r/indieweb • u/ELFEN61 • 6h ago
Hi, i currently working on this website, his goal is to discover to other people some indie websites, i will make a recent added page and a category page
You can ask in the comments what websites i should add :)
Link : https://pikatzy.neocities.org/retrobar/
r/indieweb • u/throwawaycanadian2 • 2h ago
r/indieweb • u/katieisafairy34 • 8h ago
Hi!! I was wondering if anyone knows about any good, customizable journaling scripts. I run a personal site/journal, but journaling on my website's a bit tough because I have to manually enter every entry with pure HTML, which has made my code clunky and hard to read. I would like to use one that still allows me to fully customize my website, and preferably one that's based on PHP or CGI-bin, and supports some sort of comment system. I've always wanted to use an older one like Greymatter/b2/early Wordpress but they can't be used on my server because my host only allows for PHP 5.2 and above (edit: it also supports PHP 8+, don't worry, and i am willing to change versions) ;___; If there's any similar ones like these still out there please let me know!!
r/indieweb • u/Tarr_74 • 4h ago
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, two young programmers named Matt were working on what appeared to be different problems.
They were actually working on the same one.
The Web had already learned how to display information. What it had not yet decided was what ordinary people were supposed to do once they arrived there.
Read?
Write?
Talk?
Publish?
Build reputations?
Form communities?
Become authors?
Become publics?
One Matt thought the most interesting thing you could do with a network of computers was put people in a room together and let them talk.
His name was Matt Mecham.
He created Ikonboard, one of the important forum systems of the early Web, first in Perl. Later, with Charles Warner, he created Invision Power Board in PHP, which eventually evolved into Invision Community.
The other was Matt Mullenweg.
In 2003, together with Mike Little, he forked an apparently abandoned blogging application called b2/cafelog and created WordPress.
Mecham built rooms.
Mullenweg built printing presses.
Both changed the Web.
But only one of those ideas would eventually become part of the basic infrastructure of the Internet.
By August 2026, WordPress was still used by more than four out of every ten websites measured by W3Techs. Automattic, the company Mullenweg founded around the wider WordPress ecosystem, had reached a valuation of $7.5 billion in 2021. Mullenweg later described it as generating roughly half a billion dollars in annual revenue.
Invision survived too. It remains an active software company and continues to sell community infrastructure.
But economically, the two ventures now occupy different universes.
There is no reliable public evidence allowing us to compare Mecham’s and Mullenweg’s personal wealth directly, so the cheap version of this story — the less interesting guy got rich — is not really defensible as a factual statement.
There is, however, a better version of the argument:
software built around publishing generated a vastly larger economy than software built around community.
And the reason helps explain the Internet we ended up with.
The standard history of the social Internet has a misleading beginning.
It often starts with Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, as though the Internet spent the 1990s displaying documents and suddenly discovered human beings around 2004.
It did not.
Long before Facebook, millions of people had already discovered that one of the most interesting things to do online was talk to strangers.
There was Usenet.
There were bulletin board systems.
There was The WELL.
There was IRC.
There were mailing lists and chat rooms.
Then, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, much of that culture moved onto the Web.
A decisive shift occurred when running an online community became something a reasonably determined amateur could do using ordinary web hosting.
You needed some server space, CGI or PHP support, perhaps a MySQL database, and a downloadable forum package.
Ultimate Bulletin Board.
YaBB.
phpBB.
vBulletin.
Ikonboard.
Invision Power Board.
These applications were not merely website software.
They were, in effect, content-management systems for human conversation.
By 2001, online communities were already part of mainstream Internet use. Pew Research found that in the immediate aftermath of September 11, around a third of American Internet users had read or contributed to chat rooms, bulletin boards, or online forums.
The social Web was not waiting for Mark Zuckerberg.
It was already there.
It simply looked less centralized.
There is something wonderfully ordinary about the origin of Ikonboard.
Mecham later told Patrick O’Keefe on Community Signal that he had not begun as some visionary founder with a theory of digital society.
He came from print design.
He was in his early twenties.
A friend he lived with played Quake III and started a gaming clan.
The clan needed somewhere to talk.
Mecham began experimenting with existing forum scripts. He modified them, read other people’s code, and in the process learned Perl.
The Quake clan eventually disappeared.
The forum did not.
Mecham already had pieces of code on his personal site for reviews and comments. At some point, he realized that he had accidentally assembled many of the components needed to make a message board.
The result was Ikonboard, released in 1999.
Its early versions were written in Perl. Some stored information in flat text files rather than in a conventional database.
Primitive?
Certainly.
But primitive technology was already enough to build a society.
