Yesterday I talked about cyberdecks and I mentioned that Indie web is also another big part of what my capture my attention this year. The Indie web came to me through a youtube video talking about how the majority of the web is still alive, while we live in the corporate matrix of global corporations websites. Either provided by one of the big ones, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok.
Our space on the web isn't really ours. We are renting space on these corporations that profit from renting space to use to hold our data and make them feel comfy in an interlaced system where you got your high school sweetheart, or your ex, or your bestie in it.
This is nothing new, we started since MySpace with that idea of everyone having their space sublet for everybody. Putting your baby pictures, your family pictures, your weekend photos and everything for free. But even back then, MySpace still allowed you to put a tiny bit of your personality by allowing you to select ugly backgrounds and some colors. Which we all know how things turned even worst once the next player swoop with that same promise but better networking, at the cost of ALL your personality.
But what is the indie web? People that were here long enough might remember the horrible 90s webistes. I even remember a book talking about ugly 90s websites. We remember the animated GIF with the banana guy dancing on the edge of our site. To even incorporate guestlists, and chatboxes. Very loud colors like hot pink backgrounds with the FrontPage template styles of repeated image all over the bgcolor attribute of our 'learning HTML' tutorial.
No doubt it was ugly, and DHTML and Javascript didn't really helped. It wasn't until the mid 2000s XHTML that made the websites more sober and with less tables as a design tool, and more CSS as a separate language to put the style beside the content. But anyway, it doesn't matter if your website was horrible, the best part was that it was YOURS. And as the web mature, you mature with it. But there is also a cost, adding too much pre-packaged libraries and CSS frameworks, and open source PHP applications like Drupal or Wordpress, you also lost your personality in it.
As some of you might also been developers. The corporatization process also happened on the back-end of the web. From software to hardware infrastructure. Most of the servers are stored into a centralized datacenter in Amazon through a VPS, while the website is running some over-standarized framework like VUE.js or Django or Angular. The rabbitholes goes deep.
The more standarized your infrastructure is, more will it will be at the cost of your personality, your design choices, you content choices and eventually your personality.
Do code has a personality? I will say yes, we can't all code the same fashion even when we try to do the same thing. And here is where the Indie spirit takes place. How much of your database structure, your variables naming and your comments is on your website backend.
What about the server? Is it on your basement, under your desk, on a tiny room, or is it on a corporate datacenter in some S&P500 company?
This is the big dilemma, would you find the beauty in imperfect, in highly buggy but be 100% yours? Will you pick up the poop of your own machine when the power is out in your house? Will you look for optimization and slowly maintain a pain in the ass code you wrote 8 years ago, but keep it because it's yours? Here is the beauty of the Indie movement.
Will you actually try to make friends on your own, and not have some algorithm suggest you friends with an actual complete stranger? Communities like kcya.net and other resources to be a part of these movement, while retaining your personality.
As we move into a vibe coding era, where the machine does everything for you, and everything is perfect. Beauty and humanity will be found on the imperfections and the Ugly. But more than hippy shit, is more about expressing yourself, is about digital art and digital mirror of what you believe, and offer with your individuality.
