What is the IndieWeb? I have been thinking of this question since I hosted the IndieWeb Carnival in December 2025 when quite a few contributions engaged with some form of this question. This is a rather difficult topic to address effectively, which explains why I have been sitting on this essay since 2 February this year when I first started writing a major portion of it. I have since revised it four times in six months.
In the end, a collective effort will prove critical in establishing a definitive answer to this question, but as an individual I can nevertheless contribute by building on the ideas others have already discussed. For better or worse, that is what this essay has amounted to, perhaps dishearteningly.
I.
Spirit and letter
Just to be comprehensive, I want to start by clarifying that the specific terms ‘IndieWeb’ and ‘indie web,’ written as they are, are not what I intend to address. And for the purposes of this essay at least I will treat them as interchangeable semantics, preferring the term ‘IndieWeb’ as I have done in the past.
There are some who would argue that the two terms might be taken to mean slightly different things – as indeed they did during the December 2025 edition of the IndieWeb Carnival – but I propose that such nuances need not be accompanied by signposting spellings; at least not until we have fair grounds for substantially different definitions for either term.
Moving beyond the letter to the spirit, a common point of distinction seems to be not what the definition of the IndieWeb is but how this definition should come to be. Should the definition be inclusionary or exclusionary? Some, like Khürt Williams, are especially opposed to the exclusionary definition or what they call ‘Defining yourself by your enemy.’ Others, the majority by a cursory assessment, seem to define the IndieWeb specifically by contrasting its features with that of the CorpoWeb. I think insisting on inclusionary definitions is a form of isolationism; Leon Paternoster calls it, more elegantly, ‘tech fundamentalism’.
In my opinion the argument that one must not define themselves by their enemies makes things seem more black-and-white than they should be and is frankly unfounded. It is not, in any case, an argument that is sound enough to rationalise abandoning such an approach entirely. Effective definitions look both to first principles and relative positions. Involving your ‘enemy’ in a definition is a case of the latter; so also is establishing a competing ideology, and whether we like to admit it or not, the IndieWeb, whatever it is, embraces a competing ideology on many measures compared with the CorpoWeb. Moreover, and for whatever reasons, if the CorpoWeb has come to define the experience of the average internet user, the IndieWeb would have to reference those standards – written or unwritten – to establish itself within the context created by those users and standards. There is no third player in this field.
What we need is both an inclusionary and exclusionary definition without needless adherence to the ideological style of the definition itself. We need clear ideas about what the IndieWeb is and what it is not. And if it is not what the CorpoWeb is, then to say it in any other way than by invoking the CorpoWeb makes for a weak definition. This is not defining oneself by one’s enemies, it is simply an effective approach to defining anything at all.
II.
What’s the problem?
Even if IndieWeb.org is not to be considered a definitive source of information on the IndieWeb (and it does not claim to be) we might nevertheless pay heed to a website considered by many to be the unorganised focal point of activities surrounding the IndieWeb. Its definition of the IndieWeb is as follows:
The IndieWeb is a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.
I suspect this definition would appeal to Khürt. It says nothing of the CorpoWeb, it says much about ‘what we are for’ and certainly speaks of how we can ‘build something’. And yet plenty of people are writing about better defining the IndieWeb because this definition is inadequate and vague. Consider for example how Goodreads owns its own domain, and uses its domain as its primary identity, and publishes things on its own site first, and of course owns its content. Yet nobody claims Goodreads is part of the IndieWeb; is that simply because it is not a ‘personal’ website?