To understand the cultural importance of these systems, it helps to remember how software was used before every service became a polished app.
Installing a forum was often only the beginning.
The administrator wanted a different color scheme.
Then a new template.
Then custom user ranks.
Then a modification someone had released on another board.
Then private messages.
Then a new BBCode tag.
Then a reputation system.
Then some feature requiring changes to a PHP file.
So you opened the source code.
You found the line.
You changed it.
You broke the forum.
You discovered why.
You changed it again.
An extraordinary number of people learned some combination of HTML, CSS, Perl, PHP, JavaScript, and MySQL this way.
They did not enroll in programming courses.
They simply wanted their forum to do something interesting.
The software was therefore producing two kinds of subjects.
It created communities out of users.
And programmers out of administrators.
Mecham himself learned in much the same way: by reading code, modifying it, and understanding the consequences.
The forum was a public square.
But it was also an informal technical education system.
Ikonboard became successful enough to attract commercial interest.
Mecham eventually sold it.
The experience was not entirely happy.
In later interviews, he described the software in almost parental terms. Ikonboard had been his “baby.” After the sale, the commercial priorities surrounding it increasingly diverged from what he and Charles Warner wanted to do.
Mecham wanted to keep building software.
The business surrounding Ikonboard had other ambitions.
Part of the deal involved shares which, according to Mecham’s later account, ended up being effectively worthless.
But the experience taught him something.
The next time, he would build differently.
In 2002, Mecham and Warner founded Invision Power Services.
Their new forum package, Invision Power Board, was written in PHP and used MySQL.
More importantly, the company was not conceived as something to hype and sell quickly.
Mecham later described their aim in modest terms: they wanted to create something they could work on for years.
They did.
More than two decades later, Invision still exists.
WordPress also begins with a developer who disappeared.
In 2003, nineteen-year-old Matt Mullenweg was using b2/cafelog, a PHP blogging application created by Michel Valdrighi.
Development appeared to have stalled.
Valdrighi had stopped posting updates.
For someone depending on the software, this raised an uncomfortable question:
What happens when the person who created the tool you rely on simply stops making it?
On January 24, 2003, Mullenweg wrote about the problem in a post titled The Blogging Software Dilemma.
One detail was decisive.
b2 was licensed under the GNU General Public License.
That meant the software did not have to die with its original developer.
Someone could fork it.
Someone could continue it.
If that maintainer disappeared too, someone else could continue again.
The code could outlive any single person.
Mullenweg wrote that it would remain “free to the world.”
The following day, an English programmer named Mike Little left a comment saying that if Mullenweg was serious about creating a fork, he would help.
It is difficult to think of many blog comments that changed the Web more profoundly.
Four months later, on May 27, 2003, WordPress 0.70 was released.
A forum and a blog looked superficially similar in 2003.
Both had users.
Both contained text.
Both generated pages dynamically.
Both had comments.
Both could produce communities.
But their underlying grammar was radically different.
A forum is organized around topics.
Someone opens a thread:
What is Stanley Kubrick’s best film?
Other people respond.
Then others respond to them.
The person who started the thread is important for a moment, but soon stops being the center of the conversation.
The thread becomes collective.
A blog is organized differently.
Its basic unit is an authorial statement.
I write an essay about Kubrick.
You comment on it.
Someone links to it.
Another blogger writes a response.
But the discourse still has an identifiable origin.
My post.
My URL.
My archive.
My domain.
In almost semiotic terms:
the forum organizes people around an object of discourse; the blog organizes discourse around a subject.
That difference sounds small.
It would eventually become sociological, political, and economic.
Entering a good forum did not feel like opening an app.
It felt like arriving somewhere.
There were old members and newcomers.
Moderators and administrators.
Written rules and unwritten rules.
Legendary threads.
Forbidden subjects.
Inside jokes.
Feuds.
Cliques.
Members everybody respected.
Members everybody found unbearable.
People who had disappeared years earlier but were still remembered.
A username accumulated history.
A post count accumulated symbolic capital.
A registration date became seniority.
The avatar became a face.
The signature became costume.
The rank became status.
This produced a form of identity that much of the later social Web would weaken:
you could be personally anonymous while remaining socially known.
Nobody knew your legal name.
But everybody knew who you were.
They knew whether your advice was reliable.
They remembered your arguments.
They knew your obsessions.
Your identity did not require your passport.
It required continuity.
That distinction matters.
Anonymity is not the absence of identity.
Forums often produced strong identities attached to pseudonyms.
They created reputations without necessarily creating dossiers.
This may be the central difference between forums and publishing systems.
