The Weird Part Was the Platforms

Stevie Bonifield in The indie web is here to make the internet weird again:

The end of Twitter may be indirectly part of the flourishing of the indie web trend because there's no longer a "default" social media hub everyone uses. Our social spaces online have become somewhat fractured as a result, which may be making it easier for people to adapt to the algorithm-free world of the indie web.

I've written about this for years. The indie web, ActivityPub, owning your content. People nodded along but stayed on Twitter because that's where everyone was. Now Twitter's ‘gone’, replaced by a dozen fractured alternatives, and suddenly the indie web doesn't seem so weird.

The article suggests this fracturing made it easier for people to adapt to algorithm-free spaces. I think it's simpler. People didn't choose the indie web. They just ran out of places to go.

When there was one big platform, leaving meant missing out. Now there's Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and whatever else springs up next week. No single space feels needed anymore. The FOMO vanished. Once that happened, having your own blog stopped looking like the odd choice.

I moved to micro.blog back in 2018 when I got tired of the attention economy. Then spent years watching people cling to Twitter like it was the only way to exist online. The platform was actively hostile to its users and they stuck around anyway. Now it's imploded and those same people are discovering what some of us knew all along: you don't need a central hub.

The "algorithm-free world" sounds noble. Truth is, most people just want somewhere to post without the rage bait and exploitation. Somewhere that doesn't constantly try to manipulate them into scrolling longer or clicking more ads. The indie web offers that by default because there's no company trying to maximise engagement metrics.

What The Verge calls a trend is really just people rediscovering the obvious. When you publish on your own site, you control your content. When you're not trapped in one platform's ecosystem, you can move between spaces without abandoning your work. When there's no algorithm, you see what you choose to see.

The weird part isn't that the indie web exists. It's that we ever thought centralised platforms were a better idea.