In Episode 23, I chat with Ben, the author of werd.io about, among other things, the role of the indie web in the broader information ecosystem, community building and growing the indie web, and more. Enjoy the episode! ## Transcript This episode was transcribed by Zachary, the proprietor of Lunaseeker Press. If you notice any typos in the transcript, please contact James. ## James **0:00** — Welcome to ‘Wonders Of Web Weaving.’ This week I’ll be talking with Ben Werdmuller, who writes at the intersection of technology, journalism, and community at werd.io. Welcome to the show, Ben. ## Ben **0:13** — Thank you. It’s exciting to be here, and I’m looking forward to the conversation. ## James **0:18** — Likewise. I like to start at the beginning of people’s journey with the web. When did you start blogging? When did werd.io come into existence? ## Ben **0:33** — I started blogging in 1998, in my first year studying computer science at the University of Edinburgh. We had internet at home through a company called Demon Internet, one of the first ISPs to give every customer a little piece of web space: they may have been the first. I’d been using the web since 1994, and I enjoyed tinkering: colored backgrounds, and CSS later. As the fundamental building blocks of the web emerged, I was playing with them. If you look at my high school yearbook (I went to school in Oxford, my hometown) it says I was most likely to become a journalist. But I got distracted by the web. What an incredible medium for telling stories. While I was at university, I started writing the story of being at school, on a hand-rolled website. As my journey continued, I went through all the blogging platforms: Greymatter (one of the formative ones,) Movable Type, and eventually WordPress. I kept writing about what I was doing, in the open. I’ve become a natural blogger. If someone tried to take blogging away from me, I’d be upset. It’s a huge part of my identity, but also of how I think and act in the world. People say I’m prolific, and I guess I am, but it’s because I can sit at a text box, write, and hit publish quickly. It helps me organize my thoughts. I didn’t use a consistent domain, because I was experimenting. I started benwerd.com in 2006. Before that, I blogged on Elgg, a social networking platform I built, and I used LiveJournal for a while. In 2013, I discovered the IndieWeb community, and started meeting up in person in San Francisco with people like Tantek Çelik and Kevin Marks. They were talking about how templated the internet was becoming: everyone subject to platforms like Facebook and the decisions those platforms mad. The IndieWeb’s answer was: no, we don’t need to do that. Everyone can have their beautiful identity on the web. That spoke to me, because I’d already been doing it for 15 years. Because the IndieWeb was coming out with new technology (microformats, Webmention, all these underlying building blocks) I established a new website so I could experiment. I’m flippant, and I liked the idea of using the first part of my last name, so I found a “werd” domain, and werd.io seemed to fit. I built a platform that became Known. I published on Known at werd.io for a long time. Last year, I realized my life was too hectic (I have a three-year-old and a demanding job) and I had to admit I couldn’t maintain the software anymore. I still wanted to publish on the web, so I flipped to Ghost. I love Ghost with my whole heart. I tweaked the templates, added Webmentions, and imported all my backstory: everything from werd.io, but also from Elgg and benwerd.com. It doesn’t have my whole history, but it’s 20 years of blogging, probably 25. I try to publish something every day. I’ll say it has changed, and I feel uncomfortable about it. When I started, I was at university chatting about my friends, the stuff I was doing: living in a block of flats on South Clark Street, Edinburgh, where an off-license opened underneath the student flats and had a full marching band at 8am on a Saturday. I remember posting about that. These days it’s more: I’ll professionally talk about the intersection of democracy, journalism, and society. That’s important, particularly in the moment we’re in, but I miss talking about anything that’s important to me. I’m a lifelong Doctor Who fan. Doctor Who was canceled yesterday, and I may well post about it. Every time I do, people ask, “Why are you talking about that? Why aren’t you talking about journalism?” I’ve outgrown my space, or painted myself into a corner, and I need some other identity to sit alongside it. I’m struggling with that. This process of representing myself on the web (thinking in the open, using it as a public notepad) has been with me for a long time. I’ll say one more thing before I shut up: every major job I’ve had has come out of blogging. When I graduated, Edinburgh didn’t have the tech scene it has now; it didn’t in 2001. I didn’t want to leave such an amazing town, but nobody had heard of me and I didn’t have a network. Publishing on my website let me find other people who cared about the things I did (social networking, educational technology) and it let me build relationships that led me to places to go and people who wanted to work with me. When I built my first startup, I didn’t have investment. I wasn’t one of those VC bros or startup founders you picture. But publishing about it on my blog let people from everywhere in the world discover what I was doing and thinking about, and it let me create a community of support. That’s been true all the way through, right up to working at a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative newsroom