In response to Coyote’s post, found via IndieWeb News.
There is a sentence in Coyote’s recent post, How LLMs & Chatbots Are Bad For the Indie Web, that deserves more scrutiny than the rest of the piece probably receives. It is a single sentence, buried in the opening paragraph, and it does more work than any other line in the essay. Here it is:
“The indie web may mean different things to different people, but if we’re thinking of it at all in terms of favoring small sites over corporate exploitation, then the indie web as a concept and a practice is fundamentally at odds with what LLMs are doing to the web.”
Read that again. Coyote opens with a concession — the indie web means different things to different people — and then, in the very next clause, discards that concession entirely. The conditional “if we’re thinking of it at all in terms of favoring small sites over corporate exploitation” is not actually a conditional. It is a rhetorical move that redefines the indie web as an oppositional project and then builds the entire argument on that foundation. Everything that follows — the bandwidth argument, the guides argument, the surfability argument — inherits this framing. And that framing is wrong.
The Indie Web Was Built Around What We Are For, Not What We Are Against
The indie web did not originate as a protest movement. It emerged from a set of constructive, generative ideas about what individuals could do with the web: own your content, control your identity, publish on your own terms, connect with others without intermediaries deciding the terms of engagement. These are the principles that drove the creation of IndieWebCamp, the development of standards like Webmention and Micropub, and the quiet, persistent work of thousands of people building personal sites and tooling to support them.
Look at the IndieWeb principles. They do not read like a manifesto against corporate power. They read like a set of positive commitments. Own your data. Publish first. Use your own site as your identity. The corporate critique is a consequence of those values, not the origin. You arrive at “corporations are doing this wrong” only after you have already decided “here is what doing it right looks like.”
This distinction matters enormously, because it changes what the indie web is and, by extension, what it owes to any given technology.
Defining Yourself by Your Enemy Weakens You
When you frame a movement primarily in terms of what it opposes, you hand your opponent the power to define you. The indie web becomes, under Coyote’s framing, essentially the anti-corporate-exploitation web. That is a reactive identity. It means that every time a corporation does something, the indie web must respond — must decide whether this new thing is a threat, must position itself accordingly, must orient its energy around the adversary.
This is not a posture of strength. It is a posture of dependency. A movement that defines itself by opposition is, in a very real sense, parasitic on the thing it opposes. Remove the corporate antagonist and the identity collapses. That is not a foundation anyone should want to build on.
The indie web is stronger when it is defined by what it does: people owning their publishing, people controlling their data, people connecting through open standards and handcrafted links. That identity does not require a villain. It stands on its own.
The Framing Pre-Decides the Conclusion
Here is why this matters for Coyote’s argument specifically. Once you have established that the indie web is fundamentally about opposing corporate exploitation, the conclusion that LLMs are bad for the indie web becomes almost inevitable — because LLMs are, unambiguously, a product of large corporate investment. The argument is essentially: corporations are bad for the indie web; LLMs are a corporate product; therefore LLMs are bad for the indie web.
That is not an argument. It is a syllogism dressed up as one.
Coyote’s post does contain substantive points — the bandwidth argument about scraper bots is legitimate, and the surfability concerns about citation erosion are genuinely worth taking seriously. But those arguments can stand or fall on their own merits without requiring the indie web to be redefined as an anti-corporate project first. If scraper bots are overloading indie sites, that is bad regardless of how you define the indie web. If LLM-generated summaries are eroding link culture, that is a problem worth examining on its specifics, not on the basis of who funded the technology.
Collapsing the indie web into an oppositional frame does not strengthen those arguments. It actually weakens them, because it invites the reader to dismiss the entire post as ideological rather than engaging with the substance.
What the Indie Web Owes to Any Technology Is Scrutiny, Not Allegiance
The indie web’s values — autonomy, ownership, open standards, creative agency — give us a perfectly adequate framework for evaluating any technology, including LLMs. The questions worth asking are not “is this made by a corporation?” but rather: does this tool serve or undermine individual ownership of content? Does it strengthen or erode the link culture that makes the indie web navigable? Does it give people more agency or less?
Those are the right questions. They are harder than declaring an entire class of technology the enemy, but they are the questions the indie web’s actual principles demand.
Build Something
Coyote describes themselves as “interested in how to build a better web.” That is a worthy aspiration. So where is the building?
The essay catalogues three harms. It links to other people’s writing about those harms. It quotes other people’s frustrations. It closes with a declaration that the indie web is at odds with LLMs. And then it stops. There is no proposal for how indie site owners might collectively defend against scraper bot abuse. No suggestion for tooling that could help guides reach learners who have drifted toward chatbots. No protocol, no standard, no plugin, no practical step toward preserving the link culture the essay rightly worries about. Nothing to build. Nothing to do. Just a verdict.
This is the deeper problem with framing the indie web as an oppositional project. Opposition does not require you to build anything. It only requires you to identify threats and declare them threats. That is useful as far as it goes — but it does not go very far. The indie web was not made by people writing essays about what was wrong with the web. It was made by people who got fed up and built their own sites, their own tools, their own standards. That is the tradition worth honouring.
So here is one approach to the scraper problem, offered not as a prescription but as an example of what it looks like when you actually do something about it.
The first layer is the robots.txt file. The conventional assumption is that robots.txt is permissive by default — you allow everything unless you explicitly deny it. Flip that. Deny everything by default and whitelist only the robots you have chosen to allow. It is not a guarantee. Malicious bots ignore robots.txt routinely. But it is a starting point, it costs nothing, and it is something every indie site owner can do today without touching the command line.
The second layer is network-level defence. On my own server I have already built a security stack that includes Apache with ModSecurity and the OWASP Core Rule Set, Fail2Ban for login abuse, and UFW managing the firewall. The work started with Hardening WordPress After Replacing Jetpack Premium and I wrote up the full picture in Building My Own WordPress Security Stack. The next step I am considering is maintaining a list of known AI bot IP addresses and domains — harvested from publicly available sources and my own server logs — and feeding that directly into UFW and ModSecurity to block them before they ever reach WordPress. That is not a moral argument. It is an infrastructure decision. My server, my rules.
This is not advice. It is simply what defending your own site looks like when you decide to do it yourself rather than waiting for someone else to write an essay about the problem.
Coyote’s post is worth reading for its specific critiques. But the foundational premise — that the indie web is defined by its opposition to corporate exploitation — deserves to be challenged, not accepted as the starting point for every conversation about technology and the indie web.