Why I Love The IndieWeb or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love HTML and CSS

It's kinda no secret that the internet... sucks for the most part, especially with more mainstream websites. I'm talking your Facebooks, your Twitters, your Reddits, etc. etc. How every website now feels totally soulless and like there's no real sense of community or fun behind it, it's just a bottom line to making more money and exposing you to more advertisers, while collecting all your data and leaving you at the mercy of some bullshit algorithm.

Fortunately, that's where the IndieWeb comes in clutch, it's a smaller-ish subset of nerds who just make their own websites full of whatever they wanna put out there, whether it be on games, music, random fun stuff, or just anything else that's interesting to the creator(s). Personal sites especially are pretty damn cool, as they can follow whatever theme or topics they want (kinda like this website :P), which just allows for endless creativity. There's a bunch of ways to discover cool and interesting stuff, my personal favorite method is either browsing through Neocities, using specialized search engines for that kinda stuff (like Marginalia Search), websites made to find cool stuff (like YToo and Cloudhiker), and various webrings that people have set up.

Though admittedly a personal issue I find with sites like Neocities (no disrespect at all, just something I noticed) is that people tend to use the site as like, social media in a sense, instead of using it as a way to host and set up their own websites, if you wanna have something like that, SpaceHey is a thing, but that's just my two cents. And honestly with the growing distrust and hatred for social media (mainly sites/apps like Twitter and Facebook and TikTok and whatnot), I could honestly see this little subset of the internet grow pretty rapidly over the next couple years, and I'm all for it.