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.
This month’s question: Where do you see the IndieWeb 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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.