Softcore First, Hardcore Eventually: A Ladder for the IndieWeb

Yesterday, omg.lol founder (and overall wonderful person) Adam Newbold posted a guide titled "Hardcore IndieWeb", where he went over how anybody can start their own fully independent website for only $0.01 USD per day thanks to the hosting solution NearlyFreeSpeech provides. (The guide doesn't even touch IndieWeb Standards which are commonly pointed to when this topic is brought up, which I personally appreciate it.)

I think a lot of people see a tension between making things accessible and non-technical versus having more autonomy and control over what you own digitally, right? Like a spectrum from super-easy no-ownership (corporate social media) to super-technical full-ownership (creating and hosting your entire website by hand).

A guide like Adam's tries to bridge this, by making a point that your content should be fully owned by you and fully portable and that it doesn't have to be technically complicated. He places particular emphasis on the point that, while there are platforms that exist which make the process of making and publishing your own site easier, the platonic ideal of the IndieWeb is to be independent from platforms and to avoid incurring the costs associated with them.

I've posted my own guide for people who don't have technical skills but want to join the IndieWeb myself, specifically towards bloggers and writers. My philosophy is that people should dip their toes with options like BearBlog or Pika or Pagecord, all of which are relatively simple with free tiers.

"Hardcore" and "easy" IndieWeb aren't two camps you have to pick a side of. No, there are rungs on the ladder, and most people need to climb it, rather than getting dropped on whichever rung feels most ideologically pure and getting told to figure out the rest.

UX designers call this progressive disclosure, a concept Jakob Nielsen introduced in 1995 for the practice of hiding advanced functionality until a user is ready for it, so nobody gets overwhelmed by a feature they don't need…