Why I'm Betting on the Open Social Web
Centralized social media had its run. Here's why I think the next decade belongs to protocols, not platforms.
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.