You don't need a deal with a label. You don't need a platform's blessing.
I. WE ARE THE DIY KIDS
Punk didn't wait for labels to say yes. It plugged in a blown-out amp in someone's basement and played anyway. Bad singer? Makes no difference. Three chords? You go. Own a drum kit but never had a lesson? You're the drummer now.
The IndieWeb works the same way. Nobody's waiting for permission to publish a website. You don't need a "content strategy." You don't need a niche. You need a place that's yours, and the nerve to hit publish.
Sometimes it's ugly. It's the wrong font. It's a blog post about nothing at all. It works, and it's yours.
II. WE OWN THE MASTERS NOW
In the old days, the music industry owned the masters, the distribution, the airwaves. You made the music; they made the money and decided if anyone got to hear it.
Big platforms run the same racket. You write the posts, build the audience, generate the engagement, and they own the feed, the algorithm, and the right to bury you or boot you whenever it suits the shareholders.
Not here. Own your domain. Own your data. Own your identity. Your words live on infrastructure you control, not on borrowed servers that can evict you without notice.
III. NO A&R, NO VENTURE CAPITAL, NO GATEKEEPERS
No punk band was chasing a platinum record. Punk was about making music and getting it into people's hands - that was the whole transaction.
No indie web builder is chasing Series A. We're not optimising for growth. We're not selling your attention to advertisers. We charge a fair price for a real thing, if we even charge at all, and either way nobody's pitching us to a boardroom.
Small. Sustainable. Answerable to no one but ourselves.
IV. THE ZINE NEVER DIED, IT JUST GOT A DOMAIN
Punk had zines - cut, pasted, photocopied, and passed hand to hand because the real press wouldn't cover it. That's blogging before anyone even called it blogging.
We still do that. A blog is a zine with better uptime. An RSS feed is a mailing list that never asks for your email. Webmentions are show flyers stapled to telephone poles all over town, pointing back to each other, building the scene a link at a time.
Community over audience. Nobody in this room is just watching.
V. MAKE WHAT YOU NEED, NOT WHAT "EVERYONE" NEEDS
Stop designing for some hypothetical user that doesn't exist. Build the thing that scratches your itch. Use it yourself - eat your own dog food. If you're not depending on it, why would anyone else?
Do this enough, in the open, sharing your code and your notes and your half-finished ideas posted for all to see, and the rest of the scene will pick it up. That's how it spreads: not top-down, but kid to kid, site to site.
VI. WEIRD IS A FEATURE
GeoCities had hideous backgrounds, animated GIFs, and a MIDI file that played on page load. It was ugly, but it was also alive in a way no template can ever be.
We're not going for pixel-perfect. We're not A/B testing a homepage. Have fun, or what's the point? Keep the web weird. Keep it handmade. Keep the mohawks.
VII. IT'S AN ALL-AGES SHOW
Punk wasn't always right about this. Each scene had its bouncers at the door and idiots in the pit. Bands worth remembering spent half their set shouting them back out - Rock Against Racism, Riot Grrrl, the Dead Kennedys writing a song to tell the Nazi punks exactly where to go. That wasn't a side project. It was a full-time job.
So... Everybody gets a seat on the Indieweb. No matter your colour, faith, gender, who you love, how your brain is wired, what your body can do, how old you are, where you were born, or which language you write in. Nobody at this door is taking a ticket.
No degree, no job title, no follower count, no years of experience, no permission from others who were on the scene first.
And if you're already inside, hold the door open for others. Link to the new kids. Answer beginner questions without snark. Write the alt text, caption the video, keep it keyboard-reachable. A site nobody can use is a club with stairs at the doors and no accessibility ramp.
All are welcome on the Indieweb.
VIII. THIS IS THE COUNTERCULTURE NOW
In the '80s and '90s, blasting Punk Rock was a way of telling the establishment where to stick it. Today, publishing on your own site instead of feeding the algorithm is the same middle finger, just a little quieter.
