> It's like saying that gardening hasn't taken off because most people buy their vegetables at the supermarket. The IndieWeb doesn't need to "take off" to be valuable to those who participate in it.
I have a different viewpoint on this.
The non-independent web which is largely controlled by faceless corporations has never been bigger or more able to hurt the average person. Someone who gets locked out of their Google account today is at risk of getting their entire life turned upside down -- and they don't even get to argue their case via phone call!
Thus, fostering an independent web and making sure more and more people can build their presence outside of the BigCorp stranglehold can be said to be more like growing vegetables in wartime, similar to a victory garden [1]. It's more of a necessity than something that's great to have.
Sure, no one from the IndieWeb organization signed up for this mission. But they, along with things like RSS, Matrix, Mastodon, and the Bluesky protocol are the nearest glimpses we have of an open web that exists outside regulation-capturing trillion-dollar corporations. So I would entreat their leaders to be a bit more forgiving if critics express frustration at the difficult user interfaces.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden
I have a different viewpoint on this.
The non-independent web which is largely controlled by faceless corporations has never been bigger or more able to hurt the average person. Someone who gets locked out of their Google account today is at risk of getting their entire life turned upside down -- and they don't even get to argue their case via phone call!
Thus, fostering an independent web and making sure more and more people can build their presence outside of the BigCorp stranglehold can be said to be more like growing vegetables in wartime, similar to a victory garden [1]. It's more of a necessity than something that's great to have.
Sure, no one from the IndieWeb organization signed up for this mission. But they, along with things like RSS, Matrix, Mastodon, and the Bluesky protocol are the nearest glimpses we have of an open web that exists outside regulation-capturing trillion-dollar corporations. So I would entreat their leaders to be a bit more forgiving if critics express frustration at the difficult user interfaces.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden