Let’s make the indie web easier
We need more than Wordpress
(8 January 2024)
OK, developers, I have a challenge for you.
I’ll assume that we’re all on board with the 2024 indie web revival. We all want things to get weird again, right? Yeah.
And, I’ll assume we all agree that owning your own website is a good thing, and we all want more people to do it.
But here’s the thing: we need more tools for it. We need simpler tools for it. And we need to make installing and using them trivially simple.
We need more self-hosted platforms for personal publishing that aren’t Wordpress. And don’t point me to Hugo or Netlify or Eleventy or all those things - all of them are great, but none of them are simple enough. We need web publishing tools that do not require users to open the Terminal at all. And we need lots of them.
We need a whole galaxy of options.
So that next time we say to someone: “You should own your own domain, and publish on your own website,” and they answer with “How?”, we can give an answer that’s more than just: “Install Wordpress.”
It’s not that I hate Wordpress. I don’t use it, personally, but I don’t hate it. I can see the benefits of using it. It’s a great tool.
But it needs more competition. People coming fresh to web publishing should have more options.
If we want the future web we’re all clamouring for, we need to give people more options for self-hosted independence. If we seriously, truly want the independent, non-enshittified personal web to flourish, we need to make it easier for people to join in.
Why not build static website generators that people can just unzip, upload to the shared hosting they’ve just paid for, and start using via a browser?
Why not make backups automatic, and make upgrades simple? Why not make the tricky technical stuff go away?
Terminal commands are easy for you, but they’re a huge hurdle for most people to overcome. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen a link to a static website generator, which claims to be simple, and then the instructions start with something like:
It’s easy! Just gem install blah
then blah setup mywebsite
then cd mywebsite
then use nano or your favourite editor to write Markdown files! So easy!
This is not easy.
If we truly want to open up the web for everyone to publish on, we have to make it easier. Let’s give people choices. Let’s give people options for tools they can set up and use, with no more knowledge than the knowledge they already have.
Update, 14 August 2025
Matthew Brown wrote a very long and thoughtful follow-up to this post: Let’s talk about making IndieWeb weirder and easier. I encourage you to read it.
I’m not a developer, but I liked Matt’s conclusion about PHP:
Seriously though, if we want easy-to-use IndieWeb stuff that the average person can get interested in, we need something that just works on whatever cheap hosting they can find (LAMP stack most likely) with good documentation and solid community support. We want one or more somethings that regular people can make stuff out of in regular time. It will probably be a light framework that can be used to build all sorts of things. It should have access to WebMention, RSS, ActivityPub, Microformats, etc.. This is how you enable people to build things with those tools, I think.
I liked that conclusion because, even in my non-developer brain, I had been leaning towards the same conclusion. But I lacked the technical knowledge to be sure that I was right.
It reminds me that, in recent years, I’ve had a small number of conversations with people in which I’ve said: “Oh yes, I still make my website the 1990s way, with hand-coded HTML that I SFTP up to a server.” And they look at me like I’m crazy.
That old technique still works because the technology that permits it still works. It might be old-fashioned, but it’s not abandoned.
The way I see it, the sort of simple tools we need now, to make independent web publishing more popular and more accessible, are likely to be tools written using simple technologies, to run in simple web server environments that haven’t changed that much in decades. Yeah, PHP and stuff like that. Makes sense.
Matt makes another point about purple cows, ideas that spread because they stand out, because “they are worth remarking on”. That makes sense too.
I’d suggest that the reason they should stand out and be worth remarking on should not be the tech they’re made with, but the things that they make simple for users. An IndieWeb publishing tool will be remarkable if it’s drop-dead simple to install, set up, and start using - by anybody.
- There’s a follow-up to this post: More on the easier indie web
giles (at) gilest.org