Did you know that 65-70% of users think that the web and the internet are the same and only 20% truly know the difference? For those few who don’t know the difference, the internet is made up of all the computers in the world connected together and it runs services like the Web, email, online games and FTP amongst others. The web is just a publishing service. The internet started in 1969 while the first website appeared in 1991- and you can still visit it.
But many people believe that the web as it exists today has become too dominated by the tech giants with Google, YouTube and Facebook being the top three most visited websites. Facebook evolved to try and keep users on for longer, but the cost is you’re unlikely to see all the posts by friends instead of paid posts by others. Google searches now lead with AI summaries instead of links to websites.
What is the Indieweb?
As a reaction to this, a movement to create a more human web was started in 2011 called the Indieweb. The people behind it want the web to belong to everyone, not just the tech giants.
What is an Indieweb website?
Simply put, it’s a way of classifying independent websites that follow three principles:
- It’s your content published by you.
- You can publish once on your site then have it syndicated elsewhere, also known as POSSE or share links.
- Keep the web both weird and interesting!
15 years on, has it grown?
Estimates on the size of the Indieweb vary, but all agree it’s at least several hundred thousand in size. Over 30 years ago, the free site GeoCities hosted something like 38 million user pages. Yahoo, who owned the site closed it down in 2009 but much of the original content was rehosted on GeoCities.ws, which continues to this day and there’s a searchable archive of 40 million pages.
In 2013, a new site was created that also hosts the old GeoCities sites - neocities.org, and that currently has 1,722,100 sites on it. All sites are limited to HTML, CSS and JavaScript plus image files. There’s no server-side scripting and there’s a generous free tier as well as a paid tier for $5 a month. This is a good fit for the Indieweb as static HTML websites make up a large number of what’s out there.
What else does Indieweb offer?
To encourage blogging sites there are various blog carnivals where different hosts write posts linking to any posts submitted on a chosen topic, such as books, movies or fiction. Those are done though the main Indieweb website but there are others on more diverse topics such as mathematics, gender and writing. There are also challenges where anyone can set a challenge to be answered via a blog post.
Conclusions
The original spirit of the web is kept alive by Indieweb and others, although it’s just a couple of million websites out of an estimated 350 million. Finding them is a real problem that’s been made worse by the AI Overviews that Google introduced in 2025. According to the BBC 60% of the five trillion Google searches each year now result in zero-click, i.e. not visiting the website.
Perhaps it’s time to go back to the curated directories that we used to have in the late 90’s. There have been attempts at this, listed on the Indieweb directory page but these only cover a few thousand sites or so.
