The Indie Web

I’ve always spent a lot of my time on the internet. In more recent years, my time has increasingly been spent on huge web platforms designed for consuming and creating content, and interacting with other people. Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, etc, which I call the “Corporate Web”.

Corporate Web platforms have a vast userbase due to their status as a hub for internet interaction. They contain such a glut of content that you could never hope to view even 0.1% of it, even if you spent a lifetime streaming it directly into your eyeballs.

As a result, the Corporate Web is necessarily in the business of deciding what you should spend your time looking at. They build systems that usually take the form of some kind of information feed. When you’re scrolling through a feed, you’re acting as a passive observer, being spoon-fed whatever content some machine thinks will keep you scrolling for a while longer.

As a creator, you end up forming your content in whatever shape you think the Algorithm will appreciate. You have to, or you won’t be granted the gift of viewership. The feed algorithm designed to surface interesting content ends up defining the content that gets made in the first place.

This would be a convenient time to say, “go outside! Experience real life!” if that was the point I was trying to make. And you should. It’s nice out there. But I like being a denizen of the internet. I just want it to be a more adventurous experience.

Do you remember the early days of the internet, following links crafted by humans leading to new places you hadn’t seen before? You might find yourself reading about elephants, and encounter a link to the blog of an elephant researcher, who also has a passion for film, and then discover a bunch of movies that they spent time writing reviews for, just because they want to share their passion with the world. It was an adventurous and exploratory process, requiring active engagement and rewarding with new discoveries.

People could make their web presence multidimensional and unique. When you find a link on the web, it should mean that someone cared enough to link two things together. Not that a soulless box decided you should see it based on the viewing habits of a thousand people you will never know. Here’s an idea: Instead of giving so much authority to the opinions of a machine, I’m going to trust my own curiosity to lead me on interesting adventures.

That’s why this website is not a portfolio of my work, or a promotional stunt to increase my professional standing. It’s just a place where I put stuff. It feels pretty good to be free from someone else’s idea of what I should be.