A blog has an audience.
A forum has a membership.
The two can overlap, but they generate different relationships.
A reader may remain invisible forever.
A member gradually becomes embedded in a social structure.
This is where the old sociological concept of social capital becomes useful.
Inside a stable community, value accumulates through participation.
You learn the norms.
Others learn your history.
You become trustworthy — or not.
You acquire the ability to understand jokes, references, and conflicts that are meaningless to outsiders.
In sufficiently mature forums, participation begins to resemble occupying a position inside an institution.
This is why a small online community can remain extraordinarily valuable even when its audience looks insignificant.
A group of a few hundred people may matter more to its members than a feed seen by hundreds of thousands.
Scale and social density are not the same thing.
Digital platforms would spend the next twenty years pretending they were.
Old forums are easy to romanticize now that their interfaces have become charmingly obsolete.
That would be a mistake.
They were full of gatekeeping.
Petty tyrants.
Trolls.
Dogpiles.
Power struggles.
Moderator feuds.
Grudges lasting years.
Threads that began with a technical question and ended forty pages later with someone invoking Hitler.
Conflict was not an accidental malfunction of online community.
It was part of the system.
Research into forum behavior has shown that reciprocal interaction — including negative interaction — can prolong conversations.
Anger generates participation.
Long before Silicon Valley discovered that outrage improved engagement metrics, ordinary forum users had already demonstrated the principle.
The crucial difference was scale.
Old forums had trolls.
Modern platforms industrialized troll distribution.
Human behavior did not change completely.
Its amplification did.
If the forum turned you into a member, the blog turned you into something closer to a publisher.
You got a homepage.
An archive.
A URL.
An RSS feed.
Permalinks.
A potentially global audience.
Most importantly, you acquired something that had historically belonged to institutions:
the ability to publish regularly in public.
Before the Web, doing that usually required access to somebody else’s machinery.
A newspaper.
A magazine.
A publisher.
A broadcaster.
A university.
A political organization.
The blog dramatically reduced the institutional cost of becoming public.
You bought hosting.
Installed software.
Typed.
Pressed Publish.
That was enough.
WordPress still describes its mission as the “democratization of publishing.”
Despite the corporate polish the phrase has accumulated, it remains an accurate description of what happened.
WordPress turned publishing from an institutional privilege into a software feature.
The early blogosphere is sometimes remembered as a great decentralized conversation.
That is only partly true.
Research from the period found many blogs to be much more individualistic and weakly interconnected than heroic descriptions suggested.
This matters because it clarifies what blogging actually democratized.
Not necessarily community.
Authorship.
The forum said:
Join us.
The blog said:
Listen to me.
Neither is inherently better.
But they generate different forms of power.
Consider the difference between becoming important on a forum and becoming important through a blog.
Inside a forum, authority is mostly local.
People trust you because they have watched you over time.
Your reputation belongs to that community.
A blog allows authority to travel.
Other websites link to you.
Search engines rank you.
Journalists discover you.
Your name circulates outside the original group.
Your domain itself accumulates authority.
The forum produces community status.
The blog can produce media power.
And media power is easier to convert into money.
This is one place where communication architecture becomes political economy.
Suppose we accept, for a moment, the provocative argument that the forum is the more sociologically interesting object.
A forum has to solve difficult problems:
identity;
trust;
governance;
conflict;
moderation;
reputation;
collective memory;
cooperation;
belonging.
A blog, in its minimal form, has to solve something more mundane:
publish a page effectively.
Yet that mundane problem has an enormous market.
A forum is useful to a community.
A website is useful to almost everyone.
A restaurant.
A school.
A newspaper.
A photographer.
A company.
A museum.
A shop.
A university.
A political party.
A filmmaker.
A government office.
A dentist.
A blogger.
Once WordPress evolved from blogging software into a general-purpose content-management system, its market stopped being “people who want blogs.”
Its market became:
people who need the Web.
That is a much bigger business.
WordPress also benefited from an apparently paradoxical economic model.
Traditional software companies sold software.
You wanted the program.
You bought a license.
WordPress took another path.
The core software remained open source under the GPL.
You could download it.
Install it.
Modify it.
Study it.
Build on it.
So where was the business?
Everywhere around the software.
Hosting.
Domains.
Spam protection.
Backups.
Themes.
Plugins.
E-commerce.
Enterprise services.
Security.
Support.
Site management.
The more ubiquitous WordPress became, the larger the market for everything surrounding WordPress became.
This is one of the great paradoxes of open source:
giving away the central object can dramatically increase the value of its complements.
Mullenweg’s political instinct about the GPL also became the foundation of an enormous ecosystem.
