What is the IndieWeb?

“Decentralised media gives you a way to really connect with people with shared interests, and [...] the opportunity to think and choose what you want, where you want to be, and who you want to connect with.”

Kiara Jouhanneau, a survey participant who’s a part of the IndieWeb

IndieWeb principles

(IndieWeb, 2024)

Own your domain

Publish on your website

Own your content

Your website should be your home on the internet. Think about introducing yourself to a friend’s friend, or a distant family member. It’s unlikely that you’d introduce yourself as [username] from Instagram or Twitter. You’d introduce yourself as you!

Owning your domain lets you introduce yourself as just you, rather than tying your identity to a third-party company or service.

Living on someone else’s platform means that you’ll always be bound by their rules—you never know when all your content (and subsequently your online presence) would be lost.

With your own domain (e.g. wingpang.com), even if a service is gone (r.i.p. MySpace), the domain is still yours, and people can still find you.

Own your domain

Has the internet began to feel more like a habit rather than something that’s exciting and stimulating to you? It used to not be this way!

We’re so used to consuming content online which are designed to be addictive, for the benefit of advertisers. Alex Beattie (2018), a lecturer at the Centre for Science in Society at Victoria University of Wellington likens our addiction to the current internet as “lab rats, conditioned to anticipate the rewards”.

IndieWeb is a movement against just plain consumption. Publishing on your own website, taking the time to create something and contributing to a community might feel slower, but it is much more rewarding!

Your thoughts are important.

Publish on your website

Social media is not free. When you use social media, you’re giving away your content and your data.

Owning your own website means that your content and data is yours—not to be used for advertising, nor to be used for training for the social media company’s AI.

Irinia Raicu (2018), the director of the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics suggested that we should think of data as not just a thing that is owned by us, but a part of us.

Your data are tied to your thoughts and memories, a part of your identity (Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, 2015). You should have a choice in what you choose to share.

Own your content

See how YOU can join in

Click here!

Join the community on Discord, Slack or IRC!