The Indie Web Solves What Corporations Created
Houses at Auvers by Vincent Van Gogh
The internet, once an exciting, new tool for human connection, is now seen as a problem in many people’s personal lives. Books like Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism becoming a New York Times bestseller, and reddits like r/nosurf cropping up with almost 250,000 users, show that people have come to see the technologies of the internet as a double edged sword. Much of this, I think can be attributed to the centralization of the internet. Four out of five of the most visited websites in the past month, August of 2024, were social media sites or content silos, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and X.com.
Most of the internet’s traffic is happening on these centralized sites which are controlled by massive corporations whose primary motive is to make money. Non-coincidentally, the issues people often have with the internet, endless scrolling, rage bait, stealing data, and ads, are all things which directly benefit these corporations. That’s where the Indie Web comes in, a movement away from the corporate web. Indie blogs and personal websites don’t have any of these problems. It doesn’t make sense to freely contribute labor to corporations who are just profiting off of it. Instead if we all posted to our own sites, we could connect with each other without the negative consequences imposed by corporations.
This is why I started my own personal blog and would like to slowly move away from the corporatized internet. All of the data on my blog, is data that I own. It is stored on my computer, and eventually I will create a backup for it on a hard drive as well. I used a tool called Jekyll which is free. I specifically used something called Jekyll now which makes setting up Jekyll very quick and easy. You can have your own personal, blog site up and running within a minute using this tool. I did spend some time using HTML to customize it a little further for my own purposes, but just getting your own blog up and running which is not tied to one of these tech giants is quicker than ever using this tool. The hosting is also free, and it’s provided through GitHub Pages. If you’d like to buy custom domain for the site as well you can use Porkbun and domains are very affordable. Usually, you pay about $15 a year for one. I hope you’ll consider creating your own online presence as well away from these tech giants, and slowly we can build the world we want instead of the one we were given.
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Tags: life , mindfulness