Indie Web – Back to the Open and Democratized Web

I recently stumbled across the Indie Web movement, First, I love the name. Rather than being a bunch of geek bloggers sniffing around the fringes, you’re now an Indie Band vs. a mainstream commercial act. That gets to the spirit of things – the Internet and simple self-publishing tools made it possible for passionate and knowledgeable individuals to get a following, find each other, and form a community.

Dan Glimor put it very clearly forth on Medium: We’re in danger of losing what’s made the Internet the most important medium in history – a decentralized platform where the people at the edges of the networks – that would be you and me – don’t need permission to communicate, create and innovate. This isn’t a knock on social networks’ legitimacy, or their considerable utility. But when we use centralized services like social media sites, however helpful and convenient they may be, we are handing over ultimate control to third parties that profit from our work, material that exists on their sites only as long as they allow.

The Indie Web movement is a people-focused alternative to the ‘corporate web.’ One of the main principles is that when you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. In the age of big business social media, people are less interested in setting up their own website and domain. The Indie Webers want to reverse this, but not in a way that rejects social media, rather they want to incorporate that experience into their own experiments. They promote interesting tools that allow you to POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), and to pull responses and comments from all other sites (Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) back to yours. If you look at the folks involved, there are some big names who helped build the underpinnings of the modern web. Very interesting stuff. Read about it here on indiewebcamp.com.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been advocating in the same direction. He’s an amazing man who, without restriction and without royalties, democratized access to information and the ability for anyone to become a publisher. He recently urged the public to reengage with the Web’s original design: a decentralized Internet that remains open to all. (Update 5/19: see his recent Webby speech, as well.)

This of course connects back to the dismaying fight over Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality as an important component of an open internet, where policies such as equal treatment of data and open web standards allow those on the internet to easily communicate and conduct business without interference from a third party. It’s concerning to be “reliant on big companies and one big server,” something that stalls innovation and limits or slows access in the name of profits.

Call me an aging hippy, but I love this Indie Web idea.

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