Great post from Alexandra. Tons of great resources to explore as well.
...recently the indie web has been experiencing a revival, as more netizens look for connection outside the walled gardens created by tech giants.
The kinds of posts and projects you’ll find are creative, personal, experimental, and sometimes so intimate you feel like you’re intruding. However, they’re not the kind of content that usually goes viral on TikTok. That’s beside the point. The focus isn’t on personal branding, growth or monetization, or “content” creation, but on freedom from those things. Instead of polished, 10-second snippets optimized for mass-appeal, engagement, and profit, these are largely slow-cooked projects made just for fun.
Against a backdrop of accelerating enshittification and living chronically online — especially since the COVID pandemic — there’s growing interest in the slower, more intentional and connected experience the indie web promises.
In different corners of the mainstream internet, younger users are talking about reclaiming their attention spans, trading in their smartphones, writing essays for fun, journaling, discovering long reads, reading fiction, and picking up hobbies like crocheting or scrapbooking.
Discoverability can be a challenge...But what seems like a bug can really be a feature of the small web experience: the point is to explore.
In the greater context of the global internet, the small web will never completely replace big platforms or serve every need, nor should it. Social media is still the main source of news in many parts of the world, offering valuable tools for community-building, commerce, even activism. For their part, most indie web creators are happy to exist outside of the mainstream.