why should I join the indie web movement when I already have Facebook, TikTok, and the Gram?

(a lot of this page is basically a summary of the great Cory Doctorow's Enshittification. I highly recommend grabbing this book OFF HIS INDEPENDENT SHOPS IF YOU CAN! and learning more about how the whole world wide web has been getting enshittified for us since even elder millennials like me were still enshittifying our diapers.)

I highly encourage you to explore the concept of enshittification. here's the tl;dr: while convenient and addictive, contemporary mainstream social media platforms have historically followed a pattern of becoming lecherous and all-consuming. we permit them to exploit us for our data as they generate content for us that ranges from irrelevant to harmful, all the while siphoning money from business customers they don't even deliver results for. if you spend two-and-a-third hours on social media each day, starting when you're ten and ending when you die at 80, you'll have spent nearly seven years of your life just on social media.

to be clear, I'm not doggin' on anyone's desire to stay connected. that's where social media gets us: we like to be with our friends, but we can't always be with our friends. we have jobs and lives, we move away for college or new employment opportunities, and... well, sometimes we want to nose around a neighbor's life without actually having to interact with them because they are terrible.

but, here is where the indie web movement comes in. if you could spend those seven years, or even a fraction of those seven years, taking up meaningful skills (web development and administration), engaging with content made by others on the indie web (such as other Neocities sites, or niche social networks and forums), and leaving a mark on the Internet that can't be exploited to make a billionaire more billionaire-y, you might feel more fulfilled by your time online--and have a lot of fun doing it.

my friends won't leave Facebook with me and join the indie web movement. do I have to blackmail them into it?

no. if you blackmail your friends into leaving mainstream socials with you, you will probably solve your problem of not having any friends left on mainstream socials, but it will be because you won't have any friends left in general.

the reason it's hard to leave a platform like Facebook or Twitter or what have you is because of the collective action problem. when something is all of our job, that "something" becomes none of our job. "this platform sucks and we don't want to be on it anymore; where do we go now?" is a much bigger, harder-to-solve problem for hundreds of friends than "we're hungry but we can't pick between Taco Bell and Burger King" for the three people in my household, yet the three people in my household somehow face the latter problem multiple times a week. hence, the collective action problem. unless we are all commanded by an executive authority or compelled by collective desire, it's hard for us to agree on how to proceed.

what I'm trying to tell you is that it's okay if your friends don't jump on board with you. you can reduce your mainstream social media consumption and still engage with friends, while developing your plot of digital land here on the indie web.

sooo... I can have my cake and eat it, too?

yeah, totally! here's what I've done. for the sake of brevity, I'll use Meta's products as my examples, but you can apply this logic to really about anything.

first of all, I've separated my use of mainstream socials into two categories: essential and non-essential. for me, my essential uses of Meta platforms were Facebook Marketplace; using Messenger to stay in touch with my loved ones in Wisconsin, the Philippines, and Hawaii; local community groups in my county so that I can help with mutual aid (this became especially important after the shutdown and SNAP crisis); and staying current with subcultural events (like Indiana goth nights) on Instagram. without Meta's platforms, I would not be able to access this information. non-essential was everything else, like scrolling and seeing people's posts.

I personally have a very addictive personality and could not limit myself to just a little scrolling "as a treat"; therefore, I leave myself logged out of my platforms when not in use. some people find that they can afford themselves a bit of non-essential social media time and leave it at that, sort of like those people who only smoke cigarettes when they're drunk (in fairness, I, too, only smoked cigarettes when I was drunk; I was just always drunk). when not engaging in your very minimal if any non-essential social media time, log yourself out. always require yourself to log back in every time you want to use an addictive social media platform. they rope you in with convenience, so make these things as inconvenient as possible. then, when you need to buy something off Marketplace/have some extra food for a pantry/want to check out a local event, log back in, search quickly, and log right back out again.

will you miss out on keeping up with your good friends? yes, and it's an exercise in remembering how to strike up conversations again, and ask people how things have gone. will you miss out on keeping up with your casual acquaintances? also yes, and that's an exercise in giving way less of a fuck about the personal goings-on of people we would otherwise never have over for a meal. more dinner dates, less likes and subscribes, please.

okay, I wanna make a cool site like yours but I don't know where to begin!

never fear. I will help you succeed!

like I discussed here and in my indie web manifesto, a big problem with the web over the last two decades is that it's gone from being extremely customizable and versatile, to this big pile of shit that we all have to play in just to still be each other's friends. to quote Tom Eastman, "I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four." in fact, I am so old that my first forays on the web were on Windows 95. my first HTML/CSS teacher was Lissa Explains it All when Lissa was still a kid updating her site regularly. Geocities, MySpace, Xanga, and LiveJournal let you customize CSS--and I had it all. (CSS is still my favorite language today! ah, the delicious combination of left and right brains, logic and art, function and form.) what I'm trying to say is that I am so fucking old now that today's weird websites look like the normal websites from when I was a kid.

I'm therefore ecstatically grateful and honored to help provide resources to any individuals looking to hop on the indie web and make a website of their own. I'm also humbled to give credit where credit is due; my own website would not exist without the amazing minds of those whose code I have adapted for my own use.

keep in mind: in addition to the indie web movement, I am also a proud member of the dumbphone movement. most of these resources, therefore, will cater to a dekstop-based experience; I believe we should go back to a simpler time where the phone was for calling, texting, and taking a shitty low-res picture once in a while. because I trained as a software developer in the Bootstrap-obsessed 2010s, I will include a section on mobile responsiveness, but... that's mostly just because, y'know, it's 2025 🙄. (as of November 2025, I have not gotten around to a mobile responsiveness page. Google what you need and get over it lmao.)

get ready: we're gonna learn how to write code, make silly graphics, use easy resources from all around the web, and build cool websites together!