AI descriptions
Anyone who has been rickrolled or jumped through hyperspace to a planet that has been destroyed by a giant laser will tell you this: it’s nice to look before you leap. Since the Outer Web is basically a large network of hypertext leaps, we try to give people a good idea of whats on the other end of their click. So both Navicomputer and Explore show the linked page’s title and description like this:
| Arrakis IRL |  |
| A gallery of my August trip to the Pismo Dunes. |
Neither the internet nor the Outer Web requires either of these fields, so for pages without an RSS or Open Graph description, we’ve started adding LLM-generated descriptions:
| Exonematology |  |
| [AI summary] This post speculates on the viability of populating Tatooine from the Star Wars series with sandworms from the Dune series. It discusses the impact on civic centers, moisture farming, and intergalactic trade. |
2030
Dogfooding and discovery
I was verifying the Outer Web link for Web 2.0 Sucks! and stumbled upon its neighbor Manifesto by V.H. Belvadi. This, in turn, led me to Belvadi’s lastest post about hosting this month’s IndieWeb Carnival.
What is IndieWeb and what is its carnival, you might ask.
- IndieWeb is an advocacy movement for the small web, it provides helpful guides and technologies for self-publishing on the web
- The IndieWeb Carnival is their monthly blog prompt with a rotating host
This month’s question: Where do you see the IndieWeb in 2030?
The web in 2030
Gut check: my 2025 personal site looks about the same as it did in 2015 and 2005. The content has evolved, the tooling has evolved, but for the reader it’s structurally the same. Having reviewed many, many sites during the development of this project, I can say my own experience isn’t an isolated one.
Writing: The backbone of the indieweb consists of personal/semi-professional websites crafted by cool people who have hobbies, jobs, and responsibilites. I expect that the next five years will see the blogosphere gain and lose some voices but they’ll largely fit the same mold. Even if enshittification causes people to flee web2 platforms in droves, the fundamentals of blog writing will largely remain the same.
Medium: I also don’t expect the core web experience to change: html, scripts, images, videos. Incumbent content delivery methods have momentum and, well, there’s nothing wrong with traditional web pages. Microblogging, bring back webrings, nownownow, backlinks, gemini, atproto… it’s tough to gain traction in the small web’s fragmented ecosystem. And many of these approaches require critical mass to be of value to their user base.
And so while I don’t expect the indieweb to experience a major structural change in the next five years, I do expect it to experience a subtantial topographical change. In five years I hope to see an indieweb that is denser and more discoverable.
- Denser: there will be more links (and more linking). As writers embrace links pages, webrings, and a general sense of community, we’ll have an easier time traversing the blogosphere using the trusty old href.
- More discoverable: finding content on an arbitrary subject won’t be such a challenge. Densification combined with benign external services such as this site, Marginalia, Scour.ing, and Indieseek will make it easier for readers to enter the indieweb and find what they are looking for. Then maybe hang around and read some other cool stuff.
The indieweb will still be alien to people who cannot be severed from infinite-scroll platforms and video shorts. It will still be an enemy of the web built around profiteering and endless javascript. But as the core web offers less and less authenticity, people will seek noncommercial, human-created content.
Subprompts
Belvadi provided a handful of subprompts in case the big question was too open-ended for carnival participants. They’re great questions in their own right and I found them to be an excellent way to revisit my answer to the main prompt.
Are you building something for the IndieWeb? This would be a great time to showcase it, whether alpha, beta or production-ready.
As it happens, yes! This site. It’s production-ready for its current feature set and it’s growing by the day. In the context of the 2030 question, plenty of others are attacking the same connectivity and discoverability problems in different ways.
What radically new idea do you have for the IndieWeb that you haven’t been able to communicate to someone with the skills to build it?
Let’s all add a footer to every blogpost that links to three other webpages with similar content. Let’s link to people we don’t know (or don’t necessarily know).
A simple example, here are The Outer Web peers of Belvadi’s manifesto post:
- IndieWeb principles / developer-principles
- The IndieWeb is for Developers
- WordPress and IndieWeb
- Why have a personal website?
How better can the IndieWeb stand up to the CorpoWeb in the coming years?
I mentioned above that people will seek content that isn’t AI-generated, SEOed, and delivered via algorithm. Not everyone will, but as the corpoweb grows more and more plastic, users will seek flesh and blood. The indieweb simply needs to remain independent and stick to its values.
