Last summer, I walked away from most social media networks, in particular anything related to Meta. Facebook and Instagram was deleted and WhatsUp uninstalled. It was a liberating move and outside a few local groups and friends I have not regretted it or looked back.
In December, I sat round our table with my two children and started having ‘that’ chat, the difficult conversation any parent has; how do you protect yourself online. Well, OK, I guess I will be having a different conversation with my daughter at some point.
We spoke about online services and platforms. How you would sign up and gain access to these and how a password is not only used but how it can also be abused. After this, we discussed email over a cup of tea and I realised that email was probably not going to be used as much as messaging or more modern platforms. This hit something in me.
That night, I tried to shake that feeling from earlier, but it was resonating with the conversations I had been having at work. The internet is changing, the platform is evolving and the relevance of a humble website is slowly being eroded.
As a society, we now go to social media platforms for news and updates. Our shopping comes delivered to the door, sometimes we do not know we ordered it. Our life feeds are being curated and served to us in a bit sized chunk expertly selected by an algorithm.
Two hours later, I found myself on the IndieWeb site reading through the principles and core foundations of an open web. The comment of ‘build sites for people, not companies’ was precisely how I was feeling. I have just given my children the keys to the internet without really knowing how they will interact and use it. They could end up joining all the latest and greatest platforms, making lots of content, building friends and relationships that last forever…
No, they will not last forever. They will last for as long as that platform allows. They would be giving their words, pictures, and creativity to that platform to own, moderate and use as needed. When that platform goes away or ceases to be all that work, all that legacy will be lost. There will be nothing to look back on, they will have missed out on building the internet.
I hope that they learn to build something for themselves, they publish their words and those words remain.
Where does this leave me and how does it relate to my purge of social media platforms. Well, having sat in on a couple of IndieWeb meetings and talking to a few members of the community, I am reworking my online presence. I am going to build what I want to use, own my data and hopefully share with my children the joy of creating something that is 'on the internet'
This site will become my silo of data. I will publish here and syndicate elsewhere.
So far, I have imported the old WordPress blog posts going back to 2005. My Swarm checkin data is also recorded here as plain text Markdown documents. I’m working on a way of importing my gpx/fit files from races and training.
It is invigorating, and has really given me a purpose for this domain. It feels a little like the talks we have about the environment, we need to ensure that we leave something for the next generation.