Dec 13th, 2025

by Juha-Matti Santala

This was published in categories: indieweb

Two things in the past week made me think about tools and how I enjoy building them — often more than doing the things those tools enable us to do.

A follow up on my latest IndieWeb post

Earlier this week, I published my submission to IndieWeb Carnival and as part of discussion that sparked in Fediverse, Khleedril commented:

I would argue that we don’t need to talk about tools at all. They are a concrete implementation detail completely hidden by abstraction.

This was a great comment as it touched on something I discussed in the original post: to me, IndieWeb as a community is primarily a community of tool builders. At least that’s who I want to find there and that’s what I want to geek out about with them.

Somebody needs to build the tools we use. The only way we can ignore them as implementation details is to let others — often corporates whose incentives don’t align with ours — to decide what tools we have and how we can use them.

That’s a core value in IndieWeb community for me. It’s difficult to take ownership of data and content and the control of them if we don’t build tools that allow that.

Often when I talk about the non-corporate, non-commercial web, I prefer to talk about personal or small web instead of indie web (or IndieWeb) for this particular reason. I’m a strong believer in that side of things too. To me, those are communities or approaches that cover much wider group of people: users, creators (as in, artists, writers, etc) and builders (as in, technology).

I’m especially excited about building those small indie tools: things that would never be commercially viable but that can solve problems of individuals or small groups. Hobbit software, if you will, or home-cooked, situated software.

A wild tool idea appeared

A few days later the question popped into my head again.

I was rewatching Chrism360’s and Shenanagans’ old Pokemon Randomizer blind bingo race from 2018. In it, the players compete in achieving certain goals while playing randomized Pokémon Red. The catch is, they don’t know what those goals are and there’s a third person keeping track of the bingo card.

As I was watching it, I realised many of the goals can be quite challenging to keep in mind and make sure the person keeping score catches them all.

Immediately, my mind went into a “what kind of software could be built to help make it easier” rabbit hole. I started thinking about how those goals could have data attached that define Pokémon, moves or items that satisfy the criteria.

Then, the scorekeeper could just keep a log of actions and events (like catching a new Pokémon, learning new moves, etc) and the system would take care of all the difficult parts: matching the actions and events with the goals and would update the score as things happen.

I’m much more interested in building those kinds of tools than I am of participating in such races as a player.

I’ve always been like this

I became a community organiser because I realised at one point that I’m almost always more interested in the organising and being behind the scenes making stuff happen than I am with doing the thing itself.

Organising shares so many same traits as tool building. Both are about creating structure into chaos and making it easier for people to enjoy the thing they enjoy. Being able to tame that chaos into something easier to understand and deal with is what makes me tick in life.

On the first day of my current job, I introduced myself to sales people as someone who likes to build tools for professionals.

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If something above resonated with you, let’s start a discussion about it! Email me at juhamattisantala at gmail dot com and share your thoughts. In 2025, I want to have more deeper discussions with people from around the world and I’d love if you’d be part of that.