Rambling: The Indie Web and My Problems with the Social Media Panacea

09 Nov, 2023

I've noticed a bunch of my posts on Tumblr concerning webdev tips having a sharp uptick of activity. With Tumblr’s supposed death knell (I don't know, personally I think it'll just persist as the desiccated corpse the site has always been), I've found that there’s been a ton of people encouraging others to create their own website. Which is great! But there's some things to it that bother me, and this news has given me the push I need to complete writing this post. It’s a mostly a vent post - take it with a grain of salt.

The Indie Oasis

If you’ve been on the Indie Web space long enough, you may be familiar with (or even driven to the Indie Web by) the rallying cries of “taking the internet back” and “making (the internet) fun again”. Loads of website manifestos on various Neocities pages wax poetic on a return to form, to no longer be inundated with unfeeling algorithms or tyrannical egomaniac billionaires having a final say on the platform where the ability for millions to put food on the table and keeping the lights on are at stake.

I can’t say I disagree with this belief. Social media as we know it is a total dumpster fire in all fronts - Silicon Valley’s Icaruses have flown too close to the sun in the name of profit and we’re the ones being burned for it. The dopamine chase being fundamentally integrated in the design of modern social medias, the rampant usage of ads to datamine information from you for merely visiting a site. I've known artists and other creators lose their livelihoods because of accounts being banned or a change being made to the social medias they use that fucks over creators.

In this case, the prospect of the Indie Web sounds like a relief from this hell we’ve long called home on the Internet. However, I’ve always felt a degree of hesitation by the zealous recommendation to get into the Indie Web. Part of it has to do with my feelings on it being fueled by nostalgia (I’ll touch on that in a bit), part of it painting this hobby with a rather wide brush. Web design can be fun, and if you’re considering getting into the Indie Web, I highly encourage it! But I also think there’s a lot of preconceptions perpetuating by well meaning proponents of the Indie Web that I think prospective webdevs-in-the-making ought to be aware of.

First and foremost, for my fellow artists and creators - the Indie Web (or Old Web, or Slow Web, or what have you) sucks total ass for those trying to make a living or maintain a degree of a social life off of it. I treat my website like a garden I tend to, something that people visit and enjoy and learn from, but not necessarily the medium I use for keeping up with my friends. That's what social media is for, after all, it's the medium to be social, and I think that's something some don't realize: a fundamental part of the Indie Web is its slow, organic nature. Algorithms are nonexistent (and when they do, they’re terrible: the main popular site pages on Neocities are full of sites that haven’t been updated in literal years). On the Indie Web, you find other websites through exploring sites, through webrings, through adding people’s buttons to your site. It’s very fun! And business-wise, a terrible idea. If you are a content creator and opt to forgo social medias for the sake of joining the Indie Web, you are accepting that you will most likely take a very big hit on all fronts for very little return. You will most likely not make money off this. If you're alright with that, go for it (there are many independent creators that solely exist on the Indie Web) - but if that's your main moneymaker, it's probably not a wise use of your time unless you’re also living off of the Bank of Rich Parents or something.

Speaking on social media, a brief aside: Neocities's social media portion is terrible. In a way, it's kind of meant to be? The impression I had gotten from it was that the purpose of the Activity Feed is not to be treated like Twitter where you post whenever, but rather to discuss updates to yours - and others' - sites. It serves that purpose pretty okay, but when you have involved discussions with others it just gets messy. I don't mind using it too much, but if you want to forgo the social media portion entirely and just use it as a web host, you can do that (I think it's in the settings for your account). Anyone that tries to go to what would be your Neocities profile would be redirected to the site itself.

Back on track to the main point of my rant/vent/what have you: I think the issues I have with the Indie Web are twofold: many starry-eyed indie webdevs are so preoccupied with this preconceived notion of What The Internet Once Was due to nostalgia that they’re completely ignoring what the internet actually was - and that not all that is modern is bad; and that despite the dialog about “taking the Internet back”, most mediums for the Indie Web make it so that your site isn’t actually yours.

Back in My Day…

Let’s tackle the first point. When you think of the Indie Web, or the Old Web, what do you think of? For some, that’s crunchy Geocities sites (or something alluding to it like the fictional sites in media such as Hypnospace Outlaw). For others, it’s old mid 2000’s Youtube or Adobe Flash games. But there is a string of commonality to them - for many of us, it’s home. Or at least, the Home That Was.

