Be IndieWeb Enough

Joe Crawford has run artlung.com since 1997. Here he revisits a 2016 post about why the personal web matters to him, then takes stock. A decade on he uses far more IndieWeb tooling (h-cards, webmentions, rel=me links, backups of his old silo posts), and he insists that makes him no more IndieWeb than before, because nobody keeps score. No one should feel lesser for skipping a building block. What counts is the principles, above all owning your domain and data, plurality, and having fun.

He is careful about politics. IndieWeb takes no position on particular conflicts or policies, he says, but it is political about free expression and against silos that censor, shadow-ban and disappear. He puts self-publishing in the line of pamphleteers and samizdat.

On AI he is mixed. He uses autocomplete and local models, and calls AI software whose risk grows with whatever it is connected to, but he holds the companies behind it unaccountable for harms to creators, resources and democracy. His hope is that AI does not split the community. He ends on accountability: a silo’s behaviour matters more than its existence, regulation is a lever, and personal sites can do some of the work.