(2025-12-08) On the "indie Web", real and fake
----------------------------------------------
My recent week had been extremely difficult in every possible sense. However,
I managed to stumble upon an interesting phenomenon I never met before: fake
indie Web. What do I mean by that?
Imagine signing up in a place that poses to be the opposite of big,
commercialized Web, "striving to bring back the spirit of Web 1.0", designed
in a cyberpunk asethetics, emphasizing on usage of no AI, algorithms,
tracking or other modern scum, distancing itself from "the cyber malls of
the corpos". The place looks nice and promising a great hacker vibe at the
first glance.
But then, you open the feed. And get instantly bombarded with words like…
Windows. Iphone. Spotify. Apple Music. Rust. C#.
"Lolwut? Where am I really?"
And then you read the FAQ:
> Images aren’t loading? They need a WebGL shader component to render. Enable
WebGL in your browser settings.
> Stack? Nuxt frontend. Firebase backend. Vercel hosting. Your email and
password are safe and encrypted using Firebase Auth.
And then you open the CSS styles. Tailwind over the top.
And the site doesn’t even display in Dillo Plus because its "Vercel security
check" requires JS. Even with JS, the auth doesn’t work on some Android
browsers.
And then, the more you read the feed, the more you realize all of it is a
fucking charade.
No real hackers there. No believers in the cause. Not a single person who
knows what it’s really like to live in a dystopia (which I’ve been trapped
in for the last 4 years btw). Just average lusers with their first-world
problems, not having a slightest clue what they are doing, hipsters who
think they are somehow different (by going all-in form over function) and
aggressive commies who call to silence and cancel anyone who doesn’t agree
with their doctrine of conformity.
It’s just another fad. Just another pseudo-underground to steal your
attention from what really matters.
And I fell for it too and spent several days lurking there before realizing
what it really was.
Social media are doomed not because of all of the modern surveillance and
algorithm techniques, but because people (at least their online part) have
changed throughout the last 20 years. You can fix the medium but you can't
fix the users. They are different now. Most of them already have grown up
without any notion of thinking outside the propaganda narratives. They
either keep discovering obvious facts as some kind of great revelations, or
they seal themselves hermetically within their world of pink ponies and get
offended if someone tries opening their eyes on the truth, which can be even
uglier than Rust language syntax.
This is why truly independent Web can never exist in the form of social media
anymore. By the way, I have decided to return to the Web in the form of
ad-hoc no-JS microblogging ([1]) and some space for JS-based experiments
([2]). Yes, the second website was created on Neocities, which is a fair
effort to support individual creativity from the true early Web days
perspective. It even has a CLI program for easy uploading, as well as a HTML
editor built into the admin panel itself, also hosting some HTML/CSS
tutorials for total noobs. Which, to be honest, is the right way to go
instead of forcing everyone into the same design style and decisions made
for them by someone else. The more people know the actual HTML and CSS
instead of endless bloatware frameworks, the better Web as a whole can be.
What if everyone, instead of using a locked down social platform, created
their own Web pages with their own unique content, linking to each other’s
posts on different sites? Crazy, huh?
Anyway, in case you're not doing this, please don't call yourselves "indie
web".
--- Luxferre ---
[1]:
https://lynx.luxferre.top
[2]:
https://ironlynx.neocities.org
