The Indie Web Principles That Guide This Site

How POSSE, owning your content, and building for people shape the way I approach this site.

The indie web isn't a technology. It's a set of principles about how the web should work — principles that feel increasingly important as more of our online lives get funneled through a handful of corporate platforms.

Own Your Content

The most fundamental indie web principle: your content should live on a domain you control. Not on Medium, not on Twitter, not on any platform that can change its terms, shut down, or simply decide your content isn't worth showing to people anymore.

Every word on this site lives in markdown files in a git repository. I can move it anywhere, transform it into any format, and it will outlast any platform.

POSSE: Publish on Your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere

POSSE is the idea that your site is the canonical source for everything you publish. You can still share on other platforms — but as copies that point back to your site, not as originals that happen to also exist here.

For this site, that means RSS is the primary syndication mechanism. If you want to follow along, subscribe to the feed. If I share something on another platform, it'll link back here.

Build for People, Not Algorithms

There's no analytics tracking on this site. No engagement metrics. No algorithmic feed deciding what you see. You see everything, in the order it was published, and you decide what's interesting.

This isn't just a privacy stance (though it is that too). It's about creating a space where the content stands on its own, without the anxiety of optimizing for invisible systems.

Small Web, Big Impact

The indie web is small by design. These personal sites don't compete with platforms for attention. They don't need millions of visitors to be valuable. A handful of people reading something you wrote and finding it useful — that's the whole point.

If this resonates with you, consider building your own corner of the web. The tools are accessible, the community is welcoming, and the web is better when more of it belongs to the people who use it.