re:What is the IndieWeb even?
Yesterday, I rebuilt this corner of the web that I've started to love. I also made the promise that I would start to engage more with the community because "I now aspire to write content that will be read, not out of ego, but because you've reminded me why I fell in love with the web in the first place."
Brandon’s Journal recently published an article about his inner critic. It reminded me of this scene from Bojack Horseman. Every time I think about engaging with someone's post, my inner critic says, "Why would you? That person wrote it way better than you could ever aspire to!"
That all to say, I read grubz.blog's post about IndieWeb and its definition. I think he captures the spirit of all this that we are building here so well that I would recommend you stop everything you are doing and read it. But that post made me think about four topics that I wanted to share with you all.
#1 - Does the IndieWeb Suffer from the IKEA Effect?
The "IKEA effect" is a cognitive bias that makes people "place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created." It's well-studied, and I bet you have felt it already.
IndieWeb surely is about DIY and the punk-rock spirit. And I think it's probably one of the last spaces online (that I am aware of, obviously) that is embracing this spirit and fighting back for the true spirit of the web and its creator.
But I find myself asking: are we really capable of fighting back? Or is it already lost?
Would someone out of this bubble find this interesting?
Don't see it as a personal attack. I'm just embracing the philosophical skepticism approach here.
#2 - Should We Evangelize the IndieWeb? And If Yes, How So?
Don't worry, I don't wish to make this our online secret and make the first rule about the IndieWeb not talking about IndieWeb. This comes from my teacher side (I teach introduction to web development to college first years in multimedia and arts-related college degrees).
Should I encourage my students to start their own blog and express themselves even with very low-tech technology (or even a service like Bear or Micro.blog where they can apply their newly acquired knowledge in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript)?
And, if you all agree that yes, we should, how can we do it? How can we get someone invested in this?
I know, I know, maybe that's precisely what the indie part means, but shouldn't we aspire to have more people on board?
#3 - How Do We Get People to Actually Come Here?
Sure, RSS is amazing. It's one of those technologies that's too good that, for obvious reasons, companies like Google made everything possible to kill it. But it doesn't come by default on computers, the biggest browsers, or mobile phones.
Maybe this is my experience in the media field talking. But on the news website I work at, almost half the traffic comes from search engines and Google News. At first, I couldn't understand why Google News -I don't think their product is that good - until someone told me that it comes by default on almost all Android devices and it shows some algorithmically chosen news when you open Chrome.
Obviously, I don't want to replicate any of those strategies.
But I don't want IndieWeb to be HipsterWeb.
Because the same way that "if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?", I wonder: might we be missing amazing content just because someone hasn't even started?
#4 -It takes time
I actually think it's good that it takes time. It took me a week to even get a name and think about what I would post. I came up with the pseudo-intellectual ramblings that you can see on the front page. And all this concept of blog posts as research notes. It also takes time to come up with new post ideas - I'm forcing myself to try to write every day with the same spirit that I practice sports; it's not the best post in the world, but I'm moving somewhere.
But what if the problem with the social media pandemic that we are facing is actually because we look at it as tiny pieces of content that we can consume very fast while we are in the waiting room (oh, f@ck you, Fugazi, you knew all along!).
I'm afraid that the question might be time.
No time to read something longer than a tweet or watch a TikTok. And, to be honest, how can we ask a working-class citizen who worked for 10 hours and had to cook, do the laundry, help the kids with their homework, and plan the next day to come online and still write? I know that a ton of you do. That you are not all privileged people living in ivory towers. But you know Newton's first law: "A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, except insofar as it is acted upon by a force."
What force can that be?
I know that this ended up sounding like an anti-IndieWeb manifesto. It's not. Believe me. But take it more as a set of ramblings and doubts that I wanted to find an answer to. A set of hypotheses and theorems that I wanted to see solved.
I believe only this community can do it.