When I started blogging earlier this year I wrote a lot about the indie web. The social web, small web, or even the IndieWeb, if you’d like.

It’s the small, mostly DIY part of the internet where creators (rather than Mark Zuckerburg or Elon Musk) own the work they create and publish. A place free of corporate sponsors, influencers and infinite growth for the sake of infinite growth.

I started writing because I needed a hobby. I obsess over text-based media everyday anyway, why not contribute and share some of those stories around? I didn’t know anything about the indie web when I started out. I learned pretty quickly though. When I joined Micro.blog on a whim, and for a brief moment Bear Blog, it was like I unlocked this whole other universe that was right under my nose all along.

The websites I started to frequent didn’t require a bulletproof ad blocker just to make them functional; no one’s advertising or force-feeding me cookies. I can subscribe to all of their RSS feeds and actually read the full post content in my reader - without needing to rely on fancy text extraction features that an RSS app usually needs nowadays.

There’s bias, but only because each blogger is an individual with their own opinions. What there’s not, is media bias being pushed by investors, political groups or other big corporate entities. It’s simply a bunch of people writing about stuff they feel like writing about.

No one needs to come up with clickbait headlines for the sake of getting more clicks - why bother? Most of us aren’t trying to be famous bloggers. We’re not on the indie web because we want to be the next Mashable or TechCrunch.

A mere six months ago the world was a lot different. It was still shit, but things weren’t quite so uncertain and horrifying. Things felt a bit like a bad B-movie still, but not the way it does now with president Elon and vice president Trump gearing up to conquer the free world once and for all.

Big Tech CEO’s are bending over backwards so our dictator in chief doesn’t crush them under a tiny iron fist. News outlets are getting soft for the same reasons. It’s like we have this 80 year old schoolyard bully, but the schoolyard is a global community. I get that the US isn’t the center of the universe, but because of the way half of us voted this year, the global economy is facing a tariff induced trade war that will echo across the civilized world. When it comes to a bully, you can stand up and punch him right in the fucking nose, or you can appease his every wish whenever he’s in the room so he doesn’t make you a target.

No one on the indie web is going to lose a sponsorship or funding because of something they wrote on their blog. No one here is a puppet for advertisers or political interests. Of course, we don’t have massive teams of editors and fact checkers working around the clock, but we’re not running professional publications over here either.

My point is this: I think the indie web is more important than ever right now. Look at the multi-year Twitter exodus to Bluesky and Mastodon. People are getting fed up with dipshit tech bros who want to hoard their information to sell them ads and train AI. I’m sick of watching people become radicalized by brain dead far right propaganda. Now more than ever, we need community. Authentic community; not the kind that only gives you magic internet points.

In the real world, many of us are completely surrounded by conservatives who think we’re about to enter a new golden age in America. It feels like an episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s like one of those dreams where you’re being attacked and no matter how hard you fight back, you aren’t landing any hits. It’s like your hands are made of feathers and you’re trying to fight off a pack of bears.

I’m sure there are corners of the indie web that push ideas similar to Info Wars and Fox News, but I haven’t seen it. By and large this place is incredibly compassionate and progressive. People care about people. That’s reason enough to keep me here.