We opt out of the surveillance feed. We opt out of the engagement farm. We opt into a web made of small, stubborn, independent spaces that are loosely joined, built to last, and owned by those who make them.
We don't need major platforms.
We have the Web, keyboards, tools, and community.
IndieWeb is Punk. Oi!
Do you ever ask yourself, what is the point?
Why do we work hard to earn money to buy things we don’t need?
I’ve been asking myself that question for years, and I still don’t know the answer.
Lately, the YouTube algorithm has been feeding me videos about EDC items you can’t live without and ten things you should own that will last a lifetime. Some have value. Most miss the point, which makes me scratch my head.
Apparently, one of the first steps towards owning fewer things is buying the correct things to own fewer things.
I have been doing my best to reduce my belongings rather than add to them. When I think about it long enough, I realise I don’t need “stuff”. I’ve written about that many times, but now it is hitting home harder than ever. It is shaping what comes next.
I have a nice MacBook. I have a Pixel 8 Pro running GrapheneOS. I have a compact Canon G9X Mark II camera, which my son has claimed as his own. I own a set of good-quality kitchen knives. I own a nice Skoda hatchback, which I bought outright and owe nothing on. I have just bought the cottage we have lived in for the last five years. Aside from the mortgage, I don’t have consumer debt.
I have everything I need.
Why do I feel I need more things?
“Things haven’t really gone in the right direction. Have you considered a statin?”
I had my annual diabetes health check this week. I know, and have known for quite some time, that I need to do more to address my health issues. I have a list as long as your arm of diabetes-related maladies to manage. The nurse knows it, and so do I.
“Yeah, but I don’t want to change or increase the medication I’m taking. Not until you give me three months to try to turn things around through lifestyle choices.”
She smiled and said, “That’s okay, but you have to consider medication if the numbers don’t show us that you’re moving in the right direction.”
Fair enough, I thought.
I never named anybody.
It didn’t matter. They recognised themselves.
Or they thought they did, which amounts to much the same thing once somebody has decided that a sentence on the internet is definitely about them.
Explaining that it wasn’t did not help. It probably made things worse. I was no longer merely a dangerous blogger. I was now a lying dangerous blogger who refused to admit that everything I wrote revolved around the people I worked with.
I have got myself into hot water before by writing about my day job.
I wrote about the atmosphere. The friction. The odd little cruelties that collect inside a workplace until everybody begins treating them as normal. I wrote about how it felt to spend most of my waking life somewhere that seemed to be making me increasingly miserable.
I avoided names. I left out locations. I changed or removed details.
I thought that was enough.
It wasn’t.
Sometimes I wonder whether I got into trouble at some of the places I have worked because I am more intelligent than some of the people around me.
There. I have written it down.
It looks bloody awful.
Arrogant, elitist and exactly the sort of thing said by somebody who has recently watched a twelve-minute YouTube video about misunderstood geniuses.
I am not saying I am better than everyone else. I don't believe I should be carried into work on a golden throne while my colleagues scatter rose petals beneath my feet.
I am not even sure that intelligence is the right word.
Still, the thought has returned often enough that I cannot dismiss it completely.
I seem to notice things that other people do not. Cracks in plans. Contradictions between what somebody says and what they actually do. Problems sitting quietly beneath the surface while everyone else carries on as though everything is fine.
Sometimes I can see where something is heading before there is enough evidence to explain it properly.
It is a feeling.
Something does not fit.
Something has changed.
Something is being left unsaid.
I have learned not to ignore that feeling because it is often right.
Not always.
That is where the trouble begins.
I had been spreading myself too thin. This was not an unusual state of affairs.
I had started a Substack newsletter and filled it with sections about cars, motorcycles, travel, television and anything else that wandered across my field of vision. The problem, as I saw it then, was that none of it fitted neatly together.
I did not have a niche.