Published on 17 December 2025 under the IndieWeb category.

We just finished our last Homebrew Website Club Europe event of the year. We spent the time chatting about the last year on our websites – what we made, what we are proud of, what we learned – and looked ahead to what we may be interested in doing next year. One question came to mind during the event: what are you grateful for in the indie web this year?

I am grateful for so many people making cool things and sharing them on their websites. I have been inspired countless times by blog posts and websites this year. Blog posts have made me excited, curious, interested in new things, inspired to go deeper on things I’m interested in, and so much more.

What I love about the personal website community is how many different things you can learn. Indeed, this year I have learned about everything from typography to CSS to how beautiful snow looks in New York’s Central Park in Winter, all through personal websites. I have enjoyed reading slices of life written by people from around the world, from Greece to Berlin.

I have been able to share my own stories, too. The participatory potential of the web is special.

I am grateful for all of the grass-roots efforts and projects that encourage, celebrate, provide places to discuss, and ways to discover, personal websites and web pages. Whether it’s projects like PowRSS for finding blogs, the 32-Bit Cafe Code Jam, in-person events like IndieWebCamp, blogging carnivals like the IndieWeb Carnival or the Bear Blog Carnival, platforms like Bear Blog and omg.lol creating both tools to publish websites and places to discover new websites, and everything in between. All of these projects and initiatives, the result of ideas brought to reality by innumerable people around the world, actively refute the idea that the web is dead.

Looking ahead to next year, I am as excited as ever about personal websites as a home on the web. I look forward to all the experimentation and joy that continues to live on day after day, year after year in this place we call the indie web. I hope, too, that we might approach topics we haven’t talked about as much as a community like privacy on the indie web, and continue, as always, asking the question: what do we want the indie web to be?

Indeed, one of the most exciting – and liberating – parts of the indie web is that it is made by us, for everyone. We can shape it, through our websites and all the places we come together – forums, events, carnivals, wikis, and everything in between.

As Tim Berners-Lee broadcast to the world at the London 2012 Olympic Games: “This is for everyone.”

This post was also shared to IndieNews.