The IndieWeb Is Right. But Should We Trust It?
I’m aligning with IndieWeb principles. The geography problem is real and I’m naming it. The class problem is real and they know it. The institutional gravity problem is real and it hasn’t gone away just because there’s now a meetup in Edinburgh.
Lloyd Lewis | Opinion | artoffaceless.com
Let me tell you what happens in my gut the moment I encounter a community built around principles.
It seizes. Every time. Doesn’t matter how good the principles are. Doesn’t matter if I agree with every single word. The visceral punk Pavlovian response fires before the rational brain gets a look in: another wiki, another code of conduct, another set of founding documents that’ll be framed on a wall while the founders quietly negotiate the acquisition.
Some of that sounds like Art of FACELESS (oh the irony!).
I’m now ‘retired’. I’ve watched this happen enough times that the pattern recognition is basically involuntary now. Good people. Good ideas. A community forms. A nonprofit status gets filed. Sponsors appear. A travel scholarship fund gets announced for “underrepresented groups.” The flagship event stays in the same city for nine years running. Then one day you look up and someone’s driving a Porsche and explaining, very patiently, why the corporate partnership is actually fine.
So. IndieWeb. Let’s do this properly.
What They’re Actually Saying
Strip the developer-speak and the core of IndieWeb is embarrassingly simple: own your domain. Publish there first. Own your content. Don’t hand your creative output to a platform that can delete it, monetise it, or disappear overnight and take everything with it. Sound familiar? Yeah, it’s basically what we’ve been advocating since, like, 2010 when the writing was on the wall of T&Cs of Facebook et al.
That’s it. The POSSE model — Publish on Your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere — is a formal name for what any creator with a functioning brain should have been doing all along. Put it on your turf. Push it outward. Don’t mistake the platform’s algorithm for your audience.
Art of FACELESS has operated this principle without the acronym. artoffaceless.com is the hub. Always has been. Everything else is signal distribution. We’ve watched platforms eat people’s entire catalogues — years of work, gone because a company pivoted or an account got flagged or a moderator had a bad day. We built accordingly. Apparently there’s now a community wiki for that.
Fair enough.
The Geography Problem
Here’s where I get difficult. And specific.
IndieWeb was founded in 2011 by Tantek Çelik and Aaron Parecki, out of Portland, Oregon. The annual IndieWeb Summit — their flagship gathering — was held in Portland every single year from 2011 to 2019. Nine consecutive years. One city. One country. Their own fundraising copy, to this day, describes “motivated local groups all over the US Europe” — no comma, note, between US and Europe, as though the second is a footnote to the first.
Parecki’s day job is Director of Identity Standards at Okta — a major commercial identity management corporation. Çelik works on web standards at Mozilla, which runs on a budget north of half a billion dollars annually. These aren’t garage hackers. They’re credentialled standards professionals with deep institutional roots in the American tech ecosystem. That’s not automatically disqualifying. But it is context.
Their past Summit sponsors have included GoDaddy. I’ll let that sit there for a moment. GoDaddy — the domain registrar best known for predatory upselling, domain parking fees, and building the most hostile possible onboarding experience for non-technical users — was welcomed as an aligned sponsor of a movement supposedly about empowering independent creators. That tells you something about whose independence they were imagining.
The founding event geography tells you the rest. Portland. SF. NYC — the latter hosted at the New York Times offices and Mozilla Manhattan. These aren’t neutral venues. These are the rooms where a particular class of internet professional is already comfortable. A certain kind of person can travel to Portland for a conference on short notice. Most people on earth cannot.
Most people, at the time of writing, in Europe, wouldn’t want to.
Now — and I’m going to be fair here, because fairness is the job — by 2025, events were running in Edinburgh, Düsseldorf, Nuremberg, and Bengaluru. There’s a Homebrew Website Club meeting in a café near Waverley Station. Online sessions carry GMT timezone tags. The infrastructure is genuinely internationalising (even if it is with a z).
I’ve seen this before too. Diversity initiatives. Geographic expansion. A Bengaluru meetup listed next to years of Portland Summits. It can be real. It can also be the kind of thing that gets announced to deflect the criticism while the centre of gravity doesn’t actually move. I don’t know yet which this is. What I know is that Cardiff — a capital city, in one of the poorest regions of Western Europe, in the country that arguably gave the world the concept of public digital infrastructure — has no chapter. Neither does most of working-class Europe. The Global South is represented by a single physical event in one Indian city.
I’m watching. Sceptically. From Wales.
The Class Problem (Which They Know About)
To their credit, IndieWeb’s own community has been arguing about this since 2018. Their principles list — ten items — reads almost entirely as a developer manifesto. Build what you need. Use what you make. Open source your stuff. Document your stuff. The accessibility critique has come from inside the house, repeatedly, with one commentator noting that the basic “just buy a domain and upload your files” framing “automatically excludes a huge number of people who will not or cannot spend money on something like this.”
