Ephemeral Dawn is an Indie Web Project, Actually: A Problem With The Indie Web

There is a growing trend lately, amplified (and rightly) by the quagmire social media has rapidly become, that sees the revival of the indieweb and that lost feeling that there was a real person behind the websites you landed on. It’s a movement that prizes ownership and individuality over ‘AI slop’ and the corporate web, which might be said to include anything from social media to just a modern, business-like aesthetic on the site – that fact varying a bit more by the advocate’s personal taste than any implicit limitation by the philosophy of the indie web.

That leads me into why I’m writing this post. I know someone who’s into the Indie Web with their own homepage on Neocities,¹ to whom I’ve not shown my own site, but parts of it in screenshots. Their view has been tacitly that Ephemeral Dawn (they are not aware this is its name) is not truly indie web, and my view is that it is. It’s in this difference of opinion that I want to explore what I think indie web really means, and perhaps where the movement has an ugly, elitist side that fights with its own core beliefs.

What is the Indie Web, Really?

There is an organised website for the IndieWeb that describes itself as a “people focused alternative to the ‘corporate web'”. It goes on to describe the idea of the Indie Web as:

“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.”

Ownership and control are at the forefront of this mission and that’s important to keep in mind. It’s not a complex mission statement, but it is something that some indie web advocates (and for clarity I mean people who support the idea of an independent web, and not the IndieWeb itself) sometimes lose sight of in pursuit of a sort of an aesthetic hegemony or in a misplaced expression of taste over philosophy.

Wide as an Ocean, Deep as a Puddle: The Conflation Between a Retro Aesthetic and an Indie Philosophy

A lot of indie web sites – and the person’s with whom my debate spurred this post – are static sites, not dynamic. The difference is partly in how they are built, and partly how they work. Without being tiresome to the non-techy readers, I think it’s fair to explain it to a lay audience along the lines that a static site displays content that remains static. This doesn’t mean that little things don’t animate, but that the content of the page (the text, images) aren’t dynamically changed as the site evolves. Changing them requires manually going to that page and editing it directly.

By contrast, dynamic sites do change automatically as new content is fed into it, usually through a content management system (such as WordPress). When I wrote my post on how systems fight with human stories, I wrote the text, put the images in between some paragraphs, and posted it. The page, with all the styling and the sidebar and the comments, etc., was made automatically based on a design I’d built and saved before. When I write this post, the same will happen. I don’t need to go and add all this stuff each time I make a new post. The site is dynamic. Not static.

I mention this because it affects how the websites are used, and this can affect its alignment to the idea of an indie web.

Visuals and Depth Are Not One and the Same:

One system offers no superiority over the other when it comes to aesthetics. Whether static or dynamic a page still needs designing, and both indie web platforms and WordPress support freedom of design. What they do not equally support are structure, and thence use, and true freedom is there.

Before I move on to talk (don’t worry, it’s layman friendly/jargon free) about tech stacks and freedom, I want to address the aesthetics issue with indie-web gatekeeping because it misses the entire point of the freedom inherent to the indie web.

There are some people, and my conversation partner was one of them, who dislike the ‘corporate’ look of modern websites and therefore deeply prefer the wild, individualistic and retro style inherent to platforms like Neocities, seen as a leading bastion of what the indie web ‘really is’.

This is a mistake that people inclined to that thought repeatedly make and it emerges as a theme in later sections: in their minds, there is no precision or clarity between matters of taste and matters of philosophical coherence. My website is, to their taste, modern and corporate. It’s… sort of mobile responsive (I’m working on that), it’s designed in that typical way where there are sections of content you scroll down over a lot of ‘white space’ to see lower content. Contrast this with the often very crowded, ‘everything fits on one page’ way that many (though not all) indie web sites are designed.

Indie web has started to fall for the same problem that plenty of other subcultures have over time. Once, a very distinctive visual style was a way to distinguish yourselves as different from the ‘mass’, but now it has ended up becoming something of a hegemony that suffers the same mistake as the mass they criticise.

Corporate websites are dull because they’re all built broadly the same; header at the top, icon on the left and menu on the right. Scroll down to a hero section, usually a statement image – in my case, the video of the sailing ship. Then you scroll down to an about or service section depending on the site’s purpose, then a ‘content’ section usually showing a blog, and so on.

