Praxis and the Indieweb

Some time ago, back before the Plague, the question was posed by James Tomasino:

Are any of you running IndieWeb goodness? Have thoughts or suggestions? Wanna vent?

So, yes, I have thoughts, and I wanted to expand on my initial reactions.

To begin, and before I get into anything else, I need to state this loudly and clearly: I like the Indieweb movement. I like the aspirational statements which underpin the movement. I like the people involved, I’ve interacted with more than a few of them and have found them to be, almost without exception, among the most earnest, polite and encouraging people I’ve ever met online.

However (and yes, there was always going to be a but) I’ve come to believe that the movement as it is currently structured can never move into widespread acceptance, that it is both target blind and exclusionary, and that, as a consequence, I don’t want to devote any more of my time to it.

To take the first criticism - that the movement is target blind - I’d suggest that you take a look at the IndieWeb site, which sets out their basic principles, and talks about owning your own site. It then goes on to describe “posts” as the essential building block of the site, and offers a bewildering and lengthy categorisation of the types of posts.

Almost every one of those “types” is, essentially, a replication of the offerings of the various Corporate Sites (referred to by the movement as silos). When a new feature is added to one of the silos, say polls on twitter, or instagram’s private stories, then the indieweb people set about replicating that feature on their own sites. In every case that I’ve looked at, other than the basic “article” case, the adoption of these features by the indieweb is predicated on their use & exploitation by the corporates.

In allowing the movement to be dominated by this effort to replicate the corporate silos, the indieweb has engaged in a sisyphean task which it simply can never finish. Corporate silos spend millions of dollars inventing new ways to keep people hooked on their sites, it is the business they are in. A collection of volunteers cannot ever hope to compete, much less complete.

That’s before you address one of the key logical constructs of the indieweb movement: POSSE - Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Again, the basic intention of this construct is praiseworthy, by publishing on your own site first, then “pushing” that to the corporate site, you remain in control of what you’ve published.

The problem is that this construct fails in two key ways, legal and conceptual. Legally, any and all content that you post to a silo is no longer “your content”. To quote a lump from the twitter boilerplate:

By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating.

To claim that you are retaining authorship rights in what you publish on your own site, while facilitating posting the same content to someone to whom you grant a “worldwide non-exclusive royalty-free license” which includes “copying and adapting” is nonsensical.

Conceptually, posting something from your own site to a third-party service is always, always at the mercies of that service. As twitter becomes ever more closed, for example, this construct will become ever more meaningless. If a service goes away, like google’s services have a habit of doing, then the “exposure” which was previously granted withers and dies.

That feature of third-party services brings us to one of the most glaring problems of the indieweb movement: the “Single Point of Aaron”.

When you dig into the various “indieweb technologies”, you come to realise, very quickly, that these are better described as “parecki technologies”. Webmentions.io, for instance, that’s an Aaron Parecki site. Aperture, the microsub reader Tomasino mentions, that’s also Aaron’s. The Microsub specification is written by Aaron, much as the Webmention spec was.

While its wonderful that these things are there, they and each of them individually are inherently biased towards Aaron’s own coding preferences. Aaron, when he’s not indiewebbing, is one of the authors of the Oauth2 specification, and works professionally in that field. So, guess which auth/validation scheme is used almost uniformly by the indieweb? (The answer will not surprise you!)

If something isn’t written by Aaron, then its usually written by Tantek Çelik or one of the other leading luminaries, and it follows their own preferences and expertise. Ryan Barrett, for instance, previously worked at Google, where he co-founded Google App Engine/Google Cloud, and so his indieweb components, primarily (and reasonably) use that ecosystem. These guys all work for tech companies, to some extent, and their choices reflect this.

By the way, that use of “guys” is hardly pejorative - with a few notable exceptions, the indieweb is almost entirely white, male and north american. Theses have been written on why the tech industry is so strongly typed this way, and the indieweb seems to take that a step further. I have no idea why, and don’t mean this as a criticism.