For starters this definition does not clarify what ‘independent’ means. To define the ‘independent’ web without defining the word ‘independent’ makes for a flawed definition. Second, it does not qualify the term ‘personal website’ which becomes especially important since there has been much said recently about how IndieWeb projects can be collaborative in nature, making the idea of an individual running a ‘personal’ website somewhat simplistic and dragging us to strangely familiar places, eg, Huffpost and Mashable, both of which started as blogs by single people, then grew to become collectively written websites before turning into parts of the CorpoWeb. So collective blogging is not new, but we do need some qualifiers for what makes for a website ‘personal’ on the IndieWeb regardless of this. Next, what is an ‘identity’ and how is someone’s website their ‘identity’? Lastly, the ‘principles’ this definition describes can be set up, like my example with Goodreads, to obfuscate the behaviour of what are essentially CorpoWeb sites parading as IndieWeb sites, an idea I will expand upon later.
Therefore, to better define the IndieWeb we would have to better define four other terms: personal, independent, ownership and identity, and principles.
III.
Qualifying ‘personal’
As one might expect, there are differing views of the term ‘personal’ in the context of websites. Leon takes issue with the focus on ‘personal websites’ in the first place because using that term ‘encourages us to view ourselves as self-contained, individual units within a web economy’ while removing that focus ‘allows for joint publication efforts.’ In a sense then this has more to do with the potentially collaborative nature of the IndieWeb which, in my view, will arise naturally from any good definition of a personal website.
Leon works around this by barring ‘closed, corporate platforms characterised by VC-funding, scale and marketisation’ which might appear to be excessive in the restrictions it places on the IndieWeb, but are restrictions with which I am wholly in agreement. If you have funders to whom you owe something, that website is no longer yours alone. What you owe may be money or ideology. Neither should be allowed, and it is rarely anything else.
Look to indie films for a similar definition: these are works that are produced without the backing of mainstream production houses. Most are distributed through the efforts of individuals involved in the filmmaking process although a minority may find distribution through small scale distributors. The feature that is particularly useful to us in defining the IndieWeb would then be the ability to trace the ownership and functioning of a website, in the short and long terms, to individuals or a group of individuals not acting as a corporate body. This necessarily also excludes backing from corporations in the manner Leon describes without getting rid of the concept of the ‘personal’ entirely.
A personal website is one whose ownership, governance and editorial control all rest with an individual or non-corporate group of individuals: a form of sovereignty. A collectively run website can also qualify as equivalent to a personal website so long as the website is owned by one, few or all of its regular contributors who – along with contributors without ownership, if necessary – are the only people allowed to exercise complete ‘editorial sovereignty’ over the website. In either case, at least one of the people running the website must also own the domain and the website cannot exist subject to a contractual or quid pro quo obligation of any nature with any external entity.
This definition of ‘personal’ ensures no corporate involvement and, more importantly, wrests editorial control entirely in the hands of the people most closely involved with the growth and development of the website. It excludes purely subdomains by insisting on domain ownership, and does not insist on independent web design because that would place an unnecessarily technical qualification, raising the bar for new entrants and excluding the likes of, say, Bear blog which would qualify on all other terms.
One might point out that the requirement to own a domain already makes this somewhat restrictive but I would argue that is the bare minimum requirement since domains primarily serve as unique identifiers on the web and not fashion statements.
IV.
Qualifying ‘independence’
This is possibly a much harder task than the previous one, but the keen reader would have noticed that it is not easy to define ‘personal’ without also defining ‘independent’ implicitly. And that is precisely what we already did earlier.
That said, while on the one hand editorial independence is paramount, it appears most definitions of the IndieWeb focus, much like with indie films, on financial independence with the understanding that all other forms of independence can potentially arise from the ‘ownership’ it affords.
This is somewhat evident from Leon’s exclusion of VC funding, corporate support etc. There is a particularly interesting clause in his definition that I have some trouble appreciating: ‘…that are not published on closed, corporate platforms…’
Should we disqualify a website based on its being built upon a platform that happens to be funded by VCs even when that platform powers only the hypothetical engines driving the website and has nothing to do with the website itself, and, more importantly, is replaceable by other ‘engines’ with minimum impact? Wordpress, the company behind Wordpress, the open-source programme, is VC-funded, yet it would be hard to argue that a number of websites powered by Wordpress and now considered part of the IndieWeb should be disregarded.