But how has the indie web not made itself equally as predictable? On the left side of the page you have normally got the navigational panels for different parts of the site. In the middle you have the content of the page. On the right you have the sidebar: self-promo, a little about me, other pages I like, status updates, that sort of thing.

The bland, flat, and boxy style common to corporate websites is just as predictable as the garish, flashy, loud style of indie sites. Except no one way has to look like this. The platform doesn’t enforce these design standards; it’s the taste and intention of the user building on it.

It should be noted too that even within these typical standards (that risk being entrenched too much as rules), there is still great room for creativity. My site might follow a critic’s idea of a corporate formula but it is very different to any corporation’s site. In turn, my critic’s Neocities site follows that Neocities formula but looks nothing like any of the images I’ve posted here of other Neocities sites.

My Website Was Actually Designed Intentionally:

I think something implicit to their criticism of corporate-looking sites is a perceived lack of expression, or intent to express, but my view is other: if the only way difference registers for someone is in overt and garish display, their perception is the greater obstacle than another’s expression.

I designed my site deliberately. It also evolved. There are no screenshots of the early days unfortunately, but it used to be heavily beige and built in obvious blocks – quite uniform and while not tasteless, not as atmospheric as I wanted. So I changed it. Now, it’s photo-heavy because of my interest in photography, and sections transition with a dark haze that overlays the seam between where two images meet as you scroll down.

It’s not flashy. It’s nearly invisible. That’s the point. It’s a calm, understated presence that gives an ethos of quietness, slowness, and a certain inability to clearly see the whole image. This haze is something I felt was deeply dream-like, when you are trying to recall a memory but it’s just not all there. Or when you wake up, and likewise can’t see perfectly sharply just yet. Both states are ones of searching; of a kind of gentle yearning, and it’s precisely that which I wanted to capture in my design.

It’s not my wish to flash bright lights and shout everything I say. My site is slower, and contemplative. But it is deeply mine, deeply designed, and suffers no lack of personality for not being as one typically imagines an indie web site to look.

Depth Matters, and Where is Yours?

If you will excuse the pointed title for this section, what I mean to discuss here is the substance of a site over its presentation. It is not that presentation doesn’t matter – both my opponent and I agree that it does – but substance does too. On my blog I have written several posts across a range of styles and topics: musings, laments, character analysis, and more; I write poems, I write about visiting the graves of figures from history, I write about systems and human erasure, and I write about academic interests too.

My website is not only designed, it’s also living – it’s a record of me living. And thinking.

It’s in part a limitation of the lack of a simple, and yet complex blogging system by default in indie web sites I am sure – it builds a lot of technical friction before writing a post, which a lot of sites do as a new page of its own instead – but a good many of these indie sites don’t really go on to be lived in. They serve more like a landing page: a loud visual style, and a few images and quotes perhaps to capture the person’s vibe – but they don’t proceed usually to live there. We don’t see their thoughts and opinions evolve, they don’t write about their hobbies or interests… it’s just… that.

And so, for the sites that remain only this, what of depth? I can’t help but feel it’s not so terribly different from an aesthetic Instagram feed or Tumblr page, in that it is only a curation of ‘vibes’ and not of, in any meaningful sense, thought or personality.

Indeed, a good many of those same sites link out to social media, where the person is far more active. I’m unable to find this anything less than amusing, as it really epitomises a performative streak, but the very absence of depth I highlight here. My site links to social media too. Three channels that I barely ever post to, because I don’t live on social media. I live here on my blog, that they don’t consider the indie web.

I’m still not saying that this is wrong, or inferior – but that expressed elitism on the part of some of the indie web advocates is debased by the lack of substance behind the noise. I will write separately on this point in politics, and art, because it’s actually a philosophical failure they carry into more consequential parts of their lives than just how websites should be done, and I think the pattern both incisive and illuminating. But here I don’t want to derail, so on to how the Indie Web is built…

Tech Stacks, Ownership, and Freedom:

One of the core ideas motivating the indie web is philosophical in origin but it has implications for the mechanics of how a site is built. The idea that you should own your site and have freedom to move it around in part entails the technical requirements that you build it somewhere open-source (so no centralised company exerts control over the software – you do) and choose where you host it. Implicit in this is that you can later move host – you are not beholden to, yet again, a single company.

