The IndieWeb in 2030
Published by on 2025-12-31 in 🔖 carnival 🔖 indieWeb
My contribution to the IndieWeb Carnival, December 2025 - the IndieWeb in 2030.In the IndieWeb Carnival Dec ’25 invitation, Venkatram asked where we see the IndieWeb in 2030. In answering it is necessary to consider what the IndieWeb is, which is described on the IndieWeb website:
The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”.
We are a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.
Photographs of Toast
Putting the website at the core of the IndieWeb is the complete opposite to the development of social media silos over much of the past two decades. The internet was certainly much better fun before the emergence of the social media giants of the late 2000s. Most social media users did not give up personal websites to join a silo though, the photograph of their toast on the timeline probably was their first meaningful contribution to the internet.
IndieWeb as a Service
To be an attractive alternative to the corporate giants of the social media world, the IndieWeb has to be easy to join, and easy to participate in. Simply it needs to be more accessible to grow beyond the fairly narrow cohort it attracts today.
I've been writing on my own website since 2004, but I've only really considered myself to be participating in the IndieWeb since early 2023 when I combined a number of Wordpress projects together on micro.blog. In the time since then I have rebuilt my site completely using Kirby CMS hosted with Krystal, have rebuilt my site on a new domain using the bearblog service, and more recently have completely rebuilt that using the 11ty static site generator hosted on Statichost, and then Netlify. Most normal people don't spend hours building this stuff, they throw a picture of their breakfast on the social media platform of their choice, and move on.
The IndieWeb of 2030 needs to have solutions that make it as easy to get involved in the IndieWeb as it is to get involved in large social media silos. It needs a genuine IndieWeb as a Service solution.
Micro.blog probably comes as close to this as I've seen, frustratingly close, with an application suite that makes it easy to post short and longform content. But for structural rigidity, I'd probably still be hosting there now.
Community
I'm sure that the IndieWeb can feel lonely at times, particularly to new participants. The alternative is some form of content algorithm that runs against the people focused alternative that the IndieWeb is.
The community building blocks are already there. From carnivals like this one, to photoblogging challenges and the Homebrew Website Clubs - they just need to be more discoverable and accessible to people who do not even know they exist.
What does need to improve, stepping into the fediverse, is cross-discoverability of content across different instances. Projects like David's TagPush are needed to help people with common interests connect with each other properly, and to discover posts that they are interested in reading but would not otherwise see. Being one of two people talking about Burnley FC on micro.blog was great, but with better discoverability across platforms might have even been three people!
Share elsewhere
Options to automatically and easily share content from website to the fediverse were improved hugely with the release of the EchoFeed web app around 12 months ago. Using different feeds and conditionals Echofeed allows the writer to share different types of content to different services differently.
While Echofeed can post to Mastodon, micro.blog and Bluesky, options that can post to other fediverse providers such as GoToSocial, Lemmy, Pixelfed etc could help to broaden this further.
Swimlanes
Venkatram asks how the IndieWeb can stand up to the CorpoWeb better in coming years. It does not need to.
There are features of the IndieWeb that are inherently good, that I would not want to change, prominent amongst those is the absence of any algorithm, and the influencers they promote.
Sure there are people active on the IndieWeb with greater reach and audience than others. But my mastodon server is not going to force marketing content into my feed unless I've been stupid enough to put it there myself.
The IndieWeb does not need to stand up to the CorpoWeb, it just needs to stay in its own swimlane, living its own values, doing its own thing. It is not in competition with the deadweb, it is a viable alternative for people to turn to once they tire of being the product.
Wrapping up
The IndieWeb is a fundamentally good alternative to, but not really in competition with, corporate social media - nor should it try to be.
It would benefit from a complete Indieweb as a Service solution that lets non-technical people do lots of the magic things that people like Jan-Lukas Else and Aaron Parecki make their websites do, without needing to dive into documentation and build things.
Better hashtag and/or content discoverability across instances, particularly in relation to self-hosted instances, would help newer users to find interesting content and people much more quickly. Further options to syndicate content out from websites more widely still can only help.
What do you think?