This also introduces two problems in my view: first, the increased focus on the tools used to build an IndieWeb site; and second, an unjustifiably hard stance on anything corporate-backed anywhere in the development pipeline of an IndieWeb site. Independence should therefore not be linked with tools, rather with reusability and replaceability. Can your website still function without its current toolset? If so, it may be treated as independent of that toolset.
While not corporate in nature, I think services like Bear Blog are potentially more harmful to realising an ideal IndieWeb than corporate-backed a flat-file CMS or Static Site Generator that powers someone’s ‘digital garden’. Bear Blog is an interesting case study in openness because it is not closed by design, yet it does nothing to encourage its users to open up to the web beyond the Bear Blog sub-system either. It does everything to coax them to be part of events specific to Bear blog. People on Bear blog tend to write about the same topic in droves, share and communicate amongst themselves, even have their own versions of activities practised more widely (eg, they have a Bear Blog carnival1 parallel to the IndieWeb carnival) and stuff from within Bear Blog, in my experience, tends to get shared with the rest of the web only when someone on Bear Blog chooses to do so. Platforms like Micro.blog do something similar albeit to a lesser extent.
Any platform that encourages inward participation rather than participation with the wider web is in fact working against the openness expected of the IndieWeb. This may be subtle but it is important because it distinguishes Bear Blog, and others like it, from tools revealing them as platforms, from enablers of open web participation revealing them as destinations unto themselves.
Focusing on corporate presence on the web serves only to distract us from entities which, by every measure, are independent but nevertheless subvert the high expectations of openness upon which the IndieWeb ought to be built. As a side effect, they also draw far too much attention to the tools being used.
It is worth asking then if a website is hosted on a highly corporatised or corporate-adjacent platform, so long as the website itself, its contents and its owner(s) participate in activities on the IndieWeb, remain editorially independent, communicate with the wider IndieWeb through various means and are not directly funded by or otherwise owned by a corporate entity, should it even matter what tool or platform they use?
Furthermore, when it comes to funding, how different is corporate funding from your friend2 paying you if they both expect your writing to be quid pro quo? The only restriction therefore should be that funding, whether corporate or individual, should not impinge on the independence of a website.
Independence refers to both editorial independence and operational/governing independence remaining in the hands of the people who own and possibly collaboratively run a website, along with a guarantee that these independences will remain free from external obligations.
V.
Content ownership
A common argument against using corporatised platforms is content ownership. A truly independent website, they say, would ensure the owner of the domain also owns its contents. This is a noble requirement but one that brings with it expectations of technical knowledge. Letting corporate platforms handle setting up a website would mean, perhaps, letting them sort their users’ data out their way. What does matter is that the data is retrievable on demand. This is not the ideal solution that outright ownership always will be, but for the everyday user this is a more practical and realistic baseline.
Although it so happens that most platforms pushing for complete data ownership today, like Kirby or Statamic or 11ty or Hugo, are not VC-funded, nothing prevents the market from shifting once people realise they want to prioritise owning their content. Astro is a great example of it: it remains one of the ‘good guys’ in the CMS space yet was funded $7 million by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The explicit disqualification of corporate platforms even on the basis of content ownership is perhaps too short-sighted. As the IndieWeb picks up in popularity, expect the CorpoWeb to warp itself into a near-identical replica with greater conveniences and plenty of revenue pipelines attached. Therefore, what any definition of the IndieWeb will need to focus on is the fundamentals. Even when we are defining the IndieWeb in terms of a rival, we nevertheless need to focus on the fundamentals.
VI.
Getting rid of rusty screws
We could start this examination with a return to the definition of the IndieWeb quoted earlier from the IndieWeb.org site focussing at last on its ‘principles’, to wit: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.