That’s a class analysis. It’s correct. And the fact that IndieWeb’s own people have been making it for seven years without it being resolved tells you something about the structural limits of principle-led communities that emerge from positions of privilege.
The last of their ten principles, the only one that’s genuinely universal? “Have fun.” Tagged on at the end like someone remembered humans exist. It’s also a bit naff to be honest.
What Actually Checks Out
I looked at their finances. I’ll give them this: they’re genuinely transparent. Open Collective, publicly auditable. Their operating costs are around two hundred dollars a month — hosting, domains, infrastructure for the community projects. That’s it. No salaries. No executive compensation. No six-figure anything visible in the ledger.
I was wrong about that specific fear, at least for now. Credit where it’s due. The books are open and the books are modest. That’s rarer than it should be, and it matters.
Why AOF Is Aligning Anyway
None of the above changes the underlying truth of the thing.
The corporate web is actively hostile to independent creators. Twitter/X proved it at scale. The Crew shutdown proved it for games. Google’s pivot to AI-generated results is systematically dismantling the discoverability of individual sites that spent years doing everything right. The economics of platforms have always been: your content is the product, your audience is the asset, and when the numbers change, you’re renegotiable.
IndieWeb, whatever its limitations, is one of the few organised expressions of a counter-position that isn’t simultaneously trying to sell you an alternative platform. The principles — own your domain, publish first on your own site, syndicate outward — map directly onto what AOF has been building for years.
For us, artoffaceless.com is not an outpost. It’s the operation. The Ghost stack we run isn’t incidental — it’s chosen for POSSE compatibility, for SEO persistence, for keeping our analytics answerable to us and not to a social platform. Ghost’s network, largely invisible to casual users, quietly builds web presence in ways that platform-first publishing simply cannot. That’s an IndieWeb-aligned decision we made before we knew IndieWeb had a name for it.
So we’re acknowledging convergence. We’re not joining a club.
The Honest Position
I’m aligning with IndieWeb principles. The geography problem is real and I’m naming it. The class problem is real and they know it. The institutional gravity problem is real and it hasn’t gone away just because there’s now a meetup in Edinburgh.
But the principles? Own your identity. Own your content. Publish on your own ground. Don’t let a corporation hold the keys to your creative life.
Those aren’t American principles. Those aren’t developer principles. Those are the principles of anyone who’s ever had a platform pull the rug, a landlord change the terms, a gatekeeper decide you’re no longer convenient.
That’s most of us. That’s always been most of us.
The IndieWeb just wrote it down.
Afterthought — published same day
After I filed this piece, someone sent me a screengrab of IndieWeb's own principles page. Three promises, rendered in cheerful orange icons.
"Your content is yours." "You are better connected." "You are in control."
And then this: "These links are permanent and will always work."
Permanent. I want you to sit with that word for a moment.
Now show me the contract.
There isn't one. There's a wiki page. There's a community ethos. There's the goodwill of two founders who currently hold senior positions at Okta and Mozilla. What there is not — anywhere in the IndieWeb's legal architecture — is a binding mechanism that prevents acquisition, dissolution, or a quiet pivot the moment the right number lands in the right inbox.
That's not a collective or co-operative.
We've watched this sequence before. del.icio.us. Last.fm. Tumblr. A hundred smaller communities that believed the culture was the protection. It wasn't. Culture doesn't survive a liquidation event. "Permanent links" is a design principle, not a deed of ownership.
So. What happens if Elon offers them a billion dollars and they accept?
The honest answer is: nothing stops them. Nothing at all.
I'm still aligning with the principles. I'm just naming, clearly and for the record, that principles without legal architecture are a promise made in good faith by people who may not always be in a position to keep it. That's not a conspiracy. That's just how organisations work when the money gets serious.
Own your domain. That part, at least, is actually yours.
Lloyd Lewis is a writer and co-founder of Art of FACELESS, an independent multimedia collective based in Cardiff, Wales, operating since 2010.
Disclaimer: This article is published as an opinion piece under the Lloyd Lewis editorial byline for Art of FACELESS. All factual claims regarding IndieWeb’s founding, event history, finances, and sponsorship are drawn from publicly available sources including IndieWeb’s own wiki, Open Collective ledger, and event archive — all of which are linked or verifiable independently. Readers are encouraged to consult primary sources. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not constitute legal, financial, or organisational advice. Art of FACELESS has no commercial relationship with IndieWeb, any of its named founders, or any of the organisations referenced in this piece. AOF’s alignment with IndieWeb principles, as stated above, is based solely on shared values and carries no financial or contractual arrangement.
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