I like to make and tinker: little experiments, half-baked projects, anything that genuinely sparks my curiosity. I want a home-base where I can put up whatever I want, however I want, and curate it to my vision.
Social media kind of serves this purpose, albeit in a somewhat crappy way. Platforms at the end of the day have their own incentives: attention, engagement, ad revenue. They also have restrictions on their own formatting and content. These incentives and structures don't necessarily always align with my own regarding the things I create.
I just want to share what I'm building, and not have to worry about someone else's rules: building on rented ground that shifts beneath you. The instagram wall, then the advent of reels, and slides, and stories, the playbook for creators who want to get noticed changes on a dime.
And perhaps that's part of the appeal of the indie web. There's no algorithmic suggestions or clamoring for discoverability; you explore link-by-link, human-to-human. Slow discovery of slow-cooked, intentional projects made for fun and genuine interest. These aren't polished 15-second snippets optimized for mass appeal.
I can speak to my own attention span getting cooked by all the short-form content that I encounter. I'm hoping this can help shape a more healthy media diet. Focusing more on creation and discovery than consumption.
It's a digital garden all my own: I set the rules, I tend it over time and I can make or break it as I please.
The Beauty of Doing it Badly
Not everyone who built a site in the early 2000s would be considered to be a coding whiz, but that's the beauty: you don't need to be. Just like anything else, namely engineering and coding, you get better by doing it. It's a studio, an open-house lab, a public notebook. The point is the process of learning live itself - getting to tinker with things, break and fix them.
It's total freedom. I choose my stack. I can build anything I want - a blog, a portfolio, a nifty interactive doodle I come up with, a digital scrapbook. This is a space that's mine, not leased with the implicit agreement that I'm also the product.
What I'm building is my digital home. A place that's mine, that reflects how I think and what I care about, that grows and changes as I do. Not optimized for engagement or growth, but optimized for me. Digging deeper into the creations already built by incredibly talented people on the indie web I see people making things because they want to, showcasing each other because the stuff is just that cool. I love this spirit.
I don't know how many people will take a look at my tinkering, and I don't want to implement trackers. I'll leave the surveillance to social platforms. I'm putting this up, with myself as the primary audience. But I do hope that maybe this can serve as a jumping-off point for someone else to start tending their own garden