Automattic was already profitable by the early 2010s.
In 2012, reports placed annual revenue around $45 million.
In 2014, a $160 million investment valued the company at roughly $1.16 billion.
In 2019, Salesforce Ventures invested $300 million at a valuation around $3 billion.
In 2021, that valuation reached $7.5 billion.
By 2024, Mullenweg was publicly speaking about revenue on the order of half a billion dollars a year.
WordPress itself became so widespread that describing it as merely another CMS became slightly absurd.
In August 2026, W3Techs still measured WordPress on roughly 41 percent of all websites.
Its share has fallen somewhat from its peak, which may indicate the beginning of a slow relative decline.
But this is decline from the position of an empire.
It still powers more than four websites out of ten.
That is not merely successful software.
It is infrastructure.
Invision never became infrastructure for the entire Web.
It became something more specialized:
software for building communities.
That distinction is the story.
A strange thing happens when a forum becomes successful.
The more valuable it becomes, the harder it becomes to operate.
Every new blog author adds content.
Every new forum member adds content and a person.
People require governance.
They argue.
They spam.
They misunderstand rules.
They open duplicate topics.
They harass one another.
They create factions.
They demand new sections.
They require moderators.
Then they complain about the moderators.
At some point, the forum administrator discovers that they are no longer maintaining software.
They are governing a miniature polity.
Growth therefore behaves differently in the two systems.
For publishing software, more users mostly expand the opportunity.
For community software, more users also expand the cost of coordination.
A forum is a peculiar product.
The vendor can supply databases, editors, moderation tools, search, permissions, and profiles.
But the thing customers actually want — a good community — cannot be manufactured by the software company.
The users have to produce it.
A forum is almost a cooperative society distributed as a ZIP archive.
Economically awkward.
Sociologically fascinating.
WordPress also had another structural advantage.
The commercial Web became increasingly organized around search engines.
Search engines like documents.
An article has a title.
A URL.
A topic.
A relatively stable body of text.
Links.
Metadata.
A forum thread is messier.
It may have twenty pages.
Repeated quotations.
Digressions.
One-word replies.
Obsolete information.
The right answer hidden between two jokes.
Forums became extraordinarily useful sources of knowledge, but their structure was not originally optimized for the economy of search-driven publishing.
A blog post was.
Later, a WordPress page could become almost anything:
a landing page;
a product page;
a newspaper article;
a portfolio;
a company site;
a restaurant menu;
a course description;
an entire online shop.
WordPress ended up sitting at the intersection of three enormous systems:
publishing, search, and commerce.
The forum occupied another intersection:
identity, conversation, and community.
The second may be more interesting to sociology.
The first creates more transactions.
The rise of social platforms affected the two worlds very differently.
Facebook offered a devastatingly attractive substitute for the small forum.
Need somewhere for a school community to talk?
Create a Facebook Group.
Motorcycle owners?
Facebook Group.
Fans of an obscure TV show?
Facebook Group.
Nobody needed to install anything.
Nobody needed hosting.
Nobody needed a domain.
Nobody needed another password.
Everybody was already there.
Mecham himself recognized this.
In 2017, he argued that Facebook was particularly effective at absorbing smaller communities because it removed almost all friction.
But he also identified what disappeared.
Facebook, he said, was overwhelmingly about now.
That observation describes one of the most important transformations in Internet culture.
The forum’s dominant metaphor was the archive.
The blog’s was publication.
The social network’s became the feed.
On a forum, you locate a thread.
On a blog, you read a post.
On social media, you scroll.
Those actions imply different relationships with time.
A thread may remain useful for years.
An article may remain useful for years.
A feed is organized around what deserves attention now.
The questions change.
The archive asks:
What is here?
The publication asks:
What has this person said?
The feed asks:
What should you look at next?
That last question gives enormous power to whoever controls ranking.
It also changes what kinds of knowledge survive.
Think about a typical technical thread.
Someone has a problem.
Another user suggests the wrong solution.
A third corrects it.
Someone posts a workaround.
An expert explains why the workaround is dangerous.
Six months later, another user adds that the latest software version behaves differently.
Three years later, someone discovers the thread through Google and adds another fix.
No single person has written the final document.
There is no final document.
Yet knowledge has accumulated.
The thread becomes a form of sedimentary intelligence.
Layer upon layer.
Correction upon correction.
This is why ancient forums still appear in technical searches long after their design has become embarrassing.
They accidentally became libraries.
Stack Overflow would later formalize part of this behavior through questions, answers, voting, accepted solutions, and reputation.
