Back to square one

When I was in my teens and 20's, unrecognized trauma and addiction played a big role in my burning of bridges and rebuilding everything from the island I inevitably stranded myself on.

Starting over isn't always such a negative thing though. Sometimes you just paint yourself into a corner and have no other option than to scrap it and take a new approach.

That's where I'm at with blogging.

At first, and for the last couple of years, I went all in on the IndieWeb™ — the smaller, quieter part of the internet that's reminiscent of the good ol' days online.

People building their own things instead of being locked into the corporate walled gardens we have today. Why give control of your content to Meta or Elon Musk? Why not just code your own blog and host it on your own hardware in the basement?

That kind of idea comes on strong, but loses me when it gets to the point of needing to be a seasoned programmer and network admin just to post dumb little blurbs online. I'm tech-literate enough to use Debian Linux as my daily driver; I'm fairly comfortable around a command line when that's the only option. On the blogging front, I actually enjoy spending hours at a time tweaking CSS and even some of the more involved stuff like JavaScript and PHP to give my corner of the web a unique design.

But I have no interest in learning Git or figuring out things like Mailgun, how to build my own CMS or how an SQL database works. I know nothing about this stuff; I don't even know if I'm saying it right half the time. I just know there are a million little things like these that power the web. And if you want to truly self-host everything and completely cut out every big tech company, you might as well get a computer science degree and reinvent the wheel in your own image.

Luckily, there are plenty of solutions to this problem that pride themselves as being more indie. Things like Micro.blog and omg.lol are both very open and user-first; they're independently run and you can always pack up and migrate somewhere else if you ever change your mind.

But it's more nuanced than that, of course. You may own your data; you can download an archive of it anytime you want in a just a few clicks. But it's never as straightforward as simply plugging it in somewhere else.

Micro.blog allows you to export your data in a couple different formats — Blog Archive Format, which is essentially useless in my experience, and an XML file you can import to Wordpress. Facebook also lets you export your data, but good luck figuring out what to do with it. The obvious difference is that Facebook is a sinister multibillion dollar corporation with tens of thousands of employees, where something like Micro.blog has one employee, and it's the guy who owns the place. And I'm not as familiar with it, but I assume omg.lol is similar.

Both have insanely dedicated, hard working owners who have poured their soul into these platforms over the years. But they're really no less of a walled garden than Facebook or X. They're friendlier and more human, and they're not sacrificing your data to appease the AI overlords, but they're still a platform with a ton of different features weaved together in a way that nowhere else does it. That's great if you're okay making it your permanent online home, because moving away isn't going to be a 1:1 transfer like it is jumping from one Mastodon server to another, for instance.

You can't just leave omg.lol and seamlessly import all of your data directly into Ghost any more than you can transfer years of posts from Micro.blog to Wordpress in one graceful motion. It can definitely be done, but you're likely to end up with tons of broken links, images and videos that you'll have to re-upload a handful at a time and manually update on every post.

So I'm no longer going to get hung up on whether or not some random website I use is indie enough. Nor am I going to cry over losing hundreds of posts I'll probably never give a second thought to anyway. I used to think it was important to join small Mastodon servers to do my little part in keeping the web decentralized, but half the time they end up going offline because it's too expensive or too stressful for a small team to run and moderate. I went all in on platforms like Micro.blog that still feel like an alpha after nearly a decade of development. And now I'm on Leaflet; a thing that, admittedly, is in its alpha stage.

I guess up to this point it almost feels like I'm making an argument in favor of self-hosting over picking a ready-made platform, but I'm not.

The purpose of this rant isn't to trash the independent corner of the internet I love so much or the hard-working folks tirelessly building it — I'm only touching on the things I'm hitting some turbulence with lately. Things I'm only just beginning to find out for myself. In all honesty, I met some pretty fucking cool people here; people I respect and look up to very much.

My point is this: you have to be willing to burn it down and start over sometimes if you're going to invest so much of yourself in highly experimental, small batch, hand-built platforms. Half of this stuff — most of it, probably — will disappear some day due to lack of funding, burnout, drama; you name it. What's important are the friends you made along the way. Or something like that.

I mentioned using Linux earlier - that's actually a pretty good example of where these indie corners of the web will eventually end up, I think. 20 years ago, I would've rage quit Linux after a day or two if I tried to move from Windows XP. These days, there are distros even my boomer parents can navigate with ease.

Open source, community-built things often move at a snail's pace, but they usually have great intentions at heart. It takes a while for everything to fall into place, but it'll get there.

One day, migrating to a different platform entirely might be as universal as the cable you plug into the bottom of your iPhone or Android to charge. But for now? I'm not afraid to empty the recycle bin and start from scratch every so often.