Web Discovery
Entrypoints to the authentic web
If you’re here, we hope you’ve checked out Explore or its more orderly cousin Explore Sorted. There are a few other great indieweb discovery projects, here are some of our favorites:
| Site | Type(s) |
|---|---|
| Cloudhiker | Blogstumbler with categories |
| The Forest | Blogstumbler |
| Indieblog.page | Blogstumbler, feed |
| Indieseek.xyz | Link site |
| Indieweb Webring | Blogstumbler |
| Kagi Smallweb | Feed |
| Marginalia Search | Search, blogstumbler |
| Ooh.directory | Link site, feed |
| People and Blogs | Feed |
| Scour.ing | Customizable feed |
| Wiby | Search |
Posts about web entrypoints
- A look at search engines with their own indexes has a list small web search projects with helpful commentary 🪐
- Notes on the “indieweb” #2: Where do I find things to read? discusses RSS, newsletters, and microblogs 🪐
- How I Discover New Blogs lists a variety of indieweb discovery sites 🪐
- /g/’s based sites contains a categorized list of alternative search engines and other points of interest
- Surf the Web lists webrings, link directories, blogstumblers, and alternative search engines 🪐
- Entrypoints to the Indieweb discusses indieweb discoverability challenges and lists a few stumbler and search sites 🪐
A few blog posts about the web
- In Praise of Links (2025) 🪐
- My IndieWeb Journey: Building, Sharing, and Owning Your Online Presence. (2025) 🪐
- The IndieWeb’s next stage? (2024) 🪐
- We Need to Bring Back Webrings (2023) 🪐
- What happened to blogging for the hell of it? (2023) 🪐
- A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox (2022) 🪐
- Some thoughts on walled gardens (2022) 🪐
- The IndieWeb for Everyone (2022) 🪐
- The IndieWeb Mixed Bag (2021) 🪐
- The small web is beautiful (2021) 🪐
- The Small Website Discoverability Crisis (2021) 🪐
- Web 2.0 SUCKS! - My manifesto and feelings of Web 2.0 (2021) 🪐
- Ringy Dingy (2020) 🪐
- The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (2019) 🪐
- An Introduction to the IndieWeb (2017) 🪐
- How the Blog Broke the Web (2017) 🪐
- Indie Web (2015) 🪐
- Why the Indie Web movement is so important (2014) 🪐
- The Slow Web (2012) 🪐
On the replacement of independent websites by social media:
Those who would give up essential liberty to decide whom to follow, for getting a little temporary convenience in exchange, deserve neither to choose what to read nor convenience - adiian
Exploration mode
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We created the Outer Web to help web contributors find and link each other and, in doing so, created a large (and growing) galaxy of webpages.
There are a lot of great things that can be done with this data and one of those things is Exploration Mode. It’s exactly as it sounds: an interface for exploring webpages indexed by the Outer Web. Since we organize content by similarity, if you’re viewing a page about sci-fi interfaces, your exploration options will be topically similar.
Explore mode has a thematic UI but is nonetheless straightforward: clicking on planets (/asteroids/comets) takes you around our index, the text blurbs link to the offsite page content.
The parsec distance is a real measure of (dis)similarity, for most queries we show a fourth result that is numerous hops away.
Start exploring
- For casual browsing, the Explore link takes you to a list of categories will send you to some related posts.
- If you're using Navicomputer, you can jump into explore mode from any of the results.
How to link the web using Navicomputer
If you’re a blogger or web publisher and see interesting links in Navicomputer search results, consider adding those links to your own content. For example, here are some results from the text of our about page displayed as a table of external links:
Links similar to our about page
 | How to build a place on the web where you can own your identity, control your content and create whatever the hell you like. |
 | The indieweb is all the rage, especially as we saw the large social media conglomerates, that once replaced it, start to crack. But what is the indieweb? And how do you get there? All this, and more, in this blogpost (on the indieweb I guess). The indieweb - a web of good intentions The indieweb describes the web of personal blogs, homepages about special interests made with love, and handcrafted personal web presences. |
 | Overview of different techniques to implement comments using a static site generator. |
Another example…
Links similar to a made-up post about exploring the edge of the solar system
 | New Horizons may safe to continue exploring the Kuiper Belt -- according to a recent NASA announcement. The devil is in the details. |
 | A little-known proposal is threatening the future of NASAs New Horizons mission , and for reasons unknown, the space press has not reported on this development whatsoever. This needs to change, as the public has the right to know that one of this countrys most successful planetary... |
 | As I mentioned a few weeks back , I did a second podcast for 365daysofastronomy.org , and it's available today. It's called "JPL's Greatest... |