What I can criticise, however, is the movement’s concentration on what it terms 1st Generation IndieWebbers

Capable of building a CMS, custom blogging software, understands SSL, git, SSH, APIs, domain registrars, DNS, nameservers, communicating over IRC, and editing wikis, and is comfortable running a server to host their own content, and knows at least one basic web-based programming language. Comfortable with lengthy documentation.

I would consider myself fairly well versed in computers. I can do much, but not all, of the above, and I can do a fair number of things not on that list.

I can still barely function in the Indieweb as it is presently formulated. There is a complete dearth of simple, essential programs/tutorials/guides to accomplishing the basic tasks of the Indieweb. The movement is built around what was once called “dogfooding”, but is now Eat What You Cook, creating the tools to make it work yourself, and using it. In this, it shares some features with FLOSS generally, the cult of the individual programmer.

There are scarcely any examples of moving past self-sufficiency, providing scraps from the table for people to use. There should, at a minimum, be clear and established routes to achieving the goals of the indieweb ideal, presented in as clear and unambiguous format as possible, in a wide range of programming languages. Currently, that simply does not exist.

I did write a micropub server, the part of the indieweb which allows you to post on your own site from other sites (again mostly aaron’s) like Quill. I smashed my head firmly at the upper bounds of my capabilities, though, and I’m still not entirely happy with the code which I had to use to offer a full-featured experience.

At one point, when I soured on twitter for the nth time, I removed the code in my server (nanopub) for cross-posting to that site. I promptly received abuse for doing so. If my server, as poor as it is, was at that time the best thing someone could hope for to allow them to post? then there’s something clearly off in the indieweb movement.

As it stands, the Generations diagram is wholly exclusionary. While it allows for people of less facility in computers to play a role in the movement, eventually, it affords little or no understanding of who those people will be. In short, it doesn’t describe people in the “real world” (what on earth is Softalicious?) nor does it encompass people of lesser means.

If a movement has at its core a significant barrier to entry, then it is always exclusionary. While we’ve already seen that the movement has barriers at ability and personality, it is also true that, as of 2021, there is a significant barrier in terms of monetary resources.

One of the key features of the movement is owning your own domain, something that may be cheap for some, but is a repeating hurdle; presuming you even know how to go about obtaining one, you also need to have a method of payment, something that’s just not always true and shouldn’t be presumed. Purchasing a domain name also requires (in most cases) a contact number and a postal address; again, these are not things which should be presumed to be available.

Once you have that domain, you also need something to host your site on. As presently arranged, most all of the Indieweb options require either access to a server or the use of Wordpress. Even the “easy” option, using Wordpress, requires access to the Wordpress installation at an administrative level, this is something which is not always available and which usually requires significant monetary payment.

(aside: I want to take a moment to applaud the work of David Shanske and Matthias Pfefferle in their work on the Indieweb Plugin)

While it might sound ridiculous to claim that the cost of a domain or a DigitalOcean droplet are significant, after all, its only the cost of a few cappucinos every month, that comparison only holds true for a very small subset of the global population. If your liberation movement has an entry fee, then its just another country club.

I know I’ve gone on excessively here, and much of what I’ve written may be seen as contrary to how I started, but I don’t mean to carp from the sidelines.

I believe strongly in regaining ownership and control of our online presences. I also believe that this cannot be done either in collaboration with or by appropriation of the corporate surveillance web. The indieweb project does both.

There is too much wrong, there is too much exclusion. There are projects which attempt to repair these flaws, but, as with everything else, these are individual efforts.

In the past, I have tried, and tried and tried, to make my personal site use as many Indieweb Technologies as possible. I just don’t think its worth the effort any more.


Please feel free to contact me with any comments or questions about anything in this essay. This essay isn't performative, so I'm not displaying comments here, but I value interaction and will be delighted to engage positively with you. If I've gotten something completely wrong, tell me!