and now a fellowship at Stanford University. It’s all because of blogging. It’s been helpful: for my development as a human, and in my life. I’ve got a strong desire to advocate for it. I want everybody to have that experience. That’s my long, winding story, but blogging is core to who I am and how I’ve been able to move around in the world. ## James **9:35** — That’s an amazing story. I feel the same: my website is a part of me. Only a part, not all of me, but a big and growing part. Your last point made me think about the potential in personal websites: what they can be, what they can help you do. You mentioned advocating for different visions of technology. Have you done any thinking about the role the indie web can play in this broader information ecosystem? You’ve got all these independent sites, and sometimes it’s: okay, I’m going to work on my blog. Is there a world where we look outward and ask: how do we connect the dots? ## Ben **10:26** — The websites are the dots. The most important thing the indie web can do is keep encouraging people to build their spaces. Every person who builds their space and writes their thoughts is creating a relationship. When you post, yes, it’s for yourself, but you’re also building relationships with the people who’ll discover and engage with what you’re writing. Building the indie web is building a big community of people sharing themselves: the beautiful tapestry of the diversity of identities and thoughts. We’re about to be living in a world where AI intermediates everything, where people get their information through a single AI interface (at least if you believe the vendors,) where social media is full of AI slop, and newsrooms are seeing less engagement, revenue, referrals. The thing that cuts through all that is human relationships. People don’t want to be alone. They want to connect with other people and hear their thoughts. They don’t want to learn from synthetic amalgams of what people are saying. They want to connect to other human beings. They want conversations like the one we’re having. It’s important to foster and encourage that community of publishers, but also to be genuine community builders: to create the substrates for all those independent publishers to find each other. Help people make their website theirs. Writing, creating art, is integral to this, so help people think about the craft of writing, of making art, of representing themselves. Think of it as a movement that needs to be led, built, and grown. The place the indie web has often focused that’s less important is the technology. The open web enables all this, and we need to focus on that. Webmention was important for a while, and it was fantastic work. This isn't a criticism. We needed it for a long time. But the most important thing is that people build identities for themselves on the web, represent themselves, and do the human work of reflecting, creating, and sharing. ## James **13:52** — It makes me think about the relationship I have with your website. When I go to werd.io, I’m going there to spend time with ideas, and to get your commentary on the news of the day. Sometimes you’ll pull in a link and add a few paragraphs, and that context is additive and interesting: it helps me build my worldview. On the web, we can default to a professional sphere of news on one side and a personal sphere on the other. But there’s something between, where we can have a conversation. ## Ben **14:30** — Everything you publish is a conversation. The internet is a conversation. There’s something wonderful about the simple act of it: I publish something on my site, you publish something in reaction, or vice versa, and you build up a distributed conversation. Art has worked this way. Literature is often in conversation with itself; visual art is in conversation with itself. This is no different. We’re essayists, fiction writers, visual artists, and musicians, all part of this cultural conversation, building a cultural commons together. If we embrace that, beautiful things will continue to happen. ## James **15:31** — It makes me think about the way we (I’m hesitant to say “pitch”) communicate the value of the indie web and of having a personal website. Sometimes we talk about data ownership, or expression. To your point about bringing the humanity forward: because we have this rich layer of technology, we’re coalescing toward websites as a place for your art, words, essays, advocacy. All the ends, rather than the means of the HTML. ## Ben **16:11** — We have that technology, and it’s wonderful: it enables this. But the thing that makes it valuable is the messy human expression created using it. That’s true in a world full of technology that seeks to remove that messy humanity: to intermediate it, summarize it, turn it into structured data that can be quantified and analyzed on a mass basis. That’s not what humans want. I’ve got a bunch of books behind me. I love reading messy literature: stories from people who are sharing key parts of themselves. We want to reach out and find people. We don’t want that for everything. I’m going to Pittsburgh next week, and if I’m searching for the best hotel there, I don’t want to read a whole essay about it. But I would love to read someone’s essay about how they felt in Pittsburgh. What their experience of being there was. That human layer is a key part of the human experience. You can’t abstract it away. Without it, we will feel empty. Movements like the indie web are going to get more important as that layer is stripped away in other places. ## James **17:59** — There’s always talk in the community about how to get more