Stephen has some interesting views on the Indieweb movement. I'm not sure I agree with many, but it's useful to understand the angle they're coming from and I can, at least, respect their reasoning.
One bit that did spark a thought was his comparison on how the web is often centred around broadcasting, specifically getting content out to as many people/places as possible. I agree that this is probably a problematic model, but found this note on context collapse useful for understanding some of the mess of social media:
The commercial web brought with it context collapse, in which everybody is talking to everybody. This is what creates the need for filters and algorithms and moderation and all the things we said above that the Indieweb is trying to avoid. But when everybody talks to everybody, these are unavoidable. They have to be managed somehow, and sometimes it feels like most Indieweb projects are exercises in different ways of doing this
Relatedly, I thought this was a neat summation on what we should perhaps be aiming towards:
A system based on webs, in other words, and not on stars.
Stephen has also outlined how we might go about doing this, both in terms of ideals to strive for and project constraints that should (in his view) be an MVP for a true "indie web". Here I think I disagree more, but these three ideals definitely ring true as something the web should strive for generally:
- a way for people to store and manage their own data (where 'data' means any digital creation or record, including metadata),
- a way for people to share data with each other without being required to give up their rights or ownership over that data,
- a way for data management and sharing to be independent of the particular platform they are using,
