Ten years ago the death of Blogger FTP two days before inspired introducing “the indie web” as a definite noun phrase: > Blogger turned off FTP May 1st [2010] Who/what will step up for the indie web? http://tantek.com/2010/123/t2/blogger-turned-off-ftp-what-indie-web-diso (https://twitter.com/t/status/13329370781) “The indie web” was a name given to the collective us that used and still uses our domains for our actively independent web presence, a practice Blogger FTP helped enable for many years, for many people. Our sites worked (were at least viewable) without requiring (truly independent of) another web site or service being actively up & running. Blogger FTP was a nice-to-have, even if/when it was down, your site and permalinks were still browsable, and you could still manually FTP and edit your site, your blog, on whatever generic web hosting service you were using. You could migrate your blog by FTPing your static storage files from one web host to another. Without any database export/import/(re)configuration. Subsequently of course https://indiewebcamp.com/ was founded, eventually (and currently) https://indieweb.org/, recognizing a pre-existing practice by naming it and giving it a community focus. A community to discover & find each other, to actively collaborate, building on each other’s ideas & building blocks, evolving our sites, innovating the practical peer-to-peer web with a plurality of approaches, designs, interoperable implementations, and sustainable solutions.

Ten years ago the death of Blogger FTP two days before inspired introducing “the indie web” as a definite noun phrase:
> Blogger turned off FTP May 1st [2010] Who/what will step up for the indie web?
http://tantek.com/2010/123/t2/blogger-turned-off-ftp-what-indie-web-diso (https://twitter.com/t/status/13329370781)

“The indie web” was a name given to the collective us that used and still uses our domains for our actively independent web presence, a practice Blogger FTP helped enable for many years, for many people. Our sites worked (were at least viewable) without requiring (truly independent of) another web site or service being actively up & running.

Blogger FTP was a nice-to-have, even if/when it was down, your site and permalinks were still browsable, and you could still manually FTP and edit your site, your blog, on whatever generic web hosting service you were using. You could migrate your blog by FTPing your static storage files from one web host to another. Without any database export/import/(re)configuration.

Subsequently of course https://indiewebcamp.com/ was founded, eventually (and currently) https://indieweb.org/, recognizing a pre-existing practice by naming it and giving it a community focus. A community to discover & find each other, to actively collaborate, building on each other’s ideas & building blocks, evolving our sites, innovating the practical peer-to-peer web with a plurality of approaches, designs, interoperable implementations, and sustainable solutions.