people to have websites. We’ve been living on websites for years, so we know what they do, but to somebody more familiar with social media, that’s a different paradigm. Social media drifted from the web a long time ago. There’s been one way of viewing technology where growth means getting as big as possible. What do you think it means to grow the indie web community in this cultivating, grassroots way, rather than through a huge-tech-growth lens? ## Ben **18:53** — It’s movement building. The indie web isn't a startup, not a wealth-generating medium. It’s a cultural movement. We have to think about it one artist at a time. There’s a wonderful book about writing called Bird by Bird, about breaking large projects down into one little step at a time: word by word, bird by bird. We grow the IndieWeb bird by bird: one creator at a time, one community of creators at a time. There are people who want to create but believe their only option is Substack or Instagram: that it’s the only way they can find an audience or a community. One thing we can do is tell the story of how that’s not the case. Substack’s network is restrictive. That they compensate Nazis aside (which is a large aside) it’s a network that enforces a template on how you represent yourself. You don’t have to. Sometimes your work sings when it’s in its space, tailored for it. If we tell the story (here’s a person who published on their site, and these wonderful things happened; here’s the community they built from their space that they couldn’t have built in a templated one) those stories matter. Everything is powered by stories, and the stories of success, community, and finding humanity on the web are what’s going to empower the indie web. There’s one other thing: technology is hard. It shouldn’t be necessary to learn HTML, or how to run a web server, to represent yourself on the web. We need great tools. That’s a place where technology can help. How can we abstract away the low-level nuts and bolts? No one needs to know about HTTP, or about provisioning a Let’s Encrypt certificate. How do we make that easy, while making sure the technology is expressive and doesn’t template people’s expression? Those tools, by definition, are unscalable, so they’re independent projects by hobbyists. Somebody could make a living building such a tool. It’s not clear to me anyone could make a billion dollars building one. It’s an independent ecosystem, and there are opportunities for people to sustain themselves building that tooling: but it’s anti-scale, anti-VC. We’ve got to embrace. ## James **22:48** — I love the point about storytelling as the medium of communication. Whenever I’m talking about the indie web, I think about how many stories I see on people’s websites. I go to my feed reader and see photos from a friend’s holiday in Vietnam, or articles from The Guardian. I’ve got all this information coming to me: news, and so many personal websites — and that’s how I live the web. I explore websites, I click on “more,” and that takes me down rabbit holes. The more we talk about this, the more people might think, “that’s cool” or possible, at least. It’s not inevitable that you have to join Substack to find community, to find writers and readers, to find hope for people finding your thing. ## Ben **23:53** — Not to rag on Substack, although, believe me, I could do that for hours. The challenge is that these companies have spent money furthering the message that they’re how you find an audience for your work and build community. In reality, the Substack network doesn't give you an audience or bring people to your work. It would be a different conversation if it did. What they do is prioritize certain writers: some of whom are flag-waving Nazis. They give them money, tweak the network to give them an audience, and hold those people up and say, “look at the success this person had.” The cherry-picked examples. For everybody else, sitting in the long tail of publishing, they don’t see any benefit. That’s been shown again and again, with testing and research. We have to tell the alternative story. We have to say: you can do this differently. You can find community. You can put yourself out in the open. Substack is predicated on the idea that people should make money on the work they publish. At its heart is a paywall. Everybody deserves to decide how they make money from their work (fine) but it has the flavor of a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s not something most people can do to support their work through writing alone, unless you’re already famous, unless you’ve already got a following. Even for people who want to be independent and build a career on the internet, by far the better thing to do is to put your stuff out there and use that as a driver for whatever else you’re doing. If you’re consulting, selling a book: fine, you can do those things, but the paywall gets in your way. The message Substack sends is that you’re going to get a huge audience and make money. Neither of those is true, and people trade freedom of expression for that promise. There’s another, public, alternative promise we can make. Stories are at the heart of everything. Stories define us: that’s how we learn about the world, and how we understand how to make good decisions, by ingesting stories that tell us about the world. We need more, better stories. ## James **27:25** — It’s about amplifying the impact an individual can have. The mindset with technology is that more is better. When I read someone’s website, I think, “this is the life of someone who lives in Canada, unfolding over a year,” or “this is the life of someone in