There's a brief post I made pretty recently, Briefly: The Time You Call Home, I lamented about this sort of homesickness I was feeling at the time, and how I realized I wasn’t longing to go home in a literal sense, but a longing for a time in my life from when I was a kid and the stresses of the life I have now weren’t even a consideration - this theoretical “home” of sorts.

Moreso, it’s an exploration of that “home” - it’s nostalgia. But the thing is with nostalgia that people tend to forget is that, not only is it incredibly persuasive, but it's quite the lying bitch, too.

Like, I was literally a child in 2008. Y’know, the housing crisis and economic recession of the time. It was also right before my parents’ disastrous divorce where nobody was in the right and us kids got the consolation prize of years of trauma that we’re all still kind of working out. But you don’t see me yearning to relive the awkward dinners with Dad and whatever umpteenth woman he’s brought that’s silently judging us for being “redneck country trash” while he's trying convince us that he should have guardianship over us instead of Mom because “she's crazy” (spoiler: they're both terrible in different ways). Or the vast swathes of time I can barely remember experiences of because I’ve been dealing with depression and suicidal ideation as early as fifth grade.

It’s taking turns playing old Wildtangent games with my little siblings on the family PC in the kitchen. It’s Mom piling us kids into the old as shit Suburban to go drive into town for pizza (and chicken and jojo’s for Mom and I, cause we didn’t like pizza). It’s playing Pokemon on those long, long chilly school bus rides through the early morning countryside with the volume real low. It’s taking a crusty old plastic bucket and rusty tackleboxes over to the pond to go fish up bluegills and the occasional pissed off snapping turtle with my brothers. That’s my nostalgia. That’s my time called Home.

All this online-recipe-by-some-mom level storytelling is to say: while nostaglia can be incredibly inspiring and comforting, it can also cloud our judgement for what the Things That Were actually were. Adobe Flash and Shockwave are chock full of vulnerabilities (even before their retirement!) and have been used as vectors for spreading malware. While modern accessibility solutions are far from perfect (and some doing more harm than others), the framework that is there now was nonexistent at the time. Not to mention the entire social climate involved with the Internet where blatant bullying was not only the norm, but an encouraged way of participating on the World Wide Web. Sending people loud as shit jumpscare pages or violently strobing sites that could hospitalize someone was considered funny. No greater example of this was YouDontKnowWhoIAm.org (better known as YouAreAnIdiot) a flasher website that originally was also a vehicle for a Javascript trojan that annoys the shit out of you - while somewhat harmless and more just annoying (and regarded as a lesson to not click on any random link. Don't worry, this one's safe, it's a Youtube video from danooct1 showing the actual trojan in action), this type of website would be replicated by many, many other copycats - some having viruses far more malicious than opening a gazillion windows with loud as shit autoplaying audio and forcing you to restart your PC with the power button. Many people in the Indie Web scene tend to forget how much these issues plagued the Old Web, or if they even acknowledge it, brush off as just “how it was at the time”.

And while we can and should move past these aspects, I think it’s important to recognize why they were a problem, and how some negative aspects of the Indie Web are inherently married to those of the Old Web. Take for example blinkies: they are a very common image on a lot of Old and Indie Web sites alike, these little 150x20 pixel GIFs that say something like “not like the other girls!” or “I ❤️ Hot Topic” or what have you. These tend to have very fast animations of pixels lighting up and going dark again or changing between two colors rapidly - ergo, blinkies. While smaller, this can be harmful for those with epilepsy that is triggered by flashing imagery, especially when you have a ton of blinkies on a single page. That’s not to say “don’t use blinkies at all, you’ll kill someone!”, or that having a blinkie wall is bad. Blinkies are a fun way of expressing yourself on your webpages! But it’s important to consider how your page is presented to other people. A wall of blinkies might be cool to some, but extremely headache inducing to others. And luckily, this is 2023 and not 2003, and there are many solutions that even those without coding know-how can use, from slowing down blinkies to half or quarter speed using GIF editors like EZGif to using JavaScript solutions like Freezeframe.js or GIF toggles. It is this awareness that enables us to create a more inclusive Indie Web.

