Refragmenting the Web

I got my first taste of publishing to the web in November 1996. I was a first-semester undergrad, still wet behind the ears. It was a life-altering experience.

For the life of me I can’t remember the URL of that first Geocities node. A damn shame though, because if I had it today, I would Wayback Machine the hell out of that little turd pile of HTML. Alas, that first URL is a victim of my memory and the site is off somewhere lost in the binary.

The ability to craft feeling and emotion from pixels was seductive to me as a teenager. Still is. Learning how a seemingly random string of unicode text could output color and aesthetic became my obsession. My first sites were an exploration in markup and imagery. In retrospect, they were not good – hideous in fact – but the idea that I could upload openly to a server that could be accessed by anyone with an internet connection, anywhere in the world, blew my mind.

I began publishing my writing online shortly after I figured out the nuts, bolts and protocol of the web. Blogs weren’t a thing yet, so inline styles served as post formatting and table wrappers made the sidebar. A new post meant appending the top of the journal.html file with some new, often idealistic, text. Much simpler days.

Shortly after my first foray into online journaling, a virtual tag cloud’s worth of blogging platforms emerged. Millions of people (myself included) entered the world of platform-based reverse chronology and the big business of blogs was subsequently born. By 2004, blogs were all the rage and a personal URL was the social accessory of choice. Independent weblogs enjoyed their time in the sun for a hot second before something happened.

Facebook happened. Twitter happened. And then the social dominos started falling until they covered over independent websites. Now when someone publishes, they tweet. Or post on Facebook. Or publish an essay on Medium.

So why, if it’s become so easy to publish via 3rd party services, do I and others like me continue to publish sites like these, on unique URLs, free-standing in their platform-agnostic glory? It’s simple really. We subscribe to the Craft Indie philosophy, meaning we take extreme pride and are borderline-obsessed with hand-crafting our own little corners of the web.

Writer and designer Craig Mod says it better than I ever could in his amazing essay All You Need is Publish: Considering the Indie in Indie Web:

Craft Indie is calculated indie. Laborious indie. Tie-your-brain-in-a-knot indie. No easier than it’s ever been. I’m talking about breathing your bits — really possessing, sculpting, caressing, caring for, caring after your bits. Knowing. Takes buckets of effort. And buckets be heavy…Craft Indie is lose your afternoon to RSS 2.0 vs Atom specifications indie. Craft Indie is .htaccessing the perfect URL indie. Craft Indie is cool your eyes don’t change indie. Craft Indie is pixel tweaking line-heights, margins, padding … of the copyright in the footer indie. Craft Indie is #efefe7 not #efefef indie. Craft Indie is fatiguing indie, you-gotta-love-it indie, you-gotta-get-off-on-this-mania indie.

Outside of our obsessive-compulsive code tweaking, independent websites remain extremely important for reasons of sustainability, portability and legacy. Relying on dedicated platforms to support the carrying of messages places the majority of power in the camp of the platform, not the publisher. Brent Simmonds writes:

My blog’s older than Twitter and Facebook, and it will outlive them. It has seen Flickr explode and then fade. It’s seen Google Wave and Google Reader come and go, and it’ll still be here as Google Plus fades. When Medium and Tumblr are gone, my blog will be here.

Using 3rd party services is great, however I’m more interested in using them to share content than publish content. This is a subtle, but all-to-important difference. In recent years web publishing has become consolidated and homogeneous. We rely on too few platforms as the pillars of this web we love. We need more distribution. We need refragmentation.

Frank Chimero explores this concept in a recent essay:

The lack of an tag led to Pinterest. No method to connect people created Facebook. RSS’s confusing interfaces contributed to Twitter’s success. Any gargantuan web company’s core value is a response to limitations of the protocol (connection), markup spec (description), or browsers (interface). Without proper connective tissue, consolidation becomes necessary to address these unmet needs. That, of course, leads to too much power in too few places. The door opens to potential exploitation, invasive surveillance, and a fragility that undermines the entire ethos of the internet.

So how do we stimulate a refragmentation of the web that isn’t just usable, but more useable than Twitter or Facebook or Pinterest? How can we achieve the dream of tech companies becoming field research that informs the underlying protocol Chimero proposes in the closing to his wonderful post? I don’t have the answer and I’m not sure a definitive one currently exists. But I believe we’ll get there.

This is just the beginning.

Until then, you know where to find me. I’ll be here in perpetuity tweaking my margins, fine-tuning my palette and publishing my pipe dreams long into the digital dawn…Craft Indie-style.