess, constantly providing an escape for anyone that wants it.