The indie web's beautiful failure
Why the movement to reclaim the internet from big tech succeeds by staying small
The contradiction arrived with startling clarity in a simple social media post. Xandra, a dedicated advocate for the indie web movement, posed a question to her community: "What does the indie web need the most right now?" The irony was immediate and devastating. Rather than publishing this crucial question on her personal website—the very thing her movement champions—she posted it on Mastodon, essentially Twitter with a different coat of paint.
Ava spotted the paradox immediately and responded with surgical precision on her own blog. Here was one of the movement's most thoughtful voices forced to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: "For many things people take for granted online, even the people who say personal websites are in many ways superior have to go to their version of social media to do it."
That single moment crystallised a deeper contradiction plaguing the indie web movement—one that reveals far more about human nature, technological reality, and the mathematics of social change than its advocates care to admit.
This moment encapsulates the central paradox of the indie web movement: its greatest strengths are also its fundamental weaknesses. And paradoxically, what critics see as failure might actually be the movement's most important success.
The numbers that change everything
The mathematics are breathtaking in their brutality. Social media platforms now serve 5.24 billion users globally—nearly two-thirds of every human alive. Facebook alone reaches 3.07 billion monthly active users whilst generating $134 billion in annual revenue for Meta. YouTube commands 2.5 billion users, Instagram captures 2 billion, and even relative newcomer TikTok controls 1.58 billion monthly users.
Against this digital colossus, the entire indie web ecosystem barely registers as statistical noise. Mastodon claims 7.4 million total users—not monthly active, but total users ever. Bluesky has attracted 6 million. The broader ActivityPub federation, encompassing dozens of decentralised platforms, totals roughly 19 million users across everything. Combined, every indie web platform and personal website represents less than 0.4% of global social media participation.
To grasp the scale: Facebook acquires more new users in eight weeks than the entire indie web has accumulated in over a decade of evangelising. When indie web advocates speak optimistically about "growth" and "adoption," they're operating in a reality distortion field that renders their numerical insignificance invisible.
The economic forces working against them dwarf anything the movement can muster. Meta's revenue alone exceeds the GDP of most nations. Google's advertising machinery generates hundreds of billions by solving the discovery and monetisation problems that personal websites cannot address at scale. These aren't merely companies—they're economic ecosystems employing hundreds of thousands of engineers, designers, and content moderators to create experiences that billions find indispensable.
The historical echo of digital idealism
The indie web's current struggles echo previous attempts at technological decentralisation with almost clockwork precision. Diaspora, launched in 2010 with nearly identical principles, raised significant funding and media attention whilst promising users "freedom, privacy, and control of their own data." Despite initial excitement and a successful crowdfunding campaign, Diaspora plateaued at roughly 850,000 users—about the population of Birmingham.
RSS feeds, despite being technically superior to algorithmic timelines, were abandoned by mainstream users in favour of platform-controlled feeds that offered better discovery and social features. Email remains decentralised in principle, yet most users consolidated around Gmail for its superior interface and anti-spam protection. Even the internet itself, originally designed as a decentralised network, has concentrated around massive data centres operated by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
The pattern reveals a consistent truth: technical decentralisation rarely translates to social adoption when centralised alternatives offer superior user experiences. The indie web succeeded in the 1990s and early 2000s because the alternative was no web at all. Today, it competes against sophisticated platforms optimised by some of the world's most talented designers and engineers, backed by billions in research and development.
BitTorrent demonstrated that decentralised networks could handle specific technical challenges like file distribution. But social interaction requires different qualities—ease of use, community discovery, safety mechanisms, and mobile optimisation—that benefit from centralised coordination. When platforms excel at the social elements users actually want, technical architecture becomes secondary to user experience.
The aristocracy of digital independence
The indie web movement suffers from a fatal contradiction: the people most capable of implementing its vision are precisely those who need it least. Sarah, a software developer in San Francisco, can afford the £50 annual hosting cost, navigate domain registration, troubleshoot technical problems, and maintain content management systems. She represents perhaps 1% of internet users—people with both the means and motivation to reject mainstream platforms.
Meanwhile, Aisha, a teenager in Lagos using a £40 smartphone with limited data, needs platforms that work reliably on cheap devices, provide professional content moderation, and offer zero-friction publishing. When technical sophisticates critique platform dependency, they're asking ordinary users to sacrifice convenience, social connection, and professional opportunity for abstract benefits like "data ownership."
This creates a perverse dynamic where indie web advocacy sounds like privilege lecturing necessity. The movement systematically excludes the people most vulnerable to algorithmic manipulation whilst attracting those sophisticated enough to resist it independently. It's rather like environmental activists promoting organic farming whilst ignoring that industrial agriculture feeds the world's poor.
Personal websites compete poorly against platforms on virtually every metric ordinary users actually care about: ease of setup, mobile experience, content discovery, social interaction, and community safety. What indie web advocates call "features"—technical control, federation protocols, ownership abstractions—most users experience as barriers to doing what they actually want: connecting with friends, discovering content, and participating in communities.