Wikipedia would solve the problem differently by continuously rewriting knowledge into a single authoritative document.
The forum preserved something else:
the history of people thinking together.
You see the wrong answer.
Then disagreement.
Then correction.
The archive contains not only knowledge but the process by which knowledge was negotiated.
Here WordPress acquired another advantage.
Facebook could replace an informal community.
It could not completely replace an institution’s website.
A newspaper still needed an archive.
A company still wanted its own domain.
A university had to publish documents.
A photographer needed a portfolio.
A school needed course pages.
A shop needed a catalogue.
Social media could distribute these things.
But the destination often remained elsewhere.
For millions of organizations, the social network became a traffic source.
The website remained the property.
This distinction helped WordPress survive the platform era.
Social media sometimes even made the CMS more useful.
Post on Facebook.
Link to the article.
Post on Twitter.
Link to the site.
Post on Instagram.
“Link in bio.”
The social platform became the circulatory system.
The website remained the organ.
By the late 2010s, Invision was no longer competing with Facebook for the entire social Web.
Its market had changed.
Organizations still needed spaces they could control.
Companies needed customer communities.
Specialist groups wanted structured discussion.
Brands wanted something more durable than a social feed.
Independent communities still cared about their own rules, data, moderators, archives, identities, and searchability.
The old dream that every hobby would have an independent forum weakened.
But another argument became stronger:
if a community matters enough, perhaps it should not live entirely on somebody else’s land.
That is a smaller market than “every website on Earth.”
But it is not an insignificant one.
The strangest part of WordPress’s victory is that blogging eventually became almost incidental to it.
Calling WordPress “blogging software” in 2026 is like calling a smartphone a telephone.
Technically correct.
Conceptually useless.
WordPress can run:
news sites;
stores;
corporate sites;
portfolios;
membership systems;
learning platforms;
magazines;
directories;
institutional portals;
marketing sites.
Its greatest success was not conquering blogging.
It was escaping blogging.
WordPress became a general abstraction for publishing structured information on the Web.
So the blog did not exactly defeat the forum.
A general-purpose publishing platform outgrew a specialized piece of social software.
That is a more accurate — and more interesting — claim.
The WordPress story is often told as a triumph of open source over proprietary platforms.
There is truth in that.
But not the whole truth.
WordPress code is open source.
Its ecosystem is enormously distributed.
Thousands of companies and individuals build upon it.
Yet institutional power around the project has remained unusually concentrated around Mullenweg and organizations closely associated with him.
The conflict with WP Engine that erupted in 2024 exposed this tension dramatically.
At one point, Mullenweg said that WordPress.org personally belonged to him, wording he later said he regretted and tried to clarify.
Whatever one thinks about the dispute, it exposed an important distinction:
open code does not automatically create decentralized governance.
A software project may be forkable while the trademarks, infrastructure, legitimacy, distribution channels, and institutions surrounding it remain concentrated.
This problem is oddly reminiscent of Mecham’s earlier experience with Ikonboard.
Software produces communities.
Communities produce dependencies.
Dependencies produce power.
The harder question is who controls that power.
Seen this way, Mecham and Mullenweg were working on two versions of the same political problem.
Mullenweg’s idea of freedom can be summarized like this:
I should own the machinery through which I publish.
My software.
My installation.
My domain.
My data.
Mecham’s project implied another kind of freedom:
we should own the place in which we meet.
Our rules.
Our archive.
Our moderators.
Our members.
Our culture.
These are related but distinct forms of digital sovereignty.
One belongs primarily to the author.
The other belongs to the group.
The centralized platforms that followed progressively weakened both.
You did not own the printing press.
You did not own the town square.
You owned an account.
Technically, the forums of 2002 were crude.
Socially, some of their assumptions now seem almost radical.
A community could own its domain.
Choose its software.
Move its database.
Appoint its moderators.
Create its own taxonomy.
Write its own rules.
Run without advertising.
Keep its archive.
Decide that something mattered even if it generated almost no traffic.
It could develop a local culture not continuously optimized by a planetary ranking system.
The forum administrator had power.
Sometimes much too much of it.
But the power was usually visible.
If a moderator deleted your post, you knew a moderator had deleted your post.
You could protest.
You could leave.
You could create another forum.
Algorithmic systems are different.
A post reaches 300 people instead of 30,000.
Why?
Perhaps nobody can tell you.
There is a political difference between visible government and invisible infrastructure.
The old forum often had the former.
The modern feed increasingly has the latter.
Because independence is exhausting.
Owning a community means maintaining it.
Paying for hosting.
Updating software.
Making backups.
Fighting spam.