I want to dig into this idea further because I think this goes hand in hand with the Indie Web's thing with nostalgia. There’s this belief many in the Indie Web space have where this presumed return to form that the Indie Web has is 100% literal, Geocities stylings (which were considered passe even in Geocities's time) and all. While not too terrible on paper (they're easy-ish to make! and fun and webcore and whatnot!), this belief has created a dissidence to the idea of an accessible Indie Web because many design aspects that support accessibility and user experience - see: literally any discussion in regards to responsive web design on hobbyist spaces - are entirely regarded as New Web, as corporate, as the antagonist to the stories of us Internet Vagabonds that we need to fight against. And in these discussions concerning accessibility, a fundamental question is behind this dissidence: why should we create a more inclusive Indie Web? After all, the whole point of the Indie Web is to enable a degree of self expression that modern social medias do not allow. It is this individualism that drives the core ideals of the Indie Web. And it is this nostalgia that further supports this individualism, almost to a tribalistic othering of all things “modern” - if the Indie Web is meant to replicate The Internet That Was, we ought to make it hostile to modern technologies because modern = bad, right? Destroy your cell phone et al. and whatnot.

Like, I kind of get where it’s coming from, but simultaneously it’s rather silly to me, in retrospect - the issue shouldn’t be with phones, but rather in the social media and apps that support the addictive nature people (typically boomers, though it has become a popular mindset for those on the Indie Web) have associated with phones. For some, phones are the only way they can access the internet - whether because it’s the only tech they own, because of their disability, or what have you. For example, one fellow webdev, Whiona at whiona.me, wrote about her experiences being a developer and a netizen surfing the Indie Web someone with Fibromyalgia, a chronic pain syndrome that makes using computers impossible at times. Similarly, my younger sister has learning disabilities and has difficulties reading and typing, so she exclusively uses her phone to explore the Internet and uses the built-in screen reader function to listen to fanfiction. And even if you have more tech or aren’t burdened by disabilities that affect how you use them, fact of the matter is shit tons of people use phones. While it may not be as important to folks on the Indie Web specifically as most I’ve seen say they typically surf via desktop, though some - myself included - use both desktop and mobile, those that do are treated like outsiders simply for the medium they use to surf the web. A core part of the Indie Web isn’t just the creation of sites, it’s the exploration of sites as well. Why bag on someone for the medium they use, over it not being “proper”? It brings to question: who actually belongs on the Indie Web?

Here's the thing: Websites in the Indie Web space can be accessible. They can also be beautiful forms of self expression. You can do whatever you want with your site, but it’s important to remember that these aspects aren't mutually exclusive, and the one can even accentuate and support the other. You can have both!

The crux of the issue is whether or not if you actually care if people can use your website.

I want other people to visit my website. If I didn’t, and it was just for me, it wouldn’t be online. Therefore, I feel it’s important for me to consider how others will use and navigate my site. Yes, I do not run a business and therefore I'm not required by law to follow WCAG guidelines (which most businesses and even government sites can’t even do anyway lmaoooo), and my site is far from perfect in that regard (this weekend's plans are to implement Freezeframe.js for all my art and CSS pack pages - something I’ve long put off but honestly shouldn’t really take that long), but little things like semantic HTML or responsive web design are small baby steps that have a pretty big impact on user experience. And when you actually go through with it and add the stylesheet code to make your site responsive, or to make your code more semantic - especially when you integrate it into your own workflow for creating sites and not just retroactively fixing your website - it makes all the backpedaling and kneejerk fighting against a few lines of code for the sake of "authenticity" rather silly by comparison.

And I think that's one of my issues with the Indie Web. It's this rejection of the modern web, fueled through a warped lens of nostalgia for an era many participants never even lived through, that is so overzealous to its commitment to the era that it outright refuses to acknowledge the improvements that have come after it. In truth, you can have both - you can still have the colorful fun of the Old Web with the quality of life and ease of use updates modern iterations of web development offer. It's just going to take a little extra learning and legwork to get it done - and what is hobbyist web design if not a labor of love?

I <3 flexboxes, btw. Love love love them. It makes some of that shit easy as pie.