When success would destroy the vision
Perhaps the most counterintuitive insight about the indie web movement is that achieving mass adoption would destroy everything that makes it valuable. If personal websites suddenly attracted hundreds of millions of users, they would inevitably develop the same problems the movement was created to solve.
Popular websites would require content moderation at scale, creating the same censorship controversies that plague platforms today. Discovery mechanisms would need to favour engaging content, leading to the same algorithmic amplification of outrage and sensationalism that drives platform engagement. Simplified publishing tools would reduce user control to accommodate less technical users. The result would be social media with extra steps—all the problems of platforms with none of their refined user experience.
The indie web's deliberately small scale preserves what makes it distinctive: genuine choice, technical experimentation, and blessed escape from algorithmic mediation. Growth beyond a certain threshold would require either fragmenting into unusable complexity or developing centralised coordination mechanisms that contradict its founding principles.
Consider Wikipedia, often cited as a decentralisation success story. In reality, Wikipedia succeeded by developing hierarchical editor structures, centralised decision-making processes, and institutional partnerships that operate more like traditional media organisations than grassroots communities. The façade of openness conceals substantial institutional machinery that enables function at scale—exactly what the indie web seeks to avoid.
The indie web movement succeeds precisely because it doesn't need to solve the problems that scale creates. Small communities can maintain standards through social pressure rather than algorithmic enforcement. Technical innovation can proceed without corporate approval processes. Individual creativity can flourish without optimising for mass appeal or advertiser-friendly content.
The beautiful failure revealed
What critics dismiss as the indie web's failure to achieve mass adoption represents its most sophisticated success: creating sustainable alternatives without the delusion of universal applicability. The movement has evolved into something far more valuable than its original evangelistic vision—a digital preservation society.
Like environmental movements that maintain wilderness reserves rather than converting all farmland to organic methods, the indie web preserves technological diversity without claiming to solve global problems. It provides refuge for the digitally sophisticated whilst acknowledging that ordinary users have excellent reasons for choosing convenience over control.
The movement's greatest contribution isn't recruiting millions—it's maintaining proof that alternatives remain possible. Every personal website represents a small act of resistance against technological monoculture. Every webmention protocol demonstrates that social interaction needn't require corporate surveillance. Every federated community proves that meaningful online relationships can exist outside platform control.
This preservation role extends beyond technology to culture itself. The indie web maintains traditions of personal publishing, technical craftsmanship, and digital independence that would otherwise vanish under platform homogenisation. Like libraries preserving rare manuscripts or museums maintaining traditional crafts, the movement keeps alive ways of being online that mass culture has abandoned.
The beautiful failure, then, lies in discovering wisdom: abandoning impossible dreams for achievable realities. Rather than saving the world from platforms, the indie web has created sustainable communities for people sophisticated enough to want something different. Rather than competing with billion-user networks, it has built something smaller but infinitely more intentional.
The wisdom of staying small
The indie web's trajectory illuminates profound questions about technology, choice, and social change that extend far beyond personal websites. It demonstrates how technical solutions to social problems inevitably reveal themselves as luxury goods—brilliant for early adopters, irrelevant to systemic transformation.
This pattern echoes across domains: electric vehicles, renewable energy, organic food—countless "solutions" that work magnificently for the privileged whilst remaining inaccessible to mainstream adoption. The indie web joins this tradition of elite alternatives that provide moral satisfaction without threatening dominant systems.
Yet this positioning carries unexpected power. Elite alternatives often serve as research laboratories for broader innovations. The indie web's technical breakthroughs—federation protocols, decentralised identity, portable social connections—are already being absorbed and refined by major platforms. ActivityPub enables Mastodon but also powers Meta's Threads integration. Personal websites inspire creator economy features that platforms then implement more elegantly.
The movement succeeds by bearing the costs of experimentation whilst platforms reap the benefits of scaling. Every indie web innovation becomes a feature request for centralised services to implement. This creates an ecosystem where idealistic developers beta-test solutions that pragmatic corporations eventually commercialise—a division of labour that might actually represent optimal resource allocation.
Most importantly, the indie web preserves the possibility of choice in an increasingly homogeneous digital landscape. Not everyone needs personal websites, but the mere fact that sophisticated alternatives exist changes conversations about platform power. The possibility of exit constrains platform behaviour, even for users who never exercise that option.
The movement has discovered something profound that most technology evangelists miss entirely: preserving alternatives matters infinitely more than converting majorities. In a world trending inexorably toward technological monoculture, maintaining diversity—even at microscopic scale—represents victory rather than defeat. The indie web has found its perfect ecological niche: not as salvation from platform dominance, but as a permanent digital sanctuary for those sophisticated enough to demand something different.
This reframing transforms the indie web from failed revolution into triumphant preservation society—one that serves its actual community rather than chasing impossible dreams of universal adoption. Sometimes the most beautiful success lies in accepting beautiful failure, discovering that the thing you thought you wanted was never what you needed at all.