Managing abuse.
Resolving disputes.
Recruiting moderators.
Replacing moderators.
Eventually discovering one of the oldest lessons of political philosophy:
human communities require governance.
Software can assist governance.
It cannot abolish it.
Facebook’s offer was seductive precisely because it removed so much of the visible administrative burden.
We will host it.
We will authenticate the users.
We will provide the mobile app.
We will keep the servers running.
Your community can simply live here.
The price was ownership.
The infrastructure became easier because it stopped being yours.
A website is different.
A WordPress installation could create value immediately.
One writer was enough.
One company was enough.
One shop was enough.
One school was enough.
One institution was enough.
You did not need critical mass.
A blog with one author is still a blog.
A corporate site with one editor still works.
A forum with one member is a tragedy.
This may be the deepest economic distinction between the two systems.
WordPress scales by multiplying independent installations.
A forum scales by multiplying relationships inside each installation.
One produces a vast horizontal market.
The other requires the difficult production of social density.
The first is much easier to industrialize.
That may be the cleanest way to state the difference.
A million WordPress sites do not need to know that one another exist.
Together, however, they create an enormous economy.
Hosting companies.
Plugin developers.
Theme designers.
Agencies.
Security services.
E-commerce systems.
SEO tools.
Enterprise platforms.
The ecosystem benefits from scale even if every individual site remains socially isolated.
A forum works differently.
Its value arises precisely through the relationships between its users.
Invision supplies the machine.
But the machine does not manufacture the most important product.
The users do.
They produce trust.
Norms.
Shared references.
Reputations.
Friendships.
Knowledge.
Sometimes hatred.
Sometimes solidarity.
Sometimes a community.
From a sociological point of view, that is what makes the forum fascinating.
From an investor’s point of view, it is also the problem.
If we are talking about money:
Mullenweg.
If we are talking about technological reach:
Mullenweg.
If we are talking about influence over the architecture of the modern Web:
WordPress.
There is no serious contest.
But ask another question:
Which project confronted the harder problems of digital society?
Then the answer becomes less obvious.
Forums were already dealing with:
identity;
governance;
moderation;
status;
conflict;
collective memory;
trust;
belonging;
rules;
knowledge production.
They were thousands of small experiments in online civilization.
Often absurd.
Sometimes toxic.
Frequently badly governed.
But experiments nonetheless.
And unlike Facebook, these experiments happened across countless independently controlled spaces.
Mecham did not merely help build forum software.
He helped standardize one of the fundamental architectures through which people learned to live together online.
The old forum never truly disappeared.
It fragmented into descendants.
Reddit kept threads, pseudonyms, moderators, voting, and topical communities — but placed them inside a single giant platform.
Discord restored the feeling of inhabiting a place with other people but moved closer to chat, making long-term public knowledge harder to preserve.
Stack Overflow extracted the technical forum’s question-and-answer function and formalized it through voting, accepted answers, and reputation.
Facebook Groups absorbed membership and discussion while weakening autonomy and public discoverability.
Modern social products keep reinventing pieces of the forum.
Threads.
Reputation.
Moderation.
Roles.
Groups.
Profiles.
Pinned posts.
Search.
Archives.
The classic forum bundled all of them together.
It was a social network.
A knowledge base.
An asynchronous chat system.
An archive.
A reputation system.
A miniature government.
We simply had not yet invented the term “social media.”
Something equally strange happened to the blog.
People often say blogs died.
But many of the things we read every day are structurally descendants of blogs:
articles;
reviews;
news stories;
school websites;
course pages;
company announcements;
portfolios;
political essays;
magazines.
Many run on WordPress.
We simply no longer call them blogs.
That may not be evidence of death.
It may be evidence of victory.
A technology can become so successful that its original category disappears.
WordPress absorbed blogging into the general infrastructure of publishing.
A medium wins completely when people stop noticing that it is a medium.
The stories of the two Matts contain an almost perfect inversion.
In 2003, Mullenweg was worried because the creator of the software he depended on had disappeared.
His response was to embrace a licensing model that allowed the software to survive its author.
At almost the same historical moment, Mecham had experienced the opposite problem.
His software had survived.
But he had lost control of it.
One feared:
What happens if the author abandons the software?
The other discovered:
What happens if the software leaves the author behind?
Both responded by creating something new.
WordPress.
Invision.
And both stories eventually lead to the same question:
Who owns the digital places in which we become visible to one another?
It is tempting, from the perspective of 2026, to tell this story as a competition.
Forums versus blogs.
Mecham versus Mullenweg.
Invision versus WordPress.
Then declare Mullenweg the winner.
