I want to be a villager
Sat 3 Oct 2026
Thoughts of Widdershins writes:
I see a lot of posts about people leaving platforms. … What strikes me is that hardly anyone is leaving for something big. They’re going smaller. A personal site, a self-hosted app, a capsule nobody’s going to stumble onto by accident.
Gordon over at Happily Imperfect wrote a reply and made some good observations I want to expand on here.
I wonder if everyone who cares about a better, more open internet packs up and retreats to their own little corners, aren’t we also leaving the big platforms with an even bigger share of the conversation?
No, because there is no mutually respectful dialogue between us the users and them the platform owners and the system they establish. On the contrary, platform owners always have control over us, and can do with our data as they please.
It is our human interactions that give those platforms value. It’s the photodumps from celebrities, athletes, and college students alike. It’s the birthday wishes for family members, the acoustic covers, the makeup tutorials and cat photos.
That goes for all big platforms. GitHub becomes useless when it runs out of human intelligence and code with which to train models. Likewise, Twitter becomes proof of the dead internet theory when people take their commentary and witty remarks elsewhere.
I mean I know that Facebook has already won, that many millions of people think it IS the internet, and exist happily in that bubble, but part of me thinks there must be somewhere to fight back… or is it as futile as I imagine?
It’s not futile and there’s hope! I think Gordon hits the nail on the head by proposing that we provide alternatives instead of simply packing up and letting things go bad. We can make good changes on the open web, where you and I are netizens with rights and liberties, not serfs in the fiefdom of Facebook.
What if we had a village instead? I want to be a villager.
And there’s another problem. If we all disperse into hundreds or thousands of smaller independent spaces, how do we find each other?
We find each other like this! We reply and engage in conversations deliberately. It’s the best way to let you know I read your post and I liked what I saw, and I cared about what you said, so much so that I took the time to write this hoping you would read it because I care about having meaningful interactions online.
This means there won’t be a platform that will solve these discovery problems completely, because the goal of a platform is to capture our attention while we passively consume content.
In indie web circles, the notion of a digital garden is popular and also, I think, a great metaphor for the kind of environment we want to foster. Perhaps not a set of lovely little islands estranged from each other, but a friendly village with sovereign gardens where we welcome our neighbors.