It also emphasises, as the IndieWeb site did, that you should own your own domain. In my case, that’s ephemeraldawn.com, and I do own it – which is a cheap counter-point again to the critic I’m aiming this post at because many such people don’t own their domain. They’re using subdomains on platforms owned by someone else. My friend’s domain is myfriend.neocities.org. They are a subdomain on Neocities. This falls short of the IndieWeb’s own stated definition, which includes ownership of one’s own domain.

I have both total ownership with Ephemeral Dawn, and I have freedom. But some people will decry that this site cannot be Indie Web because it runs on WordPress (not Neocities or equivalent), and WordPress is too mainstream.

Too Mainstream: Cars With and Without A Chassis – An Analogy About Popularity Versus Individuality

The ‘too mainstream’ critique is intriguing because it is poorly reasoned out. The first response I would have is ‘what happens when Neocities becomes mainstream?’ This belief would compel you to abandon it for something more niche. The argument that “that will never happen” doesn’t address the logical problem with that view, it just dodges it. Indie Web platforms like Neocities are becoming increasingly popular. Probably they never will overtake WordPress but how big can they get until they are a problem – where is that line drawn?

I have an analogy with cars about why popularity and individuality aren’t necessarily bound together. Without making this too mechanically heavy, older vehicles were usually built with a chassis – a metal frame that all the components of a car attach to or rest within. Modern cars often aren’t built like this – they’re more of a ‘unibody’ design where the frame of the car and what would be the chassis are all part of one same structure.²

The reason I note this is because it makes a profound difference in how much expression one truly has. Below I will post two galleries. One is of some old Land Rovers – all by the same company and most the same model too, and you can see how wildly different they are. Next, I will post an array of modern cars all made by different manufacturers, being different models. You can see how wildly similar they are.

The chassis was once the way to build cars; it was a platform that you could put anything on top of. The 109 inch ladder chassis used on Land Rover Series vehicles supports various engines, panels, gearboxes, etc. from the Series 1, 2, 2a, 3, and Defender. All of those parts from all of those vehicles were largely compatible across decades. Then there was a thriving aftermarket, too: people turned these rigs into campers, utility vehicles, showpieces and ornaments, workhorses, and more besides.

To suggest therefore that to use a 109 inch chassis to build my own car didn’t count as “indie” would be to misunderstand what it is to be indie: isn’t the point to have an adaptable platform, that I own, that I can do anything with? I can’t do that with a unibody – the modern car. It’s a closed system. It’s a corporate silo.

The Platform Matters, But Popularity Doesn’t:

The platform on which you build matters – it matters deeply – but those who gatekeep WordPress (which is used by Microsoft and by me) as being outside of the scope of Indie Web are not acting consistently with the philosophy of the indie web; they’re expressing a matter of taste – usually along aesthetic lines – but as a critique it doesn’t have philosophical coherence.

The fact, for example, that those old Land Rovers could be put to work as a family camper or as a corporate workhorse is not a problem for the platform’s freedom – it is an expression of it. The fact that a Hyundai Tuscon can only be used as a towncar is an implicit loss of freedom. Being able to put a pink seat cover and a cherry air freshener in it may satisfy you as far as customisation goes, and more power to you: but it’s not true freedom. The entire car is still manufacturer controlled.

Any argument along the lines of “well I didn’t want to change the engine, suspension, and gearbox anyway” proceeds to miss the point: when you don’t want to run, you don’t have your legs removed, because tomorrow you might want to walk, or swim.

The popularity of the platform is philosophically irrelevant: what freedom it gives you determines whether it is ‘indie web’ or not.

WordPress truly gives that freedom. I’m not saying it’s the only way – it absolutely isn’t, but I am saying against some critics that it is definitely a valid way. It’s not ‘too mainstream’.

Plugins and Do It Yourself:

In some indie web advocates, there is also some elitism over ‘code it yourself’ and plugin solutions, but I disavow this too. A great many indie web projects, again particularly on leading platforms like Neocities, use plugins. Many of them simply have to in order to expand the functionality of their site. They use these for basic features that come within WordPress by default, such as blogs, comments, and status/update posts (like Tweets rather than full posts).

