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Research Methodology and Results

The research for this project involved multiple parts. This involved:

  1. Desktop/whitepaper research (reading through articles about IndieWeb, social media, and the internet [reference list])
  2. Practical research (building my own website and making it work with IndieWeb standards like webmentions and microformats
  3. Surveys (collecting feedback from people both within and outside of the IndieWeb community)
  4. Community engagement (joining a session of the online Homebrew Website Club, joining the first day of the Düsseldorf IndieWebCamp remotely, and getting feedback from people over at the IndieWeb community chat)

Why a survey?

An online Google Form survey was chosen for this project since it could reach audiences from all over the world! It’s incredibly easy to share and allows for the participants to complete it at their own pace.

The survey was made to be anonymous (participants could divulge their identity if they wished to) and surveyees were allowed to skip questions at will.

I distributed the survey through my own social media accounts, and also at the IndieWeb community chat, where I got a lot of support in distribution.
Screenshot of the survey form

Survey Design

The survey was designed to be easy and engaging to complete. It was also designed with the assumption that the participant may not know anything about the IndieWeb.

There were three sections to this survey:

  1. Demographic questions (age, gender, and profession)
  2. Questions relating to social media (usage habits and thoughts)
  3. Questions surrounding IndieWeb and decentralised social media (a text and video section explaining the concepts, thoughts on these technologies and questions about website ownership)

Click here for a live copy of the survey with the questions and sections!

In total, there were 97 survey participants from various age groups.

Using snowball sampling methods unfortunately leads to the tendency for participants to recruit people sharing similar traits (Navarrete, et al., 2022).

Most of the participants were working in technology (47.4%) and design (23.7%).

It’s very likely that this is due to my background in design and the sharing of the survey through the IndieWeb community. 68% of participants identified as male, and 28.1% identified as female.

It would be great to re-conduct this survey at a later date with a wider sample range for greater diversity and more accurate results.

On social media

Generally, survey participants had an unfavourable opinion of social media.

Sentimental analysis of long-form replies showed that people were largely concerned/dissatisfied with:

  1. The proliferation of advertisements and the apps being increasingly profit-driven (23/60)
  2. Addictive qualities of social media apps (16/60)
  3. Privacy and security concerns (15/60)

Meanwhile, the biggest reason for remaining on social media apps is due to friends and family being on mainstream social media. (See more results here)

“The algorithms prey on people's addictive temperaments for profit. I find myself entering a feedback loop of dopamine stimulation a lot, aka doom-scrolling.”

A survey participant aged 25–30 who isn’t a part of the IndieWeb

Many survey participants expressed an interest in IndieWeb and decentalised social media.

While joining decentralised social media is perceived to have a lower bar of entry, some short-form responses expressed that creating a website and joining the IndieWeb is too complicated for a non-technical user (28/63 responses).

From survey results, we can see that there is a big percentage of people who do want a breath of fresh air from mainstream social media.

In collaboration with the IndieWeb community, this project was designed as a guide to learn more and get started

[Read more about this project].

See how YOU can join in

Click here!

Join the community on Discord, Slack or IRC!

Go to the IndieWeb wiki Open-sourced with love from wingpang.com. 14th May 2024.