Facebook is a mall food court

and the Indie Web is having a picnic / potluck with your friends.

Allow me to explain myself: To post or share something on Facebook, you only need to log in to Facebook, type in the small box on top of your feed, maybe select a photo to upload or paste a link, and click on “Post”. And all other people need to do to interact with your post is log in to Facebook, come across your post and click on the reactions Facebook has already provided for you, or type on the comment box (also provided by Facebook). In this regard, it is similar to the food court of a mall: if you want to have a meal together with your friends, you all arrive at the same location – which most, if not all, of you will already be familiar with – order something from any of the establishments set up there, and take a seat on one of the tables at the center (or somewhere near, depending on the layout of the food court). You don’t need to prepare anything, all is provided to you: not only the meal but also cutlery, cups or glasses for any drinks. You only need to show up there and you can start “using” it.

On the other hand, to post or share something on the Indie Web¹, you need to set up your own website, for which you have many options, depending on your expertise: you could get your own server in a hosting provider such as Digital Ocean, or go for something simpler like Neocities, or use GitHub Pages, or maybe Wordpress if that’s too technical for you, or Squarespace if you want to go down the website route instead of the blog one. And depending on your choice, posting something might be as simple as typing on a box and clicking on “Post”, or something a bit more elaborate, like creating a Markdown file and pushing it to a repository in GitHub. And letting your fellow website creators interact with your posts might be as simple as turning on comments on your blogging engine, or more elaborate, like supporting Webmentions – for which you need to be able to receive them and display them appropriately, and for which anyone who wants to interact with your website needs to have a website of their own. Seen this way, taking part in the Indie Web is more akin to having a picnic or a potluck with your friends: you need to agree on a location, maybe a public place, or the house of one of them, and then everyone needs to bring their own stuff: maybe someone brings the food, someone else brings the drinks, someone else dessert, but also someone needs to bring paper plates and cutlery, and someone else needs to bring the plastic cups (because good luck trying to drink soda from the 3 liter bottle without plastic cups 😆)

All this came to mind because I recently implemented receiving Webmentions on this site, but have still not completed the implementation to show the mentions sent to this site, and I thought it’d be nice if, besides the fine folks that already take part in the Indie Web, my friends could also like my posts or leave comments… but not many of them have personal websites (they might not have the time or the interest to do so), and even if they did, maybe their websites are not set up so that they can send Webmentions, and so… while most of them have an account on some social media site like Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn, which are easier to set up and allow for interaction with zero additional effort.

I don’t think one is better than the other – both cover different use cases, really, and each has pros and cons. The problem comes if / when the owners of the social media sites try to cop out the independent spaces, which would be akin to malls trying to force everyone out of public spaces and into their food courts.

(A more detailed list of pros and cons is left as an exercise for the reader for a later time ;) )

Seems I’m not the only one that thinks this way. From https://activitypub.ghost.org/:

We had it pretty good for a while, back there. The early days of the web were chaotic, free, and open. Everyone published unique content on their own domain. No two sites looked the same. We interacted with one another to share ideas.

Then the social networks came. They removed the complexity of running a server. They added simple social interactions. Follow. Like. Reply. Everything got easier.

But convenience came at a cost, and slowly the way we consumed information became less like home cooking and more like McDonalds.

Granted, it’s more to support their point of implementing federation through ActivityPub, but that doesn’t make it less true.