Most IndieWeb "Proponents" Don't Actually Care About The IndieWeb
I really hate to admit it, but I feel like most "IndieWeb" followers and proponents are just following a trend that they don't deeply care about. I've seen this cycle occur multiple times: First, somebody on Instagram, Twitter, etc. learns about a platform's multiple issues, including the addiction-inducing algorithms, lack of profile customization options, AI garbage flooding the site, toxicity, and so on, and decides they want to get away from it. Then, they discover the independent web movement, including sites like Neocities. Excited, they learn some HTML/CSS/whatever and open their own personal web site. They advertise their new web site—which is usually just some glorified advert/link repository for their social media pages, built upon a generic pre-made template—on their social media pages and proclaim they're going to "get away from the toxic side of the internet" "make the internet fun again" and/or "take back the internet from corporate control" or something along those lines. They play around with their web site or a little bit, perhaps opening an art gallery, or making a shrine, generally just indulging in their interests for a bit, before quietly abandoning their web site entirely after the excitment of owning a web site wears off. Before you know it, they're back on their Twitter and Instagram and BlueSky and TikTok. I've lost track of the amount of web pages I've seen on Neocities that were last updated months to years ago, proclaiming that their page was made "to get away from the yucky centralised modern internet that stifles creativity and damages your mental health." Meanwhile their last activity on the "sites they wanted to get away from" was under 10 minutes ago. You see this all the time in other old web revival projects as well. SpaceHey, for example, nowadays is a sea of dead accounts created by a bunch of teenagers that left/forgot about it after they couldn't get their dopamine fix in time. Oh boo-hoo! You actually have to look for pages that interest you, instead of having an algorithm spoonfeed them to you! Which is why I think most of these "IndieWeb followers/proponents" are really just a lot of trend-hopping social media addicts. If they truly did care about their on-line privacy, mental health, and freeing the internet from corporate control, they wouldn't have abandoned their sites after a few weeks in favour of sticking with Instagram, BlueSky, and TikTok. If anything, they should've ditched them—or at the very least limited their exposure to them—entirely. They never cared about the independent web, it was just another trend for them to indulge in for a bit before getting bored and dropping it for the next popular thing. I really do hope that I'm wrong, and that this is just a case of survivorship bias, but I honestly doubt it. Last Updated: May 17, 2026 Page Created: May 17, 2026 |