Why the Indie Web should stay small

I wrote this on the train a while ago, and plan on buffing it out no later than the fifth

I see all over the place on small sites, both personal/blogs and forums that we (the outsider web) should take over the mainstream web. There are always arguments for this in the form of: normal web bad, so we should take it over and replace with this because this is good. I disagree a lot.

I disagree because, regardless of how good this is, if we try to take over the mainstream web then we are doomed to be essentially overrun by all the mainstream ideals and people. AgoraRoad, Melonland, lainchan, all that, stuff that I actually like, function by not absolutely flooding people with what would be necessary if the mainstream web were actually taken over. If the mainstream web were taken over then all of the people there would have to join the "outsider" web, which would flood all these sites, and also all the places they could post them (Neocities and all the independent hosts can't handle that kinda traffic).

Additionally, it would then introduce corpos into here, as wherever people go, corpos inevitably follow. They go where the money is. And that would, once again inevitably cause this whole part of the internet to degrade in quality and value.

That doesn't even touch on the sheer impossibility of taking over the mainstream web. You want to move billions of people from content farms and hundreds of billions of dollars to this small thing? Literal impossibility.

Also, if there is an attempt to make this outside web more mainstream, then as more people flock to it, then the whole cringe and cancel culture thing will come with them! Hell, they're already doing stuff like this (basically reviewing indie sites) in YouTube! And having oppressive censorship spread into the outsider web (which would be caused by taking over the mainstream web), bringing forth self censorship and all that nasty stuff, is NOT good. And for this reason, I think we should take a little from the Japanese Web (https://www.bikobatanari.art/posts/2023/east-west-website-culture), which has learned to

AND, a final argument, I believe we already have taken over a small part of the web. We have communities, a little village, and while growing would be fine, we don't need to try to *force* it to be a big bustling city filled with everyone. That's just too much. And by the fact of our existence here, the existence of this outsider, niche, alt web, we have already defeated the powers that be who prefer consolidation to more decentralized stuff like this.

So why am I writing this?

Because I keep. seeing. stuff. online about how "Guys, we gotta take over that big bad web, right?", When, as I hope this short post pointed out, we don't actually need to. Let the outsider web naturally grow, and not try to take over or anything, and we’ll get the best version we could get anyway. Focus more on creating good content and improving this web then forcing more people to increase the size of it. Quality > Quantity

_{This post is part of the Agora Road Travelogue Disagree with anything feel free to respond: microbyt3@proton.me}