Why I'm Betting on the Open Social Web

I've been on Mastodon since 2018, before most people had heard of it. I've watched Bluesky go from a Twitter side project to a real network. And I've been publishing on my own site with Webmentions and Micropub for over a year now. Here's what I've learned: **the open social web isn't a backup plan. It's the main event.** ## Platforms are temp jobs Every platform I've used seriously has eventually done something that made me want to leave. Twitter sold to a chaos agent. Instagram buried chronological feeds. Tumblr banned the content that made it Tumblr. The pattern is always the same: build an audience on someone else's land, then watch the landlord renovate without asking. ## Protocols fix this When your identity is a domain you own, and your posts are on a server you control, and replies come in via standard protocols — you're not on a platform. You're on the web. That doesn't mean isolation. I still show up on Bluesky and Mastodon. But those are syndication targets, not home base. If Bluesky pivots tomorrow, my posts still exist here. ## What's different now The tooling finally caught up. Five years ago, running your own IndieWeb site meant hand-coding microformats and debugging Webmention endpoints. Now you can spin up a full-featured personal site in 20 minutes with a visual editor, feeds, and cross-posting built in. The barrier went from "you need to be a developer" to "you need a domain name and a Cloudflare account." ## The bet I think in five years, having a personal site will be as normal as having a LinkedIn profile. Not because everyone will become IndieWeb enthusiasts — but because the platforms will keep giving people reasons to want a backup, and the tools will keep getting easier. I'm betting on that future by building for it now.