I came across an interesting blog post from Default.blog titled Yes, There Can Be a Completely Digital Counterculture! and the concept of a digital counterculture really rang true. She discusses a conversation about the the possible existence of an on online counterculture which exists outside the social walled gardens. Which she isnt clear who this counterculture is, I immediately thought of the Indieweb movement.
If your here, there's a reasonable chance you already know what the Indieweb is but, if not, the Indieweb centers around owning your own data, building or creating a blog and maybe even joining your site to the interconnected web of independent web denizens.
The counter argument in the aforementioned post, posits that the Indieweb is a subculture, not a counterculture because it existed before the Web 2.0 days. While it is true, before walled gardens we all built our own websites, I think it missed the mark for one simple reason. Indieweb started in 2011 after Facebook arrived on the scene in the aughts!
In addition to Indieweb being post facebook (dare I say a response to facebook, etc?), the principals of the Indiweb are clearly against big-tech, from owning your own data to making your code opensource; I'd argue that the Indieweb goes against everything that big-tech-social represents.
The Indieweb is an act of Rebellion against the Billionaire serving tech machine. The Indieweb grows daily, new people publish their own websites, create new blogs and step away from restrictive commercial systems. It's clear that a broad portion of society is tired of the manipulative algorithms and privacy invading trickery. They now flock to services such as Mastodon and BlueSky and the next step for many is the Indieweb. I see the the web opening up a bit, it's moving back to that big vast place filled with ideas and creativity that many of us first discovered in the early days.
Indieweb is not an all or nothing sort of thing. You don't have to set up a Raspberry pi at home and host your static site from your office, I do, but that's not required nor is it a reasonable place to start! Indieweb is a creative journey that can start and end with simply setting up a blog or learning a little html to put up on a free hosting server.
Don't know how to code, but want to join in anyway? Check out Micro.blog which features many Indieweb features such as webmention! Hey Mention me if you join, I'll hopefully have my webmention server running in a week or so.
Join the Revolution!