Notably, we have only had cause to discuss content ownership up to this point and we have established that it should be independent of corporate involvement in the development pipeline if only because a definition should address the bare necessities, not amount to extremism. To the existing set of principles I would add the notion of complete editorial control. This applies whether you write on your personal website – as most people do – or share sketches, photographs, models, code etc. The editorial decisions should be entirely the owner’s.
The IndieWeb cannot be described as a collective either because that is far too broad a term to be meaningful without several qualifiers.
When Dan Gillmor wrote about the IndieWeb for Slate (first publishing on his own website3 in true IndieWeb fashion) he compared it to Tim Berners-Lee’s call for de-centralising of the web, made a couple of months earlier. The idea of openness has not only been central to the IndieWeb from the start, it is also the commitment most unwaveringly expected of anybody or anything that claims to be part of the IndieWeb. Gillmor had, perhaps inadvertently, also shown how that openness is multifaceted: openness through content ownership, openness through standardised protocols for interactivity, openness through formats.
At least one of that is no longer as meaningful: formats. We seem to have settled down with our choices and a deep familiarity with all possible things we can post online, including on social media, to a point where Tumblr’s pioneering post formats that once excited us no longer do. The open standards we have now are pretty much all that existed when Gillmor’s article was published 12 years ago: webmention, microformats and POSSE set-ups. Why has so little been built anew over the last 12 years – a generation in internet time? The answer is likely adoption. There is little motivation to keep building anew when people are yet to adopt something that has existed for years. In many ways this is reminiscent of Linux: the tools always existed, they were always free, and yet the OS only enjoys a single-digit market share.
Expecting the IndieWeb to surge in popularity without also making it easy for newcomers to become part of it is a needlessly tough situation in which to put oneself. Any definition of the IndieWeb would have to reflect as much. One way to do so is to ease the definition, to make it less precise and less demanding.
Consider the requirement to use your website as your primary identity online, as stipulated in the IndieWeb.org definition. How would a group of people running a website collaboratively do this? If one would argue that they will all also have individual websites (which is not a given), would the collaboratively built website no longer be part of the IndieWeb?
Likewise on Bluesky, a corporate platform by all measures, I still use my own PDS and use my website as my identity (@vhbelvadi.com). I do not think, however, that Bluesky is a part of the IndieWeb although its engine ATP might well run websites that do, in fact, conform to a definition of the IndieWeb. This is another example of how, as the IndieWeb grows, the CorpoWeb may well engulf some of its defining features as part of what many would see as the ‘mainstream’ web.
While I agree that there are benefits to using one’s domain as their identity – for example, in programming it still remains a key method to ensure unique identifiers for application packages – I also think the web has long outgrown this restriction, both in terms of how it is already in use and what it brings to the IndieWeb itself. I think we should continue to use domains as identifiers, but not make doing so a defining practice of the IndieWeb.
VII.
Agency, creativity and sovereignty
If there are things in the existing definition of the IndieWeb that have since become outdated, there are others that post-date it. Artificial Intelligence is a particularly important one. Should the IndieWeb disallow LLM-generated content?
By its nature, AI aligns more with the CorpoWeb than with the IndieWeb. It is impersonal, machine-driven and capable of producing ‘content’ that came from nobody. In the interest of remaining liberal in our definition, however, it is important we do not disallow all AI no matter what our personal stance on it may be. Using AI for feedback, brainstorming or editing should be no concern of the IndieWeb so long as two conditions are met:
- only a minority of the published work is produced by AI so that anything published on a website remains a faithful and reliable representation of the effort, judgement, criticisms and beliefs of its owner(s)
- the owner(s) of a website fully stand behind the work and ideas published, in their final form, on their website
Nothing prevents individual readers from engaging with a website that is using AI crassly, of course, but that is not the concern of any definition of the IndieWeb.
The reason this distinction is worth making is a question of creative agency: a CorpoWeb platform lacks agency by itself, relying instead on the agency of its many users. An IndieWeb site must itself have agency, and relying on AI beyond an extent transfers that agency from the owner to an LLM. This agency is then both creative in nature and editorial, and should be present in a definition of the IndieWeb.
