By Susam Pal on 22 Feb 2025

There's a corner of the Internet where people have been reclaiming their digital independence by hosting their own websites and promoting the idea of owning your own content—it's called the IndieWeb. This community has its own website, IRC channels, social media presence, etc. This movement promotes the idea that individuals should control their own digital presence through personal websites. But every time this topic comes up in online discussions, someone inevitably claims that the IndieWeb hasn't taken off!

I feel that such claims about the IndieWeb not "taking off" are either stating the obvious or, if that's not the intention, completely missing the point. It's like saying that gardening hasn't taken off because most people buy their vegetables at the supermarket. The IndieWeb doesn't need to "take off" to be valuable to those who participate in it. Maintaining a personal website is about owning your digital presence, embracing creative freedom, and expressing your individuality! It's not about appealing to the masses!

I remember how, in the early 2000s, I used to spend my spare time learning HTML and writing my website, one HTML tag at a time. Writing a few lines of code in a text editor and then watching the browser render that code into a vibrant web page full of colours and images felt like an art form. It was doubly fun to find other netizens who shared that same joy of maintaining and publishing their websites. The IndieWeb is about preserving that hacker culture where websites are crafted and hosted not for mass appeal but for the sheer joy of creation and sharing with like-minded individuals.

The IndieWeb doesn't need to go mainstream to be meaningful. It's a celebration of a more personal, decentralised, and creative world wide web. For those of us who still care about these values, it is already meaningful.