Juhis tells us that there is no membership card for the Indieweb blogging community. I like his thesis as I sort of feel like I’m at least on the periphery of the Indieweb movement. But I also feel like I’m on the outside, being judged for not being “indie” enough.
But to understand my thinking on the matter you first have to have an understanding of what the Indieweb is.
What is the Indieweb?
Juhis does a great job explaining the Indieweb. At the risk of repeating too many of his words, the indieweb is a community of people who create content on their own domains, who use that domain as their primary online identity, and who focus their content creation on that site instead of elsewhere. It is based around principles of owning your own content as opposed to turning it over to commercial entities (the “corpoweb”) for their benefit.
So if you post everything you talk about on Facebook or Twitter, you are not part of the Indieweb community. You are letting the corporate overlords control your content and giving it to them to make money from. Content ownership is the foundational premise of the Indieweb.
Other factors come into the community’s definition of itself. A lot of people who participate in the Indieweb preclude any use of commercial software from membership. Everything must be open source and preferably hand-crafted from raw HTML and CSS. Every page element and font must be lovingly and carefully placed on a static page without the use of content management solutions.
AI use of any kind is also right out for some individual bloggers in the community. Whether the AI was used to generate the page layout, the static page generation workflow, or any of the content: AI use is not permitted in the Indieweb by these individuals. AI by definition is under the control of the corporate overlords and both destructively consumes free content and produces AI “slop” for re-use.
Where is my blog on the Indie spectrum?
My blog is clearly both of and not of the Indieweb. I like to think I’m more ‘Indieweb’ than not, but the gatekeepers of that community would probably strongly disagree.
On the “pro” side– my blog is on its own domain, and the code for it executes on a server in the basement of my home. When my site breaks I have to hack the OS and supporting software to get it back to an operational state myself. My site supports Webmentions and IndieAuth which are common protocols used by the Indieweb. I regularly link out to other bloggers as part of my posting, and happily riff on other people’s content. And I now consider my blog to be my primary “home” for the content I produce with only the occasional post on Facebook for family and friends.
On the “con” side– kgadams.net uses the WordPress content management system, which is arguably a corporate product. I self-host which maybe offsets that a bit, but I do use Jetpack which means my site is tied in to the corporate entity that owns WordPress. I also use WordPress plugins and themes extensively so I don’t “hand-roll” the look and feel of my site even though I do fuss over it a fair amount. My use of AI is limited but I do regularly create header images using ChatGPT which puts me afoul of some of the Indieweb community standards. I still spend a fair amount of time on Facebook, although a lot less than I did a year or even a couple of months ago.
I would say that my site is a participant in the Indieweb and I am a participant in the movement. But I think there is a lot of gatekeeping going on that would exclude me for the reasons I’ve noted and others I probably haven’t thought of. I’m going to keep trying to be a healthy participant as I discover new things like Webmentions that I can add to my site to make it more connected to the community. And frankly I like my site the way it is and have no near-term interest in rewriting it as a static site just to meet someone’s definition of community membership.
The header image for this post is AI generated using ChatGPT
Great pondering! In my eyes, if you feel like you want to be part of the group, you definitely qualify.
The gatekeeping in the fringe of the community sucks and I hope we as a community can move past it and explore the good ideas and positive reinforcement rather than exclude people with silly requirements.