There was a time—not so very long ago—when the internet felt like a village. A slightly eccentric, slightly anarchic village, but a village nonetheless. You built your own little home page, decorated it with blinking GIFs, chose your fonts with reckless abandon, and linked to neighbours whose sites you stumbled upon in webrings. It wasn’t polished, but it was personal. It was—dare I say—indie.
Fast forward to the present, and the village has been bulldozed to make way for mega-malls. The web is dominated by a handful of platforms, each designed to keep us scrolling endlessly through other people’s carefully optimised content while slipping advertisements under the door. A uniform blandness has crept in, like identikit housing estates. Everything works, yes, but little feels alive.
This is where the Indie Web movement still matters. It’s the stubborn insistence that the web does not need to be a corporate monoculture, that we can still carve out spaces that are personal, experimental, and delightfully odd. A blog that doesn’t care about SEO. A hand-built site that reflects quirks rather than KPIs. A space where the goal isn’t scale, but self-expression.
The modern Indie Web is not about nostalgia—it’s about agency. It’s about owning your words, your work, and your presence online without filtering them through the algorithms of someone else’s platform. It’s about building connections through RSS feeds, personal blogs, and open protocols rather than fleeting engagement metrics.
And strangely enough, in this era of frictionless apps and seamless user experiences, the imperfections of the Indie Web are part of its charm. A page that loads a little awkwardly, a handmade design that feels less polished—it reminds you there is a human being behind it. In a digital world where everything is engineered to maximise efficiency, there’s something quietly radical about imperfection.
The Indie Web in the modern age is not a revolution so much as a return: to slowness, to individuality, to the idea that the web can be a garden instead of a marketplace. It’s not about rejecting technology, but about using it intentionally, to build spaces that reflect who we are and what we value.
And perhaps most importantly, it’s about community—one that is quieter, slower, and smaller, but richer for it. The links you share, the blogs you follow, the conversations that unfold at human pace: these are the connective tissues of an internet worth having.
The Indie Web may never topple the mega-malls, but it doesn’t need to. It thrives precisely because it is smaller, stranger, more human. In the modern age, that might just be its greatest strength.