England talking about rural life.” That’s the story I’m into, rather than anything else. ## Ben **27:57** — I want to learn about people. I want to read about their lived experiences and understand perspectives I wouldn’t encounter. My favorite blogs are by people living queer lives in Singapore, or people dealing with a disease I’m not aware of and adapting their whole life to it, or making it as an independent illustrator, and so on. The details matter. What does it feel like to be them? What’s the experience of navigating that life? That’s different from the transactional nature of so much information on the web. ## James **28:52** — The web allows us to express our identity in whatever way we want, and that’s one of the magical things. I can give you a slice of Scotland, you can give me a slice of journalism, and I can go somewhere else and have this whole constellation of websites. That’s reductive on both sides (we write about more than those things) but it’s there. I’m curious whether you’ve done any thinking about privacy controls, and about how we sit between the idea of a public web and the vulnerability of sharing. In social media and in the Mastodon world, there’s an acknowledgement of blocking and limited audiences. What have you thought about that in the indie web? A blog for friends? ## Ben **29:55** — There are different versions. Let’s go back to LiveJournal. LiveJournal is the most under-discussed and most formative social platform there was on the web. It’s what brought blogging to the masses. Forget WordPress and Movable Type. There were more people on LiveJournal than on any of those for a long time. What LiveJournal let you do (which is why so many people were on it) was choose your audience. You could publish in public, or create a custom audience and say, “this is for these friends, this is for those friends.” That let you share more intimate stories about your life, all in the same space. That didn’t work for the mass market as the internet grew to billions of people: it’s too complicated. Google discovered that with Google+ when they tried to do the same thing. But the principle is there. You don’t want to share everything in public, and how much you can share depends on who you are. I’m privileged to share stuff in public because I’m a cis white man in the United States. Although the United States is circling the drain, it’s still a freer place than many. If you come from a vulnerable community, or you’re in an authoritarian regime, what you can share publicly reduces. You have to start thinking: how is my data being hosted? Who am I sharing with? We’re seeing that shift. People are moving away from social and into group chats. It’s not that people are moving from the shadow of what was once Twitter into Bluesky or Mastodon. They’re going, “screw it, I’m not doing this anymore. I’m going to chat with my friends over here.” Bluesky is about to introduce private closed groups over the next year. The people behind Signal created a framework for people to build community platforms based on that technology. Mastodon has its version. We’re going to see more of that. I’d love to have a closer friends-and-family personal blog. For a lot of people, that’s Facebook, which is problematic. The chances of seeing something someone posts on Facebook are slim, and it’s got advertising. It’s an adverse space, but people are trying to do it through that, even if they don’t know that’s what they’re doing. I also think about company blogs. There’s a need for reflection and expression inside organizations that doesn’t happen. People write memos and stick them on Google Drive, or write short missives on Slack. But blogging is a helpful way to structure thought so it can be found afterward. I worked for Medium for a little less than a year. Medium has an internal version of Medium, private to the company, that’s a thousand times better than Medium. Because it’s a closed group, people shared focused thoughts about the future of the platform, but also coffee shops in the area when they were based in San Francisco, local discussions, which was amazing. That was the loss I felt when I left: it’s called Hatch, and I don’t have access to Hatch anymore. There are some examples, and there are opportunities, but we don’t have the platforms. It’s not clear how somebody who isn’t technical can achieve that: which is how we end up at Facebook, or at longer-form posts on Slack, neither of which is fit for purpose. When you think about an indie web, it gets complicated. How do you have a protocol (authenticated, audience-specific RSS) that lets information selectively flow? What does authentication look like without creating a universal, centralized identity? There’s a lot to work out, and a lot of prerequisites. The AT Protocol people may come the closest to doing it, with standard.site, a cross-blogging lexicon for encoding long-form blogging. You can publish and read using any compatible platform. They’re working on private data for this reason. Those two things might hit it: you have a decentralized substrate that lets you publish and read with the tools of your choice, but share with certain people: and you also have a decentralized identity, so you can authenticate on the web without putting a ton of trust in any one provider. It’s taken me a while to trust the people behind atproto, but that might be the furthest along. It would be lovely to see other possibilities. There’s a huge part of me that wishes we could go back to LiveJournal (which is owned by Russian state media, so let’s not do that.) But that’s the spirit I’d love to come back to. ## James **37:36** — I’ve