Pablo wrote a good post on the hurdles to joining the indieweb and getting your voice heard, offering a not uncommon solution:

…we must make software tools that make self-hosting and website ownership easy and beginner friendly.

To be clear: here, “indieweb” means a website you host, rather than publish via a platform, such as Substack, Medium, Typepad, Blogger, Pika or Bear. In this regard, it’s not just owning your domain, such as thisdaysportion.com, but also the server it sits on (or at least renting it – defining “self-hosting” is tricky).

The trouble with this solution is that self-hosting and publishing will always involve some technical effort which the likes of Substack and Medium remove. Pablo cites Giles’ post Let’s make the indie web easier, where he envisages a simple way to install an SSG:

Why not build static website generators that people can just unzip, upload to the shared hosting they’ve just paid for, and start using via a browser?

That sounds great (although more difficult than setting up a WordPress site up on a host like Pikapods), but unzipping and uploading can’t be trivialised by the addition of a “just”. Even buying hosting represents quite a conceptual leap compared to signing up for Substack, where you’ll be joining thousands of other writers and bloggers who are already publishing. And that’s before you even get your FTP credentials, install and configure Filezilla and start navigating your folder on a shared host.

This seems an intractable problem, which results in an indieweb unsurprisingly dominated by people who work, or are interested, in tech. That’s why you’ll find no shortage of posts about getting computers to do things by typing esoteric commands, or about configuring blogs – blogs about blogging, if you like.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong per se with forming a hobbyist community on shared tech, but a robust, independent web is an important missing piece of the puzzle if we’re trying to foster a healthy cultural and political online life. Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara compares Substack with the mid to late-2000s media blogosphere, where he and other academics and journalists such as Mark Fisher and Richard Seymour cut their teeth:

it [the political blogosphere] felt simultaneously democratic and curated… The result wasn’t a canon, but a shared public square with porous borders… We seem to be building fewer lasting collective institutions and more ephemeral vehicles for individual advancement. Plus, paywalls, necessary as they are to sustain writers, turn arguments into gated micro-publics.

Substack is interested in conversation and debate only in as far as it generates subscribers and subscriptions – and as Sunkara states, that’s essentially an individual, transactional relationship between writer and reader. It’s a business that looks to monopolise and monetise thought and writing, just like any other social media platform. That’s why it’s happy platforming neo-Nazis, and why venture capital will gamble on it becoming the de facto way of publishing long form texts, a tool of wealth and social power in the same way that Twitter and Facebook are.

So how do we get more writers off centralised platforms and on to the indieweb? It’s not unsurprising that a tech audience thinks the answer lies in more, better or “easier” tech. But I think it requires a shift in perspective, away from an individualistic call for everyone to “skill up” and work out how to set up their own website. We need to think collectively, and pool resources. Those who can do all this need to help those who can’t.

This is what one element of what I termed blogging collectively might look like. It’s not about setting up, say, an online magazine (although that could be part of it) – it’s more about enablement in the first instance, which would then result in better discovery and more diverse voices.

We have models already: the fediverse consists of a collection of volunteer run servers that, for all Mastodon’s failings, more or less manages to provide a decentralised platform for people whose main online interest isn’t tech (although of course there is no shortage of programmers there). And people are just helping other people set up their websites.

So, a starting point for collective blogging is a pool of folk with a range of skills to set up websites. This is no trivial undertaking: we have jobs, families, rent, mortgages, food to pay for, and work takes up an increasing amount of our time and energy. The way we think of the web is fundamentally libertarian and individual.

Perhaps this is one area where tech will help. We could use simple, cheap tech stacks with a few options – LAMP, WordPress and a set of robust themes seems an appropriate approach. But having established this foundation, we might be able to make the indieweb a more diverse place, where non-tech folk find it easier to publish their work.