To someone who uses an Android phone over an iPhone, this contrast may feel familiar. There were apps you could download to add features, like widgets, or changing wallpapers, etc., that had been default features built into Android for years. For someone to argue that iOS was better suited to having a truly individual, expressive smartphone was patently wrong: it was and still is a significantly more closed platform than Android, and it goes back to the point above: if it’s enough for you, that is fine, but this is an expression again of your taste – it is not philosophical coherence on the subject of independence, ownership, and freedom.

In WordPress you can build, often more easily, a more custom site than in something like Neocities. You can code it yourself or you can use plugins – but you don’t have to use plugins to get many basic features – you have that already. Using plugins doesn’t make the project less ‘indie web’ implicitly. You still own all the content on your site, even though you don’t own the plugin: that’s the same bargain you’re making on Neocities. One is not more about ownership than the other, and whether something counts as indie web is not a measure of skill. It’s the indie(pendant) web, not the skill web.

Closing Thoughts on Gatekeeping and Liberty:

There are reasons, which I think flare people up beyond good manners, to extoll the moral virtues of the indie web. But it sometimes comes over with the same sort of pioneering arrogance that is endemic to the toxic extremes of the Linux community too, who champion open-source software over corporate-owned closed-source ones. The reasons are compelling, and nobody really wants to have their data harvested or not own the work they create, and so on.

People often don’t need much convincing of the moral and philosophical reasons to re-assert ownership and independence. Many want it, and wish they had it, and it is not desire so much as intimidation or a skill barrier holding them back. But shouldn’t these communities then want to lead people into it? You don’t make people want something by excluding them because their attempts to attain it weren’t enough for your exacting standards.

My website might not look like your vision of the indie web but that’s because I am independent and I made something for my purposes, to my tastes. I own all of it. It is, definitionally, part of the indie web. Someone who runs is a runner regardless of whether they are 2KG heavier or lighter than you: they are definitionally a runner by virtue of the fact they run.

If people find that they experience less gatekeeping for engaging with what is best for them, don’t you think they will be more likely to choose it? The standards I rebuke in this writing are not upholding the philosophical purity of the movement; they are egoistic plays for moral superiority. It’s an unearned authority, and in some way – whether by intent or mere coincidence – it actually seeks to exert some control over another person too, and isn’t control the very thing that was supposed to be in their hands – not yours – as a fundamental core tenet of the indie web?

As a project, and a philosophy, the indie web is something I wholeheartedly support, and though I focused this post on criticism of its elitist extremes, I actually really enjoy seeing the staggering creativity – a good deal of which far excels my own – when it comes to web design.

Perhaps we might think about embracing freedom and choice instead, if we want even more of this. I have tastes of my own, and I certainly dislike and borderline hate some of the ways other people’s sites look too, but I don’t feel that for long. I land on a page, think “my god, what a cacophony”, and in the time that thought takes to go, it is gone. Do you know what remains?

What remains is a warm feeling that yes, this is a real human just trying to flourish in the world. It’s still the playing of something beautiful.

Dear reader, so long as you do no harm, may you ever know the liberation of self-expression.

Fair winds and a following sea,
Ephemeral Dawn.

Addenda and Footnotes:

1. And so Neocities style indie web sites will be my point of focus/contrast in this post otherwise it’s going to get way too confusing for the average reader. It should be noted too that this post is aimed at being a response to a creeping elitism that sometimes emerges out of the fringes of this movement. I hope the post makes it clear that it is neither an attack on the indie web nor the people, universally, who form a part of it. ↩︎
2. Warning: tech jargon! What I’m leaning into here is also an analogy for the separation between design and content. When building a site on the Indie Web, many (by no means all) will intertwine content (their images, and text) into their design (the style of the page). This is also a bit like the trap of a unibody car because now you can’t change one without changing the other. Ephemeral Dawn is built with the vast majority of its content independent of its design, so I could make myself a bright pink theme like some of the screenshots above, apply it site-wide, and everything would look perfect and nothing would break. A lot of Indie Web users especially on static sites like Neocities have to go to each page and manually change every single piece of it. Because these sites are static and not dynamic (as explained above in the post), this creates a lot of friction with blog posts, because they only have two real choices in most cases: make every post an entry within a single page (which eventually will become very cumbersome) or make every post a new page. Neither of these is a true ‘post’, though: it’s another static page. This means tagging and category systems don’t work, too. Non-static indie sites obviously aren’t bound by this, but that’s not what sites Neocities aims for. ↩︎