We Are Still the Web - The History of the Web
The web is just people. Lots of people, connected across global networks. In 2005, it was the audience that made the web. In 2025, it will be the audience again.
Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.
The web is just people. Lots of people, connected across global networks. In 2005, it was the audience that made the web. In 2025, it will be the audience again.
When I write a blog post, I want it to live on my blog, rather than a platform. I can thus invest my time thinking about how to make my blog better and backing it up, rather than having to worry about where my writing is, finding ways to export data from a platform, setting up persistent backups, etc.
A blog post can be a plain text document uploaded to a server. It can be an image hosted on a social network. It can be a voice note shared with your friends.
Title, dates, comments, links, and text are all optional.
No one is policing this.
The most important lesson that blogging taught me is that writing is for thinking first, communication last.
If you care about the indie web growing, by all means write, by all means create, by all means curate. But most of all, just read. Or listen, or experience. Spend an afternoon clicking around, like everybody used to. The more people who do that, the more everything else will slot into place without even having to think much about it.
Serendipity is the best algorithm.
A selection of blog posts from the past year.
Updating my website with related posts and fixing link rot.
Tinkering with your website can be a fun distraction.
Design systems are neither good nor bad (nor are they neutral).