@manton.org

There is no mention of the IndieWeb in Shubham Agarwal’s article for Business Insider, but I think IndieWeb might be what the author is yearning for.

It isn’t that I don’t want to post; I just don’t know where to do it anymore.

Your own website could be the perfect place to post. Please hear me out.

Having your own website gives you total ownership of your platform and your content. It does not have to be expensive, or hard, either. Neocities is a free platform to build and host a simple (static) website. Unlike other programming environments, the web considers its builders regular people and not IT professionals, and continues to write standards with that consideration.

If getting a domain name, setting up web hosting, and configuring some kind of system for publishing still sounds overwhelming, you can pay Micro.blog $5 a month to host your website, and purchase your domain name there, too. I run my own personal website with WordPress, which is a bit more expensive and only about as technical as having to update software regularly. There is a friendly community of people eager and willing to help you, too.

In the past year, I’ve helplessly migrated alongside most of my network from one new platform to another — Discord, Bluesky, Threads. You name it, I’ve tried it. The pattern is the same: I sign up for the hot, new app, toy with it for a few days, and then quickly abandon it. While widespread platform migrations have taken place successfully over the years — I migrated from Google’s Orkut, a popular platform in India and Brazil in the late aughts, to Facebook to Instagram to TikTok — I have never before found myself in no man’s land. If none of these platforms are lining up to be the new Facebook, what is the future?

Shubham Agarwal