Start building your presence on IndieWeb: a practical guide
It seems like in recent months big corporations have unanimously decided to start disrespecting their users and taking over their intellectual property. Adobe, Meta, and Figma have already added clauses to their terms of use saying they can (and will) feed user-generated content into their generative AI models. This means your creations could be used to train their systems, potentially without your consent. It’s only a question of time when others will follow suit.
Doesn’t this feel like a blatant disregard for your rights? You’re not alone. Many people are leaving the “corporate web” in favor of the Indie Web. Let’s explore how you can join it too and how Macula can help you build a rich presence on the independent web.
What is IndieWeb and why you should care
The IndieWeb is the collection of independent web sites, run typically by individuals, for individuals, using said websites to represent their primary identity and storage/hosting/posting of content on the web, in contrast to sharecropping on social media silos.
Own your data. Create and publish content on your own site, and only optionally syndicate to third-party silos.
— Mozilla Wiki
The IndieWeb is the community of people making their own websites and using them as the primary online identity and place for sharing content. It stands on a number of principles, among which are owning your content and being in control, which these days seem even harder to achieve otherwise.
The cornerstone of IndieWeb is having your own domain and building everything around it. Once you have a domain, you start building a website however you want and put everything you want there, optionally aggregating it to content silos like X, Instagram, and the others (see POSSE section below).
By doing so, you future-proof your content, keep ownership, and avoid vendor lock-ins. You can change hosting providers, tools, design, layout, and everything in between, but the content will stay yours. Say, migrating from one hosting provider to another is as easy as re-uploading your already-created site. What about Instagram, for example? How easy is it to export everything from your profile and migrate it somewhere else?
Getting started on IndieWeb
Content ownership and freedom sound nice, but how do you get started? Don’t fret, we’ve got you covered!
Step 1: Buy a domain
Domain is gonna be your primary identity on the IndieWeb so make sure to think carefully before buying one. If you already have a handle you use on social media, it can be a good option.
Step 2: Make your website
Right from here things can get overwhelming pretty quickly. How do you make a website? Where do you host it? Do you need a CMS or not? What even is a CMS!?
When starting out, don’t get caught up in the details. If you know what you’re doing, go for it. If it’s your first time making a website, stick with the simplest option that will get you to a result the quickest. And your website doesn’t have to have dozens of pages either. Even the home page is a great start!
If you’re looking for more guidance, we have written two short guides on making a self-hosted photo gallery: with Jekyll static site generator, and 11ty static site generator. The IndieWeb Wiki is also a good place to start.
Step 3: Add some content
Now that you have a website and a home page, how about posting something? Whether you want to write your thoughts or share some pictures, you have complete control over what and how to present!
If you plan to include a lot of images or videos on your website, Macula is a great place to host them. But more on that below.
Step 4: Show it off!
Now that you have your very own awesome website, let the world know about it. Add it to your social media profile and tell your friends — maybe they will want to join the fun too!
Step 5 (Advanced): Markup and federated conversations
By now you’re pretty much done with the basics so you can just keep improving your website and adding more content. But to really step up your IndieWeb game, it’s worth adding microformats and Webmentions. These act as a way of communicating between IndieWeb sites, enabling everyone to communicate in a federated manner. Say, instead of a single Twitter thread, the communication spans across multiple websites.
Check a handy guide at https://indiewebify.me/ to learn how to do this. It also includes tools to check the markup and send Webmentions manually.
POSSE
Depending on your motivation and goals, you may still want to tap into a larger audience than content silos like Instagram or X provide. When joining IndieWeb, you don’t have to give up on them. The idea of IndieWeb is to have your personal website as the primary identity and content storage, but it doesn’t forbid sharing elsewhere. For that, we have POSSE.
POSSE stands for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, and means exactly what it says on the tin: first, you publish content on your website, and then you share links to it (or copies) on other places. This allows you to have a “single source of truth” while still letting your friends see your content and interact with it.
Moreover, by doing things this way it’s easier to control ownership and attribution. Your own website won’t purge image metadata (like most social networks do) and by adding special markup, you can inform bots and crawlers about copyright statements and AI training permissions.
Macula, IndieWeb, and POSSE
When it comes to hosting a website, you have dozens of options, many of which are free. Heck, you can even serve a website from a Raspberry Pi or even your Android phone! This is because websites are relatively small and the provider needs to host only a handful of HTML, CSS, and JS. But what about media-rich websites that have a lot of images and videos?
This is where Macula comes into play. Just like a hosting provider for your website, you can host and serve visual content with Macula. Each piece of content you publish with Macula gets a unique Universal Link you can embed directly on your website or even share on content silos to get exposure without giving away the original piece of content, following the POSSE way.
But Macula is much more than a simple hosting provider. It has built-in non-destructive image editing, copyright traceability, data mining permissions, and much more.
