According to the IndieWeb website:
The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”.
Which doesn’t explain too much, only that this is against big corporations providing the platforms where we do the social web of web 2.0.
Thankfully, they provide a list of three points:
- Your content is yours.
- You are better connected.
- You are in control.
And I thought initially “OK, so the IndieWeb is what we used to call the web”, but that’s not exactly true. What I knew as the web initially depended on someone hosting your content, in the likes of GeoCities, Angelfire or Xoom –that are the ones I knew most back in the day, all of them free–.
Initially I thought the IndieWeb places us perhaps a bit later than that, when hosting started to be cheaper, and reading the getting started page, in order to join the community you need your own personal domain, a place to host your content, and setting your own home page and other “indieweb essentials”.
Which is more or less that I did in 2002 when I got the usebox.net domain, trying to establish a stable presence on the Internet for myself and a small group of friends. It was not only about a website, email was also important –although that may be out of scope for Indie Web I guess; hopefully doesn’t mean they are happy with Google owning their email, for example–.
But that was a misunderstanding, because the IndieWeb is not about self-hosting –although is not excluded–.
“A place to host your content” could mean Blogger or WordPress.com, which I don’t know how it goes with “your content is yours”, but it makes sense if you want to move away from the corporate web. The message really is: don’t get your content to Facebook, instead own your blog with your own domain.
There is a lot more to explore, like for example webmentions. Although I suspect a lot of these things may not be easy now that this blog is a static site!