So you want to start your own corner of the web

The indieweb is the old promise of the web, kept: you publish on a place you own, at addresses that do not rot, and you connect to everyone else through open standards instead of somebody's feed. It is not a product, not a social network, and not an official stack. It is just people deciding that their corner of the internet should belong to them.

If that sounds like a lot, it is not. You do not need all of it, and you certainly do not need it on day one. Put something you made at an address you control, add a feed so people can follow along without an algorithm in the middle, and you are already here. Everything below is optional depth for when you want it.

Your first afternoon

A path that has worked for a lot of people, roughly in order. Stop whenever you have enough.

• Get a domain. This is the one part worth paying for, because it is what makes the address yours to keep. Honest registrars: Porkbun, Dynadot, or Njalla if you want privacy.
• Pick somewhere to publish. No wrong answer. Micro.blog is the gentlest on-ramp with almost everything built in. Bear Blog and Mataroa are for writing-first people. Want to build it with your own two hands? Neocities and Nekoweb host raw HTML, and smol.pub or prose.sh keep it down to plain text.
• Turn on a feed. RSS or Atom is how the indieweb follows people without middlemen. Most of the tools above give you one for free. That single file is what lets a reader anywhere subscribe to you.
• Say who you are. Add an h-card and a couple of rel="me" links to your other profiles. Now the web can tell that this site is you.
• Connect, when you feel like it. Webmention lets other sites reply to yours, POSSE means you post at home first and syndicate copies elsewhere, and Bridgy Fed plugs your site straight into the fediverse.

The eight layers, if you want the map

A full setup can be read as eight layers. Almost nobody has all eight, and that is fine. Grow into the ones you actually want.

Pick a stack

• No server, no fuss. Your domain pointed at Micro.blog, with its feeds and built-in indieweb bits. The shortest road in.
• Static, fast, versioned. Eleventy or Hugo in a Git repo on Codeberg Pages, plus microformats, RSS, and Webmention.io. This is roughly how weirdnet itself is built.
• Full CMS. WordPress with the IndieWeb plugin set. The most predictable ecosystem, and the widest export.
• Hand-made and tiny. HTML and CSS you wrote yourself, h-card and h-entry, an RSS file, static hosting, and a webmention endpoint if you want replies. Nothing between you and the page.

Choices by need

Learn and hang around

The web is more fun with company. A few good doors:

• HTML for People, a free and genuinely friendly book that builds a site by hand from zero.
• IndieWeb: Getting Started, the community's own roadmap.
• 32-Bit Cafe and HTML Energy, warm communities that will help you build.
• Wiby and Marginalia, search engines that still point at real, human pages.

None of this is a test, and there is no finish line. Put one page up that is yours. The rest of the web has been waiting for it.