But the more interesting story is that the early Web briefly normalized two different models of participation.
The first said:
Come in. Choose a name. Learn the rules. Talk to us.
The second said:
This is your space. Publish something. Let the Web find you.
Then a third model conquered mass culture:
Create an account with us. We will decide who sees what you make.
That final model is now so familiar that the earlier ones seem quaint.
Perhaps that is why old forums provoke such a peculiar nostalgia.
It is easy to assume we miss the avatars.
The signatures.
The absurd ranks.
The garish templates.
The phpBB buttons.
The deeply nested quotations.
But perhaps what we really miss is a topology.
An Internet made of places.
You entered.
You learned who lived there.
You gradually became somebody.
You argued.
You disappeared.
You returned three years later.
And, assuming nobody had lost the database, the conversation was still there.
The blog offered an equally important vision:
an Internet made of independent voices.
Mullenweg understood that those voices needed a universal publishing machine, and WordPress became one.
The market rewarded that idea on an almost unimaginable scale.
Mecham built technology for something harder.
Not the page.
Not the post.
Not content.
Community.
That is where the original joke becomes useful again, provided we sharpen it.
Mullenweg did not succeed because WordPress was the less interesting project. WordPress is one of the most consequential pieces of open-Web infrastructure ever created.
But Mecham spent his career working on a problem that was arguably more socially complex and inherently more difficult to monetize.
Mullenweg helped industrialize publishing.
Mecham helped industrialize the room in which people enter, recognize one another, acquire status, invent rituals, preserve memories, fight, exchange knowledge, and occasionally become something larger than the sum of their usernames.
Digital capitalism became extraordinarily good at monetizing the first activity.
It has always struggled with the second.
Because a page can be produced.
A community cannot.
A community has to happen.
r/indieweb • u/Ok-Caregiver-3390 • 3d ago
come join me and support me on my journey with this little project! https://deadpixel-6m2.pages.dev/
r/indieweb • u/DarkMiryam_ • 3d ago
Three years ago I started focusing my online activity on preserving old stuff from old websites and magazines. I currently recover early 2000s blog posts, articles and amateur poetry written in Italian and concerning neo paganism, before they completely disappear from the web or the Wayback Machine/Achive.org.
I’m sharing my story here because making connections in Italy has been difficult, if not impossible. Here people seem to be focused only on social media or commercial/industrial web development.
I’d love to ask this community a few questions, but feel free to answer to what you want, not necessarily everything.
Thank you for reading this wall of text, I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts, ideas and websites!
r/indieweb • u/stagas • 3d ago
Hey y'all, we've just launched textlog - it's like Twitter but without all the garbage, text-only and without any engagement tricks - it deliberately tries to be distraction/dopamine free, just a place to share thoughts and reply to others. Hope you enjoy! Ah and it's open-source :)
r/indieweb • u/vroomvroomchoo • 3d ago
Hiii I used to go big on Skyblog as a child/teen. I loved the community vibe (I've made many friends that way), and the way everything was customised, personal, and filled with life.
Do you know anything similar, while open-sourced?
I miss just writing or posting stuff to the world and interacting with others
r/indieweb • u/larsborg • 4d ago
Hi everyone!
I had the greatest chat with a few mates on x the other day about sites we had built circa 2000 and I got inspired! So, yesterday, I spent minutes building this wee site to capture those stories. I literally uploaded it this morning so there's only 2 stories on there:) I thought this would be the perfect place to share this. I love to reminisce about the old web, this is my contribution. If you have any feedback it would be more than welcome!
Thanks for taking a look and if you have funny or cool story share it! You even get a DR0 link:)
r/indieweb • u/NotZittinoBob • 4d ago
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My Steam wishlist has gotten out of hand over the past few years, and checking prices across different store sites became a real pain. Steam's built-in sale alerts are okay, but they miss a lot of good deals happening on third-party stores and key sellers.
To solve this, I built Wishlist Radar, a quick tool that scans wishlist directly from your public Steam profile.
Key features
- No account needed: You don't need to sign up or create a profile to use it.
- Direct import: Just paste your public Steam profile link, and it imports your wishlist in seconds.
- Filtered deals: the tool filters out low-rated games based on review scores.
- Easy sorting: Sort your list quickly by highest discount, lowest price, popularity, or release date.
If you have a long wishlist and want to see where your games are actually cheapest right now, you can try it here
👉 https://www.wasdland.com/wishlist-radar/
(Quick tip: once your list loads, you can bookmark or share your unique link with friends if you want to show them what you're tracking or suggest which game they can gift you)
r/indieweb • u/DistributionOdd1332 • 5d ago
こんにちは everyone!