More broadly, sovereignty is key to the IndieWeb: not only should domain owners be website owners, but they should also exercise ‘editorial sovereignty’ which ensures no corporate or other funding affects their editorial decision making while also ensuring they do not surrender agency to LLMs, thereby maintaining ‘creative sovereignty’.
In the last IndieWeb carnival that I hosted a common theme was that the IndieWeb was about the ‘people’ who make it. Although the IndieWeb.org definition touches upon this, calling the IndieWeb a ‘people-focused alternative’ to the CorpoWeb, I do not believe whoever wrote that early description grasped the idea in quite the same way as we are forced to now, surrounded by AI ‘slop’ across the length and breadth of the web. I do not think that the definition of the IndieWeb should be about the people because websites are simply a non-negotiable part of it. We are not defining social or political concepts like social trust, democracy or self-rule here but a necessarily web-centric concept. In other words, the IndieWeb is more web-centred than it is people-centred. The people matter insofar as they are participants on the web and their choices shape it.
VIII.
Re-defining the IndieWeb
Having fleshed out a lot of ideas surrounding the IndieWeb, it is worth mentioning what I have not spoken about and why. I deliberately said very little about the tools we use except in the context of how that plays into our definition of the IndieWeb. More importantly, I said nothing of link rot, maintaining accessibility, POSSE, choice of tools, URL upkeep, RSS feed availability, login-free access, long-term maintenance etc. because these are, in my view, practices that the IndieWeb can enforce on itself, not ideas to be shoehorned into a definition of the IndieWeb itself.
It can be tempting to crystallise every such good practice by making it an inseparable part of our definition, but we would then end up with a convoluted definition and, therefore, a weak one. It is for the same reason that my discussion of specific technologies is also kept to a minimum: the IndieWeb should not have a technology-focused definition but a philosophically oriented one.
I also did not talk about other possible broad categorisations of the web, eg, government websites, academic websites, web archives etc., choosing instead to focus on the rather gross categorisation of the ‘CorpoWeb’, a term I am aware many dislike, because of the simplicity and generalisability it affords. A government website, for instance, is corporate in nature even though the entity behind it is not a private corporation. Moreover, these other categorisations together are still a minority of the web in comparison with the CorpoWeb, which does in fact represent a sizeable majority and is a more apt comparison to draw for our purposes.
What I did talk about are the meanings of ‘personal’ and ‘independent’, the notions of editorial sovereignty and operational sovereignty, of ownership and collaboration, the relationship between tools and the outcomes they foster, and how the IndieWeb decentralises creativity, governance and participation.
So what is the IndieWeb? I do not believe the IndieWeb is a community. As much as we want it to be, and as much as our on-and-off participation in events makes us appear to be, we are far too unorganised, too fluid, too impermanent and too broad to be considered a ‘community’ – and I think this is for the better.
The IndieWeb is a space comprising websites whose domain ownership and organisational, operational and editorial sovereignty remain with an individual or non-corporate group of individuals, free from external obligations that compromise that sovereignty.
This definition frees up the IndieWeb from tools and platforms and protocols, and it ensures individuals have the freedom to approach their websites as they like so long as they uphold the core tenets of the IndieWeb.
Although I do not use the term ‘independent’, the notions of independence are spread across the definition. Independence is what ensures there is no quid pro quo with other entities, corporate or otherwise; and it ensures no obligations that can threaten the independent running of a website, whether financially, technologically or in terms of agency. In doing so, the spirit of independence is retained but made stronger and much more comprehensive by reframing it as sovereignty.
Tools, good practices, platforms and protocols can all come and go, evolve and merge, all with the continuing intention of realising a set of timeless, foundational ideas of the IndieWeb: the people who publish should retain ultimate authority over the identity, operation and governance of their presence on the web.