"You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world [wide web]." — Morpheus, The Matrix
Why Indie Web
- You're frustrated by the downtime (or Flickr is down), maintenance, database failures, and unscalability of web content hosting services.
- Or you've lost content due to acquisitions, or post-acquisition migrations to services which were subsequently shut down. Or had an entire production database blown away.
- Maybe you're one of the unlucky few who have been disappeared from a hosting service, or suffered from involuntary identity re-assignment (perhaps due to trademark claims or other intimidation).
- Maybe Google decided that you violated(also [1]) their GMail ToS and now you can't login to all those services you signed up for... using your Google ID. (more 2011-12-11: [2], [3], [4]: "There's no legal reason behind Google's decision to block my daughter's account. They've chosen to implement these age restrictions in this particular way. They've chosen to lock up my daughter's data without warning. They've chosen to threaten to delete the data.")
- Or you got bumped off Twitter for tweeting too much.
- YouTube errantly transferred ownership of your video upload to a big content copyright holder / media company.
- Whatever the reason, you're done with sharecropping your content, your identity, your self.
Our content is becoming more important, and sometimes even critical to our lives. It is not secure in the hands of random startups, organizations and web companies. We should be the holders of our own data.
Why Indie Web Camp?
- You're here because you know this and you want to design and build a web presence where you're in control.
- Maybe you bought your own domain for vanity reasons but now want to put it to good use.
We, the organizers of IndieWebCamp want that as well, and have started building it for ourselves.
Join us and together we can grow the IndieWeb.
(More motivational examples/citations linked from: "Itches & Scratches: sharecropping and site death" - 2010-199 Federated Social Web Summit talk by Tantek)
see also
