The Indie Web in 2030

I’ve been nervous about posting here again ever since my newsletter gained 100 (!!!) new subscribers thanks to something I wrote for New_Public last autumn. If y’all were a party, you wouldn’t fit in my back yard anymore.

Initially, my article flew deftly under the radar. Depending on your radar, it might still be there.

I mean, I knew a small trend had coagulated in recent years around ditching mainstream social media, going analog, “unrotting your brain”. Some were even returning to the wild web of the early ‘00s, out of nostalgia and disappointment with the current state of the web. The indie web was (on its way to being) hip again. I reported on that in the piece.

But a few days before Christmas, I started getting flooded with comment and restack notifications. Now, the piece has over 1,700 likes and 220 restacks, and it’s still growing. At some point, I think Substack clocked that and began recommending it.

This is, of course, small compared to the bigger publications here, but to me (and to New_Public), it felt huge. I gained 100 new subs almost overnight, despite not posting anything new for a while. The comments were full of people deciding to learn HTML, restarting their old sites or rediscovering a passion for online tinkering. Untested saw a massive spike in traffic that led to a bot attack and briefly raised server costs to an unsustainable level (sorry!).

And, folks, I did my best to investigate. I managed to trace the newsletter’s sudden popularity back to a few sources: a HackerNews comment, a zine Substacker who shared my article with her 3000 subs, and the December indie web carnival. There was also a sprinkling of activity on social media, but most of it was from the article outward, not the other way around. It seems that Substack’s algorithm, such as it is, came through .

But, thanks to this, I fell down a different rabbit hole.

Let me tell introduce you to the year 2030, according to the Indie Web Carnival.

First off, real quick, the Indie Web Carnival is a monthly blogging round-up with a different topic and host each time. Anyone can volunteer to host as many times as they like. Once the month’s topic is announced, people publish on their own sites and alert the host, who then collects the entries in an overview on their website.

It is essentially a traveling living room party, where every month you meet at someone else’s house and read each other’s blogs about the future of your community, or about the importance of friction or about second person birds (whatever that means to you).

The December topic couldn’t be more urgent. Where do YOU think the indie web will be like in 2030?

When the theme was set, in November, a scathing Bloomberg article on the AI hype bubble was making the rounds online, Australia had banned kids under 16 from social media, and age verification had been adopted in the UK, with interest growing everywhere else.

The AI bubble graph exposed how precarious and monopolistic the industry is, with a closed loop of companies buying and selling to each other like a snake eating its own tail forever in the hopes it will one day start shitting cash.

Age-restriction policy brought up glaring data privacy issues with no real solution. When everyone must show their ID to exist online, sites have to process and store that data somehow. What happens to sites that can’t afford to? Many bootstrapped publishers catering to niche audience would have to shut down or (if they’re lucky) get bought.

The big tech companies would end up with even more power—and all of your data. Which, by the way, they contract shady third parties to handle. Third parties like Persona, which Discord briefly worked with before the company’s ties to Palantir came to light. Palantir, I’ll remind you, is one of the tools ICE have been using to terrorise Americans in their own homes.

In this dumpster fire of a context, the indie web looks like a safe way out, an experiment in online self-determination, one of the original dot com safe spaces, a haven of creativity and data autonomy. The online equivalent of going off-grid minus all that sovereign citizen nonsense.

No wonder we want to know where it’s headed in a few years’ time. No wonder some of us are scared the experiment could fail.

A few themes stood out: we need the indie web to be accessible to newcomers, more connected, easier to explore; it’s dangerous to rely on the same handful of big platforms to archive our online world; we desperately need a wide range of alternatives to the mainstream web; owning & hosting your content is a radical act.

Someone submitted a piece of short speculative fiction, called They Said The Web Was Dead, which I encourage you to read in full. The setup feels darkly prescient and the payoff will ring familiar to anyone who has waded through the AI slop bogs searching for remains of human activity.

By far the pieces I dug the most focussed on the indie web’s role in archiving shared history and what’s at stake if we rely solely on Meta and Google to do it. It’s true we have the Internet Archive and they’re doing brilliant work, but the walls are closing in even on them.

Most people agreed there needs to be an easier way to join the indie web. Making and hosting your own website should be as intuitive as using Instagram. WordPress is great, but there should be more options that are just as easy to use. There is hope that, with growing interest from non technically-inclined people and pressed by the need to fight a shrinking online landscape, new tools will appear to fill this gap. Most entries agreed these solutions should come from inside the community rather than tech companies, which would be defeating the point.

These would be super simple tools. No need to learn code or even basic HTML, no opening the Terminal or setting up your own server. A few blogs complained how confusing it can be if you’re tech-agnostic and said that’s one of the biggest reasons people don’t join.

Another big theme was we need better tools for discovery, navigation, and connection. Sure, webrings kind of still exist and you’ve got a few indie search engines with a “Surprise me!” function, but it still feels lonely out there.

If all you’ve ever known is the free-for-all of TikTok, Facebook, and Google, the indie web can feel lonely, disjointed. You’re used to frictionless discovery, interacting and being interacted with by all kinds of randos (for better or worse). Compared to that, a self-hosted site can feel like standing on the edge of your own little planet, sending bottled missives out into the ether. Someone might get them and respond, or they might not.

The indie web can be an incredibly rewarding place, with an amazing sense of community and belonging, if you know where to find it. But the process needs to be a lot more intuitive than it is now. Not just webrings, but robust systems of mentions, recommendations, comments, and content syndication.

On that last point, POSSE—Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere—is a good start, but we need easier ways of sharing outside the indie web ecosystem. Joining the indie web shouldn’t feel like leaving behind New York City to join a convent.

By 2030, we’ll ideally have figured out how to do that. Connect on the indie web, that is, not join a convent.

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My favourite point, made by several carnival contributors, was about the role of the indie web in archiving shared history. Many of us rely on three big platforms to document our online lives. If they go dark by 2030, or you get banned and lose access, entire chunks of your virtual existence are gone.

These online places are as real as anywhere you might go in your 3D life and many of us are deeply attached to them. It’s where you meet friends, deepen interests, explore your creativity. You’ve poured a lot of your time and data into them, so owning it makes sense, right?

That’s data autonomy. You should be able to own your online presence and whatever you publish—words, images, comments, interactions, figures, stats. If you want to take it down, at any time and for whatever reason, you should be able to. If the platform your data lives on goes down, you shouldn’t have to lose all of it.

I tend to see data autonomy as an extension of body autonomy: just like you (should be able to) own and make decisions for your physical self, that extends to the things (media, data, objects, ephemera etc) you make. It’s no different whether that’s online or off.

In a few years’ time, big platforms may rush to fill a growing demand for this with expensive luxury packages. We’ve already seen something similar with ad-free app versions like YouTube Red, which appeared as a response to users wanting to own their viewing experience.

My hope is that, by then, the indie web will be seen as a viable route for anyone who wants to opt out, whether or not they have technical knowledge or the time and inclination to acquire it. I’d like to see a rise in tool makers for the indie web like Pika and Bear.blog and Untested (which is a treasure trove of resources already). I would love to see more solid protocols for connection—outside comments, outward links, recommendations in all directions, an ecosystem rather than a small village.

If you’re tech savvy, you can help by building tools that can get us there. Check out some ideas here to get started.

And, of course, comment your predictions for the indie web in 2030—where do you think it’s heading? What changes would you like to see in the community?

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