The Web Won Because It Got Easier – Happily Imperfect

Skip to content

The Web Won Because It Got Easier

I am geek adjacent.

I lie probably slap bang in the middle of two extremes; the uber-geek/dev coder who knows internet coding and all the web server dark arts like the back of their hand, and the ‘Facebook is the internet’ person who uses the flash on their phone when taking a picture of a landscape in the dark.

I have nothing against either person. Well, that’s a lie, I have criticisms of both but they are of no importance here.

Who is it for?

I’ve been blogging for a long time and I’ve seen fads come and go, but the recent movement that is the indieweb is, as far as I can tell, a good thing that should last for a few years.

The thing is, it’s all bit techy.

That is not a bad thing, and I understand and fully support the reasons behind it and behind things like ActivityPub, and ‘the Fediverse’ and services like Mastodon, but the more I read the more I sense two things.

You need a basic understanding of some technical ideas to get into this world.

It’s not built for ‘Facebook is the internet’ people.

I’d also posit that:

Those who disagree with point 1, are themselves technical people who have forgotten what it was like to not know something (aka the curse of knowledge).

Those who disagree with point 2, who state that that is the entire point, are missing MY point.

Wood for the trees

Dear builders and promoters of the IndieWeb/Fediverse and all that it bestrides, make this easier. Or at the very least get better at communicating what you are offering and how to use it.

It’s easy, they say, just start a blog.

It’s easy, they say, just go to your server and log in.

It’s easy, they say, it’s just lots of connected servers.

And yet when I go to visit some content I need to login to a server that I’m not a part of, or so it seems. The barrier creeps up a little higher.

Please note, I am not anti any of these things, or the people who are creating them and running them. I know they are doing good work, but there is a reason why these things are still fairly (in internet usage terms) small and largely populated by people who are tech-minded enough to grok them (pun semi-intended).

If we really want all of this waves hands in the air to be for all of them waves hands in that direction then it needs to be easier, and require less work to be a part of.

My concern is not that these technologies are too hard to learn; It’s that too many advocates confuse "I understand this" with "this is easy".

My own bias

I am writing this as someone who has worked alongside software developers and testers for the bulk of my career. I am not a developer, I understand things like Object Oriented Programming and can probably bluff my way through a short discussion on polymorphism, but my work was acting as the go-between, the communicator between the user and the builder (aka the business and the dev team).

Reading articles —about the why the Fediverse is good, why Webmentions are great, how this new independent web will be good for everyone— is something I do (as I do with most everything I read that is tech adjacent) with an eye on how easy it is to understand. Time and time again, this is where I think the Indieweb shoots itself (lightly) in the foot.

If you want mass adoption, if you want the movement to swell and grow, you need to find a way to reduce the complexity of what you are offering.

As an example, which is easier, for the layperson, to sign up for. Mastodon, or Bluesky?

One requires picking a server, with little explanation why, as well as the usual name, email etc. The latter is more straightforward, username, email, password, verification, etc.

Now, I know why this is the way it is, but my point is that a lot of people won’t. Mastodon immediately asks you a question before you’ve learned enough to understand why the question matters.

And that’s a barrier that excludes them from all of this waves hands in the air again.

Can those barriers be overcome with a bit of reading and learning? Absolutely. Whether the rewards justify the effort is another question.

I am trying

I write this as I am slowly moving my ageing blog into this new world, coaxing WordPress into the light. Plugins that bring errors about webfinger endpoints, sites asking for webmentions, only add to the list of things I need to learn and understand, before I try and fix them.

Sure, I could ‘just’ start a new blog but why should I? My blog was here first!

Sure, I could ‘just’ build my own simple blog, self-host it, and push updates manually, but those bridges have been crossed long long ago, why would I want to go back there?

My blog started as hand crafted HTML, in NotePad (before HomeSite came along). If I added a page, I had to update every other page to include it in the navigation (there was no javascript to drop in).

I quickly moved to Blogger when it was launched because it did all of that for me, let me write...