Principles

The IndieWeb community keeps a short list of principles on its wiki: not rules, but what the people building independent personal websites have agreed matters.

The first and best known is to own your domain and your data: your identity, what you publish and the metadata around it, rather than renting all three from a platform. The rest follow from building things for yourself. Make what you need first, actually use it, and write down how you did it. Share the code as open source. Put the experience of the people using a site ahead of protocols and data models, keeping the standards as small as they can be. Build pieces that are modular and not tied to any platform, so they can be swapped out, and build them to last.

The last two are about the spirit of the thing. The community values many approaches over one right way, and it wants the web to stay fun, weird and interesting.