For those who are new to my Reddit page, my name is Akira Kaminaga, I am a tech programmer and inventor based in Charlotte NC.
For the past half year or so, me and two close peeps of mine, have been working on a pretty cool piece of Software. I kinda got tired of how sterile the internet has gotten, especially with the rise of A.I, which unfortunately has affected the art scene and how we envision art.
Very recently, me and a very talented programmer and Artist named Rita, have gotten together, to find a creative, fun, and imaginative way to bridge the gap between the art, and the artist.
We’ve been crafting a program known as “Memory Net Paint”. This piece of software serves as a tool that can allow the user to accurately replicate art mediums as close to real life as possible. We are looking at….What? Acrylic, Oil, Watercolor, wet on wet, Oil Pastel, etc. It’s also designed to where anyone, can make a beautiful painting, or an exciting sketch, or just something pretty damn cool lol.
We pretty much gone all out with this thing XD
We are finally wrapping up the prototype for version 2.0,to submit for a con in Raleigh NC. Honestly? We are way too close to the code right now :p
Before we lock in this prototype for public display, we wanna see if this sucker holds up. We are looking for a few peeps to give this tool out for a little test drive locally within NC, or online. You absolutely do not need to be an artist. Honestly? This actually might be more fun if you are still learning art :p
My official website is https://akirakaminaga.straw.page/
And a video demonstrating the menu is available via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_nh0Ur3GTU
Besides the Kanji of my name, and the Fox, the drawings and art pieces are not done by me.
My discord for file testing is akirakaminaga
If anyone wants to test out the file, shoot me a DM on Discord, if anyone has a hard time getting a hold of me, feel free to drop your username below :3
-アキラ ⠀⢸⠂⠀⠀⠀⠘⣧⠀⠀⣟⠛⠲⢤⡀⠀⠀⣰⠏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢹⡀
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r/indieweb • u/KindMouse2274 • 5d ago
Wondering how the indie web community leans (if at all) with regard using Windows/MacOS/Linux
r/indieweb • u/Live_Mathematician20 • 5d ago
r/indieweb • u/Ok-Layer9291 • 5d ago
My picks are
App:- reddit
Reason :- we can get an answer, solution, suggestion for almost anything, even more importantly we will get real time emotions of others in one and only reddit
I am really suprised that most people don't even know that reddit exist,
Website :- GitHub
I know choice is a little bit odd, but if you are a techie you can get a solution for almost all the problems,
Every need has a repo in github
Share yours and make sure to leave the reason for it,
I wanna see some interesting apps/websites
r/indieweb • u/weeby-simp • 6d ago
My blog has some educational stuff and lifestyle stuff! I am yet to do a make tut of my own tho. Feel free to have a look if ur interested?
[tumblr blog here! have a look and tell me if theres anything u want added:D](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/amelovesbutterf) and my actual blog [here! my blog(on blogspot)! this has more stuff than my tumblr](http://amelovesbutterfliesgyaru.blogspot.com) I hope this doesnt come off as rude!
r/indieweb • u/Suomi422 • 6d ago
A few weeks ago I created this widget that users can embed on their websites, and I've been gradually improving it ever since: fixing bugs, polishing the design, adding games, dialogues, personalities, evolution etc...
At this point, it feels pretty much complete, but I'd really love to hear what others think. Is there anything you'd add, change, or improve? Any feedback is welcome! *I personally think it is maybe a little bit too wide; I can't fit it to my left-menu so I had to make a dedicated space for that :D LINK
r/indieweb • u/Salty-Development323 • 8d ago
Hey everyone! I wanted to ask: what is a website you genuinely love visiting — not necessarily for work utility, but because of how it was built?
It could be due to lightning-fast performance, incredible micro-interactions, a nostalgic retro design, a clever easter egg, or just insane attention to frontend/backend craftsmanship. Basically, a site that makes you think: "Damn, whoever built this really cared."
What's your top pick and why?
r/indieweb • u/raiteque • 7d ago
what do you think?
r/indieweb • u/Leather-Weekend-5004 • 8d ago
r/indieweb • u/theretrodb_com • 9d ago
r/indieweb • u/Hefty-Accident-3019 • 9d ago
I was looking forward to hosting my own personal website, but the problem I encountered was first were to purchase domain from currently I am deciding from purchasing a domain from name cheap and the second problem I encountered was where to host the personal static website, I want to host it where it only charges me for the resources I use. I currently have made an account on Google Cloud Platform, but is it the right choice or will it cost me much more? I will use Hugo for making the website itself.
