Thoughts on IndieWeb

The universe has been aligned ever since I posted about my social media detox. With my new-found intention to start blogging more, I’ve been going down rabbit holes. 🐰

It started with (re-)discovering Neocities and finding cool internet concepts like a /now page.

It was 2004 when I first got embroiled in web development, making fan-sites for Habbo Hotel. Which led to me building communities, which then evolved to tooling and open-source.

I was following the trends closely, I was there when microformats and the concept of the indieweb got born. I however did not fully understand it as a teenager. I was just curious about the concept of data aggregation with microformats and getting better SEO in Google.

Death of silos

Now in November 2024, more than ever, the original thinking behind the indieweb and specifically, POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) has so much more meaning to me.

I’ve been on LiveJournal, MySpace and while both domains are still up, the community is dead. I personally left Twitter in 2022, but I’m seeing a bunch of signals of people leaving en-masse.. again.

I spent 11 years on Twitter. That’s a lot of content. This blog, has content that’s 13 years old, and it’s always been here and will always be here.. (even though the old content is super cringe)

Identity Crisis

As such I have decided to embrace the indieweb even more. But who am I?

I am blog.gerbenjacobs.nl, a Hugo-based blog. I’m pretty happy with the tech and also that domain has been used for quite a while.

I’m also gerben.dev, at the moment, a portfolio-ish site that’s just a single page.

.. but I could also be a pseudonym with a cool domain name. There’s so many now. (I was thinking of goblin.town) 👿

Also gerbenjacobs.nl is the same Gerben Jacobs on LinkedIn, but I don’t consider gerben.dev to be the same. The real me will of course always be hidden, but the Gerben on the fediverse, todon.nl/@gerben comes close.

I don’t want the LinkedIn-me be confused with the internet-me. (Boomer upbringing trauma?) But I also don’t wanna give a fuck and only work for companies who don’t give a fuck about that kinda stuff either.

So who do I become?

A web presence as self-expression

The spelunking I did this weekend made me discover a lot of cools gems aaronparecki.com and his GPS adventures, James’ Coffee Blog jamesg.blog with some very cool page ideas and Amy’s website rhiaro.co.uk which has tiny PHP apps to post custom content by using the ActivityPub protocol.

I don’t know these people, but in my mind, these are cool people. And I want to be cool! 😎

So now I want to create something beautiful, a Frankenstein’s monster, a collection of pages, little applets, colourful mood boards, emotional homages to the internet of 2004-2008. Marquee’s, glitter GIFs, MP3s in a JWPlayer SWF. Webrings, pixelart buttons, faerie pictures. The whole shabang. 🧚

Just have to decide 1) between Neocities 2.0 or regular website and 2) do I use gerben.dev or do I go for something completely new?