A Rental Property By Any Other Name Smells Just As Bad

Let’s touch on that second point. To the uninitiated laypeople, it seems like websites like Neocities are where you can have your own website free of charge. But the thing is, it’s a little more complicated than that. Time for a brief crash course in web hosting.

Fundamentally, the Internet’s a shit ton of computers talking to eachother. More specifically, websites and services hosted on servers. Some web servers are literal hardware, some are logical processes on virtualized machines. While many people imagine colossal server farms when they think of servers, in truth they can run on anything. You could even run a web server on the very device you’re using now (though it’s probably not a good idea if you don’t know a lot about it lolol). Regardless, the main thing with these bad boys is that they have software that makes it so that it can talk to other computers using HTTP or HTTPS. You can either do it yourself and have to configure everything, or you can use / pay an individual or company to do it for you (see: web hosts) and not have to worry about having to mess with settings you don't understand. Said web hosts provide differing levels of access and control, ranging from static web hosts where you can upload HTML files and be done to full blown Infrastructure-as-a-Service.

Neocities et. al. are static web hosts, which enable the use of uploading static pages to be hosted on the platform. Neocities et. al. handles everything server-side - all configurations, all updates, everything. You just upload the files for it. While this still gives you incredible amounts of flexibility in how to create your website, it is limited to just page files, stylesheets, scripts, and additional files such as fonts or images. Anything server-side is off limits.

In other words, it’s less owning your own website and more just renting the place out. Sure, your landlord lets you paint the walls bright highlighter lime green and add seventeen toilets into the front lawn, but when that landlord pulls the plug, goodbye website. This is especially disastrous for those who exclusively use the Neocities editor, rather than using a code editor and don't have some kind of backup (please for the love of all things holy and unholy, use a code editor - even shit like Notepad++ is an immense improvement). Neocities specifically has had a history of stability issues and entire sites being obliterated with no rhyme or reason, and with the upcoming uptick of new users, I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up getting worse.

This also means having to use workarounds for most things involving user input that would otherwise be handled and stored server-side. For example, many Neocities websites with guestbooks will use external guestbooks such as 123guestbooks (which have their own issues), while others use solutions such as ayano's neocities comment widget which utilize Google Forms and Google Sheets to store user input (which may also not be preferable for those not wanting to use Google products). In other words - if you want visitors to give some kind of input, that input's going to be put somewhere that isn't Neocities.

In addition, as web hosting platforms, Neocities et. al. can choose to remove websites should they break terms of use - while I assume this isn’t executed often, the fact of the matter is that there is still an entity that has reign over your website. There is, again, the issue with stability with certain platforms like Neocities where some people's websites just go completely missing without any recourse.

Because you don’t own it - because it’s not your website, it’s Neocities et. al.’s. We just live here.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing per se. Though I want to move to a different host at some point, I currently use Neocities specifically because I don’t want to worry about all the particulars of self-hosting and focus just on creating and maintaining my website, and a static web host fits my needs. As such, static hosts play an important role in the Indie Web scene to enable those without as much technical knowledge on web hosting (or don't want to bother with it) to have their own websites. However, I do feel it is disingenuous to imply that the site is yours, fully - it’s moreso renting out the space of another person’s digital property. And it's important to be aware of the issues involved with being a digital tenant.

In Summary

The Indie Web, as a hobby, is very fun! I've been maintaining fatgrrlz since July of this year, but I've been working with HTML and other languages for a while longer now. Despite the negativity with this post, I want to emphasize that it makes me really excited that others are becoming more interested in maintaining their own websites too. But I do think that some of the discussion around the Indie Web (and getting people into it) is very misguided and I wanted to express my current frustrations with the Indie Web scene.

If you're someone looking to make your own website: just do it. There's a wealth of information on the Internet (and at your friendly neighborhood public library ;) ) concerning how to make and maintain your own website. Don't let me (or anyone else for that matter) complaining about dumb shit deter you from it. Make mistakes. Have fun with it. Learn from yourself, and from others. Make it goofy. Make it some "cringy" faux-Geocities if that's the flavor you want. Pay no mind to Neocities’s jank numbers because they’re not real anyway.

But most importantly: just have fun.¹

#neocities