Reclaiming the web:
Moving towards a smaller Internet
March 9th, 2026 - Written by Andreas
Over the past two decades or so, the Internet has become dominated by a small amount of large companies. Think of where most interactions take place: Reddit, X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Discord? These platforms constitute a large share of online discourse. Not only do they control what sort of content can be shared, they own their users’ content. Any text, photo, or video uploaded to the websites of these giants is now their property, and they can use it to sell ads, train their models, and build a profile of who you are.
Recently, more people have come to realise this is not what the Internet should look like. It should not consist of a number of controlled (and sometimes closed) spaces owned by capitalist mega-corporations. In fact, we, the users, should be in charge of our own data. We have the right to our own spaces where we can share thoughts, ideas, art, and code. Importantly, we have the right to decide where we store this in order to preserve our privacy. We have the right to store our content in a place where it cannot be abused by a tech giant. These principles narrow down to the idea of the Indie Web.
The Indie Web
As introduced before, the central ideas to the Indie web is that you, the user, actually own your content; you are in control of your content and its format; and you are not restricted to a single platform. Furthermore, these personal websites tend to protect the author’s and visitor’s privacy much better. Finally, you can host your content on a simple website: One that does not require tens of megabytes of JavaScript to be loaded to track every single mouse movement; one that is accessible on any device; and one tailored to your preferences and your work.
The first important aspect is controllability. You decide what sort of content you publish and in what format. If you want to post short-form messages in a Twitter-esque format, go ahead—but you can also dedicate entire pages to essays. You are free to publish whatever you want (let’s say within legal bounds): There is no company dictating what you can and cannot post. You may include any form of multimedia content you desire to. And finally, you can make your platform reflect your style and your identity. Your online space reflects your personality, identity, and beliefs, and is not just another corporate page.
The aspect of control is also related to that of digital minimalism. On large social platforms, you are often bombarded with suggested and sponsored posts, demanding your attention (and hopefully your money as well). A user’s content is not the central focus. However, in your own space, your content is the centrepiece of your website. You can serve your work to your visitors with fewer distractions and no advertisements or other paid-for content. This offers the viewer a much cleaner and distraction-free experience.
A third reason for moving to your content to your own space is privacy. Corporations owning the large social media websites are very happy to collect your data, analyse it, and use it to build a profile of you. Not only do they know exactly who you are (and often even before you know it yourself1). They also use this information to earn money off you—they sell your profile to advertisers, who can now direct their ads to very specific audiences. Furthermore, these corporations likely own your content now and can do with it as they please. Recently, this has become evident in training AI models (although these big companies shamelessly scrape the entire Internet to get data for their models).
It is also important to realise that big platforms can remove your content at their discretion. If they don’t like it, if your account gets flagged for whatever reason, or if they decide to stop a service, your content is lost. And that is because it never was inside your control.
Decentralisation
Moving away from the big platforms means getting your own place on the web. You could move to a federated alternative, in other words, an instance of a service that has an open protocol such that all these instances can communicate with each other. Alternatively, you could self-host your content: This means you are in control of literally everything. You can design your space and present your work in whatever way you want to. It is important to employ open standards as much as possible as this allows for your content to interact with other platforms. For example, my blog posts are also accessible through an RSS feed, which can be loaded into a multitude of RSS readers.
Examples of federated platforms are Mastodon as an alternative to X or Matrix as an alternative to Discord. Instead of joining “Mastodon” or “Matrix”, you join an instance of these. Every instance comes with its own rules and maybe a particular focus; but as a rule of thumb, all instances can interact with each other. And if you don’t find any instance to your liking, you can always start your own one.
Federated and self-hosted content means we can break free from big corporations controlling the Internet. We can retake charge of our own content, using open tools that respect the user. We can finally avoid surveillance capitalism and reject the notion of being money-generating tools instead of humans with ideas, creativity, and autonomy.
Where to go now?
If this sounds good to you, and you would like to get started, I have good news: There are plenty of resources available now to help you along. The IndieWeb website can tell you all of the principles behind it and contains guides to start off. You can also look into the idea of having a digital garden: A little personal space on the Internet that you cultivate with your own ideas, art, notes, anything you’d like. Or for some examples, have a look on smallweb.
The ideas of a decentralised, indie web appealed to me. In fact, so much, that I decided to start my own little space here, in the form of a blog. I enjoy being in control of the content, of the format, and of the design. Most importantly, I also enjoy reading other people’s indie blogs. It brings me joy to see that this movement is growing. I think it reminds me of an older Internet, an Internet dominated by personal websites, forums, and mailing lists–an open Internet.
Andreas' blog © 2026 by Andreas Knoben is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
