First of all, I want to mention that whenever V.H. Belvadi is hosting the Carnival, it seems to overlap with a crisis in my life. Back in January 2025, I missed his “On the importance of friction” challenge, because I was on a hospital bed, half an inch away from death.
This December, about 80.000 people in my city and another 13 nearby towns woke up in the middle of the day with no running water due to some technical blunder while emptying the dam that supplies the area. This is going on for about 4 days already and we won’t have water for household use until at least Monday (that’s in 6 days time).
But let’s come back to our IndieWeb discussion. In order to think about how the independent web will be in 5 years, we need to look back at the state of the internet 5 years ago.
Back then we were recovering after the COVID pandemic, we were spending a lot of time in the online space, either in Zoom meetings, discord servers or in small internet communities.
Lemmy tried to overthrow reddit by offering a similar concept but more tailored for the fediverse. People started to ditch twitter (even before Elon Musk bought it and started to go full Nazi on it) and they started to migrate towards things like mastodon and bluesky, without actually understanding that the decline of twitter is not because of its ownership or leadership, but because of its user base.
People still try to make the fediverse happen, but it’s not going to happen. Not because it’s not a good idea, because decentralization always is a good idea. But the main issue is the fact that behind all these cool projects there are some pearl-clutching mods, server owners, project owners and codebase maintainers who are just as toxic for any kind of community as Elon Musk himself, except they’re poor.
And today, close to the end of 2025, we draw a line and make a total and we discover that the situation is not very bright. As one can see, the state of the IndieWeb is not a very good one at all. On the FOSS side, they’re definitely still playing “useless drama of the week” just because someone mentions Stallman in any context, while tech projects become overly-politicized, and people without activity start things no one will follow just because they need to get their attention (looking at you, dotmeow. I support trans people to be whatever the fuck they want to be, but “turning every domain into queer community support, especially focusing on trans projects” while also calling it .meow? That’s just ridiculous.)
Luckily, as the host of this month’s Carnival is attesting by simply being (among some others), there are still absolutely massive people in the IndieWeb. Smart, dedicated, who put in the work of writing an article and taking care of their digital garden without falling into ridicule or over-politicizing things just for clout.
The future, however, is grim. The avalanche of “AI”-generated slop is slowly but surely very rapidly going to engulf the internet, and will overflow into the IndieWeb as well. I did unfollow a couple of blogs in the last year, blogs of people I know and drank beers with, because they confessed their content is AI-generated so they can keep up a decent release cycle.
Look, I know I’ve been pretty acid against AI, but I understand it’s a tool, and the way we use this tool makes it a good or a bad thing. My main issue is with people who look at AI as the “one-click-make-it-and-forget-about-it” solution, which removes all the creative, logical and technological process from the person and simply turns it in to an LLM which generates whatever the user wants.
And this AI slop will grow exponentially in the next five years. People who already use it lazily, will use it more. People will use it for “winning” internet points in make-believe arguments. Others will use it to justify why their “bread toaster for lesbians, but not for gays” is the best on the market and they’ll write volumes about how you’re a racist because you happen to be only gay and not a PoC gay person. Or some shit.
The IndieWeb will survive though. From dumb rants like the one mine above, to well-written articles, we’ll discover nice people every now and then, and we’ll subscribe to their RSS feeds, until we discover they’re not real anyway, or until they stop writing altogether.
There are many really really good people having personal sites on the independent web, but I’m looking at my stats and also at the reading I’m doing. Time is getting more limited, with all the daily stuff and information we’re bombarded with, and it’s easy to drift away from people and their sites.
The IndieWeb does feel a lonely place, it does feel empty and people are not engaging with it, at least not in the way they used to interact with blogs back in 2007. It’s the reason I’ve removed the Webmentions and the Comments widgets from my site, because almost no one used them in 8 months. It’s the reason I’ve stopped building stuff for the community, to be used as open-source (or as-is), and blogging less. Because I often get the feeling that the Internet is dead and we’re just echoes bumping into another from time to time.
The solution is fairly simple. Be yourself. Write about the things you like, photograph the pretty things you like, read the people that you find interesting, connect with the people that you resonate with. Do it for no one else than yourself. Don’t do it for a false sense of validation, which might never come. Don’t do it for money or any other kind of quantifiable gain, because that will become the main purpose of existence for your site.
Less websites, more humans.
Probably the IndieWeb will fade away like the blogosphere once did, and it will be replaced with something else, not decentralized, but focused around the individual. And in five years, the independent web as a social construct might not exist at all anymore, but it’ll just be you and some people you really like making content about the things that you really like. The important part is to stay connected to the people you trust and follow.
Subscribe to their RSS, comment on their articles, post on guestbooks or send an email once in a while. It’s what pushes the thing further.
It’s either that, or all of us fighting each other over politics and other trivial stuff in the Metaverse.
время-самое драгоценное из всех средств
time is the most precious of all resources