Article URL: https://www.neatnik.net/hardcore-indieweb Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48962758 Points: 92 # Comments: 68

If you’re not familiar with the IndieWeb movement, it’s a practical approach to maintaining your presence on the web that emphasizes fully owning your identity and your content. This is especially relevant now, at a time when a growing number of corporations want to own and control those things for you. The IndieWeb ethos seeks to eliminate external influence and control over both you and your stuff. And as with any movement, there are a bunch of different services out there aiming to help you plug into this modern independent web. I even run one myself! But I always place my values over profit, so I don’t have any problem sharing the simple truth that you don’t need a fancy subscription blogging service to join the IndieWeb. In fact, when you use one of those services, you’re actually taking a step back from real independence, because your content often winds up living in someone else’s database on someone else’s server. They’ll tell you that’s OK because you can always export it whenever you’d like, in open formats, and of course that’s nice. But you still don’t fully fully own and control your content when you’re dependent on someone else’s service. There’s nothing wrong with using those services, to be clear. And if you’re already using them and happy with them, that’s great! This guide isn’t for you. But if the idea of having complete independence and control over your content on the web is appealing to you, read on. Because that’s what Hardcore IndieWeb is all about. Hardcore IndieWeb fully embraces existing IndieWeb principles; there’s really nothing new or different there. The key aspects of Hardcore IndieWeb are control over your content and portability of your website: Why does this matter? Consider what happens if the IndieWeb blogging service you’re using goes belly-up one day. Your ability to move to a new service depends entirely on your ability to export your data. What if you can’t export it? The service provider may have told you that you own your content, but what good does that do if you can’t access it? From a portability standpoint, consider what happens if you discover that the owner of your IndieWeb blogging service has been outed as engaging in abhorrent behavior or just comes down with a major case of the ick (this has happened before!). Sure, you can export your data in an open format and move house. But now you have to find another service that can work with that format, or convert everything and adopt an entirely new set of tools or processes. And you have to move house, which is a major pain. If you follow Hardcore IndieWeb, neither of these situations can affect you. Your content remains completely under your own control at all times, and your website exists in a fully published format at all times. The independence is tangible, and you can benefit from it whenever necessary. In many ways—no, actually, in every way—Hardcore IndieWeb mirrors the very same web publishing practices that were used in the 90s when the web was brand new. These were things that I did back then myself, every day, and they worked great! And they still work today, of course, but few people would recognize the approach because we’re now multiple levels deep in hybrid SaaS CMS/SSG solutions tethered to half a dozen markup languages and twice as many template systems. We’re living in a messy and complex web right now, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The complexity is one choice, and the simplicity of Hardcore IndieWeb is a different choice.