Hito Steyerl, I Will Survive, 2020, exhibition view at K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf
Fig 1. Hito Steyerl, I Will Survive, 2020, exhibition view, K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

I can't say I was fortunate enough to grow up in the golden years of the internet; I was most definitely in the post-"information superhighway" phase, but I was blessed by some of the latter days of AOL, Ask Jeeves, MSN Messenger, Club Penguin, and more of the dotcom-adjacent era excitement that made the internet such a crazy and exciting place. The internet was an open space, for open communication, and you could surf the web, exploring people's websites, learning things, or playing weird and wonderful indie Flash games. Authentication was pretty limited, advertising networks were sparse, and anyone could pretty much do whatever they wanted.

Now, I'm not saying those days were perfect, and this isn't me writing a nostalgia piece about the glory of the pre-corporate internet; the web was a very insecure, disparate mess as well. I'm just here to emphasise a somewhat forgotten ideology of the early internet that has recently started to make a resurgence, and I think everyone should be embracing it. You may have guessed: I'm talking about the IndieWeb Project. But to get there we need to understand the why.

We're so used to consuming content online which are designed to be addictive, for the benefit of advertisers.

— Alex Beattie, 2018

This is an obvious one, and you don't need me to tell you that Meta sucks. But let's spell it out anyway, because I think it's worth articulating how we got here rather than just gesturing vaguely at Zuckerberg and moving on.

The internet we use today is, for the most part, about five websites, each filled with screenshots from the other four. Your content lives on someone else's server, governed by someone else's algorithm, monetised by someone else's ad network. You don't own your posts, your social graph, or even your identity in any meaningful sense. You're a row in a database that exists to generate engagement metrics. And if the platform decides to change the rules, shadowban you, or simply shut down: tough luck. Remember Vine? Google+? The original MySpace? All those connections, all that creative output: in the bin.

The consolidation happened gradually and then all at once. Web 2.0 promised democratisation: anyone can publish! anyone can connect! It delivered on that, sort of, but with a catch nobody read in the terms and conditions. The deal was: we'll give you frictionless publishing, zero hosting costs, and a built-in audience, and in return we own everything. We took that deal enthusiastically, and honestly, it's hard to blame anyone for it. Setting up a self-hosted blog in 2008 was not exactly a smooth experience.

But the consequences compound. When a handful of platforms control how billions of people communicate, you get algorithmic feeds optimised for outrage over substance. You get walled gardens that actively punish you for linking out to the open web. You get entire generations who think "the internet" is Instagram, TikTok, and whatever messaging app their friends use. The idea that you could have a website of your own, with your own domain, that you control, that feels almost quaint now. And that's the main problem.

It's not just a vibes issue either. There are real, practical costs. Creators are entirely at the mercy of algorithm changes: ask anyone who built a following on Facebook Pages circa 2014 how that worked out when organic reach got kneecapped overnight. Small businesses get locked into advertising ecosystems they can barely afford. Journalists and researchers find their work surfaced or buried based on engagement signals that have nothing to do with accuracy or importance. The architecture of the modern web doesn't just inconvenience us; it actively shapes what gets seen, said, and valued.

Martha Rosler, The Gray Drape
Fig 2. Martha Rosler, The Gray Drape. Courtesy The Artist / Galerie Nagel Draxler Berlin/Köln/München.

And look, I'm not naive. I'm not suggesting we all delete our accounts tomorrow and retreat to hand-coded HTML pages. The network effects are real, the convenience is real, and the platforms do solve genuine problems. But I think there's a growing sense that something has been lost, and you can feel it in the rise of Mastodon, Bluesky, personal newsletters, and the broader "small web" movement. That the trade-offs have tipped too far in one direction.

As a life-long privacy enthusiast who has not had a social media account since the age of 15, I have always struggled with this dichotomy of ownership and sharing on the modern web. I firmly believe that sharing information and knowledge is helpful to the world. My career in cybersecurity would not exist without the thousands of published blogs and research papers on the internet that I learned from, and I only hope to be able to share my own learnings and experiences with others. But why should I confine myself to the digital prison cell of a platform like X or Medium, where I can't even paint my cell walls another colour or hang a picture or two. We should be allowed open expressivity on the web. Not just allowed: embracing it.

what is the IndieWeb?

The IndieWeb isn't a platform. It's not an app you download or a service you sign up for. It's a set of principles, and crucially, a set of building blocks designed around one core idea: you should own your content and your identity on the web.

At its simplest, it means having your own domain name and publishing there first. Your website is your home base. If you want to syndicate to Twitter or Mastodon or wherever else, great, but your site is the canonical source. The IndieWeb community calls this POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

The good news is that getting started with the IndieWeb doesn't require you to mass-delete your social media accounts or become a systems administrator overnight. You can start small.

Get a domain name.

This is step zero. Your domain is your identity on the web: the one thing that stays constant even if you change hosting providers, redesign your site, or switch platforms entirely. Namecheap, Porkbun, and Cloudflare Registrar are all solid options. Pick something, and you've already done the hardest conceptual bit: deciding that you want a home on the web that you actually own.

Put something there.

It doesn't need to be fancy. A static site generator like Hugo, Eleventy, or Jekyll will get you a fast, simple website that you fully control. If you're not comfortable with code, something like WordPress (self-hosted, not wordpress.com) or even Micro.blog gives you more of a managed experience while still respecting IndieWeb principles. The IndieWeb wiki has a solid breakdown of options at indieweb.org/Getting_Started.

Learn the building blocks when you're ready.

The IndieWeb ecosystem has some genuinely clever standards that make the open web feel more connected:

You don't need all of this on day one, but it's worth knowing it exists.

Join the community.

The IndieWeb chat is one of the friendliest corners of the internet. People are genuinely helpful, and there's a culture of building in the open and helping others do the same.

some reading to get you going.

So that's why I made this. The internet is full of noise engineered to extract your attention and sell it back to you, and the best answer I know to that is to opt out, quietly and deliberately, and build something you own. This site runs on plain HTML, CSS, and a little JavaScript, on a web server I control. No cookies tracking your every click, no Google Analytics phoning home, no algorithmic feed deciding what you deserve to read. Just a domain, some files, and an intent to put things worth reading on the internet. You'll find security research here: the technical, in-the-weeds kind, alongside pieces like this one: concept-driven, occasionally meandering, always honest. That's the deal. No more, no less.