If you’ve been into running a blog or personal site very long, it’s safe to say you’ve heard the terms “IndieWeb” or “small web” thrown around. I’ve only been into this stuff for a few months at this point but my understanding of what that actually means has already matured and evolved a lot.

Really, any personal website you use (instead of corporate social media) for your online presence is part of the IndieWeb. It’s like independent music. You’re writing, recording and distributing all on your own rather than finding a manager, record label, big name recording studio and getting wrapped up in contracts.

It’s pretty punk, actually. Running your own corner of the internet is like recording an album in your bedroom and then selling it at the shows you independently worked with bars and venues to set up. Just about every artist distributes through all the commercial streaming services these days too, but that isn’t quite the same as signing your rights away to a record label and letting them handle all of it. It’s more like cross-posting from your site to social media.

There’s no set in stone rules you have to follow to be a part of the community but there are some collective ideas and philosophies on it. A good place to start is IndieWebCamp!

From their front page, they summarize it as this:

Your content is yours

When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users’ data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.

You are better connected

Your articles and status messages can be distributed to any platform, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone. Replies and likes on other services can come back to your site so they’re all in one place.

You are in control

You can post anything you want, in any format you want, with no one monitoring you. In addition, you share simple readable links such as example.com/ideas. These links are permanent and will always work.

It could be argued that using Bear Blog or Micro.blog to host all your stuff isn’t a very indie thing to do. After all, companies do go out of business. Indie devs do eventually move on from that cool thing they’re doing for little to no profit and things disappear from the internet over the decades. But not everyone can set up their own server and code a website from scratch the minute they decide on getting into blogging.

Both of those platforms (and plenty of others) offer ways to export all of your data if you need to. So if you make regular backups and keep track of everything, you can always pack up your content and move elsewhere in the event that all hell breaks loose.

They do it in the true spirit of the IndieWeb though. Micro.blog has supported the philosophy and a lot of under-the-hood stuff from IndieWebCamp since it launched, so that’s pretty cool. Bear Blog is a little more locked down but the community has such a friendly, old school feel to it. They let you customize a lot of stuff but the focus is on minimalism. Its creator, Herman, even goes so far as saying it’s so simple and resilient it’s “built to last forever.” That’s IndieWeb in my book.

At the end of the day, it’s one of those things that’s easy to overthink. There is indeed a neat little community of people who agree on a loose set of principles but you don’t have to religiously adhere to them in order to move in here. Just do what you want to do for yourself. Build the things you want to build. Write what you want to write. Ideally for your own enjoyment rather than selling ads. Once you start doing it for a profit, the fun gradually dies and you’re suddenly running a business.