If you spend time in IndieWeb discussion circles, such as chat.indieweb.org or the get-togethers listed on events.indieweb.org, or if you spend time wandering through the indieweb.org wiki, you will find evidence that many of us share the view that UX must come first[1].

There are one-click-setup IndieWeb entry points. The most prominent is micro.blog which gives you a personal blog/site with all the latest IndieWeb goodness and costs $5/month.

But most people interested in the IndieWeb these days are devs, i.e. nerds, and want to roll things themselves, which is why IndieWeb-related blog posts can feel like tech soup.

This is something IW members would gladly see change! Adoption by non-nerds is something the IW cares about. David Shanske[2], for instance, has spent much time in the last decade on Wordpress plugins that gives you much of of the IW tools out of the box [3].

Finally, you don't need to use all of the tech to be "doing IndieWeb". Having your own domain is the first and most important step. Then maybe you[4] try making a few pages: raw HTML, generated from Markdown, Django, whatever. Then you can add Microformats. Then maybe add a script to send WebMentions, or use a free hosted service to do it for you. Then branch out in whatever direction you choose. At all of these stages, your site is still IndieWeb.

[1] I'm not as active in IW circles as I was a few years ago but still consider myself part of it: my personal site has microformats, I use Micropub to update it, etc.

[2] david.shanske.com

[3] https://profiles.wordpress.org/dshanske/#content-plugins

[4] Generic "you".

No. Exact opposite. Opening it up to everyone is what kills everything good, the endless september of grocery store tabloid aisles and clickbait. Gatekeepers are good, restrictions on participation are good. The internet was better when it was a self selecting place for interesting interested people and not the global walmart.

I'm pretty new to this so I can't speak for IndieWeb, but I wouldn't blame them. People who seek independence from the social silos are usually engineers or other web-aware people. It is only natural that they want to solve the problem with the knowledge they possess and tools they know - and I think it's fine. If you look back at how internet evolved, it was always like this - the geeks and nerds coming up with something fun but naturally hard to get into for the regular folk. But then it would get more and more approachable until it adopted for the said regular folk.

I think the IndieWeb is at this early stage. The adoption for a broader audience will come naturally (if this survives), but for now - let them cook

Hi! I started a startup, Known, that did exactly this in 2014, explicitly as part of the indieweb movement. The open source code is still around.

The trick is the economics here. A one-click solution is great, but right now the indieweb solves an ideological but not a hard _user_ problem. There isn't enough "there" there to either justify investment or get enough customers to cover the costs of a service.

The closest is micro.blog, which is a genuinely great service that bakes in this tech under the hood. But the tradeoff is that you can't run it on your own infra; it's a centralized service that is compatible with the protocols but isn't quite a genuinely indieweb tool.

I've wondered if there might be something around providing better tools for logging an agent's activities, or for publishing from a sensor / server / etc, but that's all speculation. Without a genuine hard user need, it's hard to imagine how this would work as a turnkey service.

They realize it's "unworkable for 90% of users" and they don't care.

Part of the Indieweb philosophy, like Libre software, is to "scratch your own itch" - no one's paying you. You do the stuff that's interesting to you. It's not a business. The point is not to take over the market.

The planet needs fewer marketing pinheads, not more. I would like it if we passed various laws that killed off a lot of the marketing pinheads, basically eliminating their jobs one way or another, and encouraged more people to create the things they want, rather than submit to the things that are popular.

The pinheads rarely create much of substance and mostly just sit around strategizing all day on how to rent seek. They have a lot of free time and money they can use to lobby the government and make it worse. They dress this all up as capitalism though it isn't really. We should strike back.

that it was so perversely gatekept is what made the early internet so enjoyable though.

I find it all the more appealing with that barrier to entry because I miss the internet that this community is nostalgically trying to replicate and reproduce.

Its initial 7 steps: having your domain, managing your site, creating your pages... are quite accessible. There is some unavoidable complexity, such as configuring DNS. However, with interest and AI, there are no real limitations.

> If you users have to go anywhere near a command line, or Docker, or they have to hand-edit HTML or CSS, you're creating walls most users aren't going to scale.

Oh, no?

Doing a quick look over the article and your comment, I gotta agree. If you want stupid simple and content first, why wouldn't you use the gemini protocol? Pages are in mark down, no way to embed gotchas in it.

Its not one click, but is massively simple and building up tooling around it to make it easier would also be super simple.

People who aren't willing to put any effort into learning how computers and the internet work are free to stay on Xitter and Facebook. Not everything has to be for everyone.

+1. unless I see IndieWeb in AppStore and real volume of real people use it, it is all tech people toy hobbies

(which seems diametrically opposite of IndieWeb: no HTML - iOS/Android is the king, no browsers, no desktop, no terminal, no GitHub, gated App Stores, rich media, videos is the king)

Indieweb is sometimes tied to self-hosting to give people configurabilty and flexibilty.

It does keep indieweb for the few and not the many.

>If you users have to go anywhere near a command line, or Docker, or they have to hand-edit HTML or CSS, you're creating walls most users aren't going to scale.

>If you want to put content UX first, you need to do exactly that, with a one-click solution that gets users up and running instantly.

You clearly don't understand the IndieWeb movement, which consists of amateurs and professionals who are motivated to go the extra mile and learn this stuff. The reason the Internet is the way it is in 2026 is precisely because we’ve eliminated all friction and have cultivated the dumbest possible user.

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