Venkatram asked where we think the indieweb will be in 2030, which prompted me to explore what we mean by indieweb in a couple of posts.

I argue that the “official” definition addresses concerns over Facebook and X’s ownership of our content, and that it represents an effort to wrest ownership from corporate social media to our websites.

• Defining the indieweb for 2026
• Amateurs and professionals: towards a less individual indieweb

In 2026 these concerns — at least in regard to microblogging style social media — have been allayed by the growth of the fediverse. There’s no longer any need to publish everything we write on our websites, including tweet-length updates, for syndication to other services. Nor do we need to collect and publish responses — such as likes, boosts and replies — using services such as Bridgy and micro.blog. Indeed, by doing this we lose some of the strengths of traditional website publishing, such as its asynchronicity and detachment from the attention economy.

However, companies such as Substack and Beehiv do form a threat to independent, longer form writing, which ironically appears to have become more popular since the official indieweb definition was first penned, albeit through the medium of the email newsletter. I contend that these platforms and their funders form a structural risk to expression and ultimately democracy through their commitment to scaling, commodification and profit.

In 2026, any indieweb definition should address these threats.

I argue that writers whose living is dependent on their writing, such as academics and journalists, are ill-served by the indieweb. There are several reasons for this, including a decades-old techno-optimism and individualism that values a hobbyist, DIY approach to building our own websites. As a result, when we talk about indieweb we generally mean a group of individual bloggers with some technical nous, rather than the “professional” writing you can find in magazines such as Tribune and The London Review of Books and more modern, online publications such as Lit Hub and Novara Media. Yet all of these are independent in that they offer a place for professional writers to publish their work away from the Substacks of this world.

In order to encourage more independent writing, we need to make it easier for professional writers to publish their work away from convenient, large scale platforms. While smaller platforms such as Pika and Bear offer viable alternatives, often they won’t provide the features — or feel — professional writers are looking for, and ultimately pose some of the same threats as Substack and Beehiv: vendor lock-in and reliance on small or even single person teams whose values we depend on to align with our own.

I feel the solution lies in moving away from a dependence on platforms to a less individual and less technological approach to publishing. We need more, ever smaller publications that handle hosting, design, content management and subscriptions, and that we form with people we trust and in some sense know. Ideally, we’d see more spontaneous collectives emerging, where those with the technological know how take a background role to support the writers. Something similar to how we can fairly easily create a Mastodon instance for a few members, but technologically agnostic and without the moderation workload.

Substack famously has a nazi problem, which prompted many of its members to move to other centralised platforms, such as Beehiv and Ghost. As these are structurally inclined to enshittify over time, I expect professional authors to become ever more concerned with the platforms they use. In theory, the indieweb as I define it should grow.

It’s possible that smaller platforms continue to develop and offer a home to Substack refugees — it would help if new platforms’ branding wasn’t so resolutely “indie”, and they considered the quality writing they could support. The Bear discover feed is a good idea, but it works on a simple upvoting system rather than any editorial judgement.

We seem to be miles away from being able to form blogging and writing collectives. This is understandable, of course: it’s reliant on volunteering and incurs costs. There is, however, a healthy collection of volunteer-run Mastodon servers out there, which I expect is partly explained by the fact it’s relatively easy to set up a server. Perhaps this is where new, self-hosted platforms could help, or agreed sets of software. Is this a use for Bonfire?

The fediverse also has a well-developed understanding of the value of independent publishing, and seems to have moved on from the 1990s techno-optimism and individualism that still characterises the indieweb. To be blunt: it’s more politically active and inclined to collective thought and action.

As for the hobbyist indieweb, I think it’ll grow very healthily, as more people take the time to learn how to set up their own site, and more Pika and Bear-like platforms develop. In turn, this will encourage more people to write about non-tech subjects, which may also encourage more professional writers.

And having read this post, you might be surprised to hear that this makes me really happy. The hundreds of personal feeds I subscribe to are a constant source of interest, knowledge and entertainment. Long may that continue.