been mulling over this concept: if it’s not on the open web, I won’t read it. I’ve been hesitant to write it down because it’s flippant, but it’s based on my reality. If somebody sends me a Facebook link, I can’t open it. That cuts me out of discussions in my local community. When I think about what the indie web can do (if communities could live in decentralized spaces and have that dialogue and discussion, where people create community message boards or listings) that feels like the social infrastructure we need. It’s about chipping into a community space, rather than chipping into a network you don’t own and leaving out everyone who can’t join, for whatever reason that may be. ## Ben **38:28** — There’s work to do. We’re in a better spot than we’ve ever been, but there’s still a way to go. ## James **38:41** — That leads me to my last question. The thing that excites me most about the indie web is that the story hasn’t been written. We’re writing it in this discussion, on our blogs, in in-person meetups. It’s happening, and we’re deciding what direction we want to take the web. Where do you hope the indie web will be in the next few years? Where do you hope we put our time and focus: community building, technology, social advocacy, whatever that means for you? ## Ben **39:18** — Community building. I love the carnivals: that’s a new thing in the community, and it’s beautiful. I want more. Let’s showcase the carnivals. You have a raft of writing on a particular topic, or in a particular way. It got me into fiction again. I appreciated the IndieWeb Fiction Carnival, although I hosted last month and haven’t written my roundup post yet, so that’s the thing I must do before the weekend. It’s brought in people who weren’t attracted to the technical version of the IndieWeb. Here are people interested in fiction writing, here are people interested in another topic. Bring that together and highlight and showcase that work, both the sub-communities and the work that comes out of them. That would be a meaningful work of community building, and would spread the indie web further. That’s what I want from the indie web: I want it to be bigger, but without losing its independence, its granularity, its focus on individual expression and independent websites. That’s what it’s about. I want it to be a huge constellation of independent websites that can all be found, that all represent themselves in different ways, with all kinds of content and conversations. That’s the promise of the web. We may lead to a point where the IndieWeb is all that remains. Let’s embrace that, and grow it, and nurture it. More communities, more sub-communities, more in-person meetups which are important, but also more remote meetups. It’s great to connect with people who aren’t in your local area. Focusing on humanity, to grow it, is the most important thing. ## James **41:58** — That’s a terrific note to end on, but I always like to ask a fun question. You mentioned you studied in Edinburgh. How much time did you spend in Blackwell’s Bookshop? ## Ben **42:16** — I spent a lot of time in Blackwell’s Bookshop. Wait. Where’s Blackwell’s Bookshop? The one opposite the university building with the rotunda dome, on Nicholson Street? I don’t know there was a Blackwell’s when I lived there. I spent time in Waterstones. One of my favorite places in Edinburgh to hang out is gone: a wonderful place called the Forest Café, which I felt a great spiritual affinity with. It was a space for independent artists, run as a collective, and it was beautiful. Blackwell’s comes from Oxford, my hometown, so I’ve spent many hours in Blackwell’s in various places. In Oxford, the original Blackwell’s has a room in the basement called the Norrington Room that for a long time was the largest single room full of books in the world. It’s worth investigating. But bookstores, that’s my home. There’s nothing better than going and perusing the kaleidoscope of writing and offerings. They’re decorated in different ways, with different styles and forms of thought. These days they’re often not produced by the same large publishing companies, but independently. They run the gamut. What’s been fun to see is that, although mass-market paperbacks aren’t a thing anymore, hardback books are on the up. People want this object which is an expression in itself. They value it, and more people are getting them, so there’s hope. Books are important: a huge part of the fabric of society. But it’s also a lesson to the indie web: all this mass-market, working-at-scale, templated stuff is happening over here, but there’s still a huge desire to connect to people’s thoughts in other ways, to see them independently and consume them on their own terms. There always will be. I’ve got hope and excitement for the IndieWeb. Beautiful things are still to come. ## James **45:27** — Amazing. Where can people find you on the indie web? ## Ben **45:34** — People can find me at werd.io: “word” with an E. If you care about the intersection of journalism, democracy, and technology, that’s the place to go; there’s lots of writing. If you care about Doctor Who, or my adventures in cooking, or anything else, I’m still trying to figure out where I’m going to put that stuff. I also have outmap.org for my fiction, which I promote less, but it’s there. What I would love more than anything else is this: if you’re publishing on your independent website, tell me about it. I want to read it, so please send me your website address. ## James **46:20** — Thank you so much for taking the time to chat. This was a pleasure. ## Ben **46:29** — The pleasure was all mine. Thank you so much.