The Indie Web Revival: Why Personal Websites Are Making a Comeback

The Moment I Knew

Last October, I watched a friend lose twelve years of writing. Not to a fire. Not to a hard drive crash. To a terms-of-service update.

Medium changed its monetization model again. Her 400+ articles — carefully crafted essays on urban design and public transit — were suddenly locked behind a paywall she never agreed to. The engagement metrics tanked. Her audience, the one she’d spent a decade building, couldn’t find her anymore. The algorithm had moved on.

She called me on a Tuesday evening, frustrated but not surprised. “I should have seen this coming,” she said. I was sitting at my desk, my British lilac cat sprawled across the keyboard as usual, and I thought: yes, you should have. We all should have.

That conversation wasn’t unique. It was happening everywhere. Writers leaving Substack after pricing changes. Photographers abandoning Instagram after yet another pivot to short-form video. Developers watching their carefully curated Twitter threads dissolve into the chaos of whatever that platform calls itself now. The pattern was unmistakable.

People were going home. Back to their own domains. Back to personal websites.

And this time, they were staying.

The Platform Fatigue Problem

Let’s be honest about what happened. For about fifteen years, we made a deal with platforms. They gave us distribution. We gave them our content, our audience data, and our creative autonomy. It seemed fair at the time. It wasn’t.

The deal worked when platforms were growing. When Facebook needed content to fill news feeds, they showed your posts to your followers. When Medium wanted credibility, they promoted independent writers. When YouTube needed hours of watch time, they surfaced smaller creators.

Then the platforms matured. Growth slowed. And the incentives flipped.

Suddenly your posts reached 3% of your followers without paid promotion. Your articles sat behind algorithmic gates you couldn’t see, let alone control. Your videos competed not with other creators but with the platform’s own content initiatives.

The numbers tell the story clearly:

graph LR
    A[2015: 16% organic reach] --> B[2019: 5.2% organic reach]
    B --> C[2022: 2.6% organic reach]
    C --> D[2025: 1.8% organic reach]
    D --> E[2027: ~1.1% organic reach]
    style A fill:#4CAF50,color:#fff
    style B fill:#FFC107,color:#000
    style C fill:#FF9800,color:#fff
    style D fill:#F44336,color:#fff
    style E fill:#B71C1C,color:#fff

That’s average organic reach on major social platforms over the last twelve years. The trend line doesn’t need commentary. It needs a funeral.

But platform fatigue isn’t just about reach. It’s about something more fundamental: the feeling that you’re building on rented land. Every post you write, every follower you gain, every piece of content you create — it all lives on someone else’s server, governed by someone else’s rules, subject to someone else’s business model pivots.

I’ve heard this described as “digital sharecropping,” and the metaphor is uncomfortably accurate. You do the work. The platform takes the harvest.

The breaking point came differently for different people. For some, it was the API lockdowns. For others, it was watching their content used to train AI models without compensation or consent. For many, it was simply exhaustion — the endless treadmill of posting, engaging, optimizing for an algorithm that changed its mind every quarter.

Whatever the trigger, the destination was the same: a blank HTML file, a domain name, and a quiet determination to own what they create.

The Tools That Changed Everything

Here’s what’s different about this comeback compared to the blogging era of 2005. Back then, running your own website meant wrestling with PHP, MySQL databases, shared hosting that crashed every other week, and comment spam that would make you question humanity.

Today? The tooling is genuinely excellent.

Astro has become the quiet favorite for content-focused sites. It ships zero JavaScript by default, renders your content at build time, and lets you use React, Vue, or Svelte components when you actually need interactivity. The performance is absurd — my own site scores 100 on Lighthouse consistently, and I’m not particularly clever about optimization. Astro just handles it.

Hugo remains the speed demon. If you have a site with thousands of pages, Hugo builds it in seconds. Literally seconds. I’ve watched Hugo compile 10,000 markdown files in under three seconds. It’s written in Go, which means the build tool itself is a single binary with no dependencies. There’s something beautifully pragmatic about that.

Eleventy (11ty) occupies the sweet spot between simplicity and flexibility. It doesn’t impose a framework. It doesn’t require you to learn a new templating language (unless you want to). It just takes your content and turns it into HTML. The community around it is small but remarkably helpful — the kind of community that actually answers questions on their forum instead of pointing you to a documentation page you’ve already read.

Ghost is the choice for people who want a writing experience that feels polished without building everything from scratch. It handles newsletters, memberships, and publishing in a single tool. The hosted version costs money, but you can self-host it for free if you’re comfortable with a Node.js server and a database.

And then there’s the hosting revolution. Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages — these platforms will host a static site for free. Not “free with asterisks.” Actually free. A personal blog with moderate traffic will cost you nothing beyond the domain name. That’s roughly $12 per year for a .com.

Compare that to the cost of running a website in 2008 and you’ll understand why the barrier to entry has effectively collapsed.

The developer experience has improved too. Hot reloading. Markdown with frontmatter. Image optimization pipelines. RSS feed generation. Sitemap creation. Things that used to require plugins, hacks, or custom scripts are now built into the frameworks or available as well-maintained packages.

I set up a new Astro site last month as an experiment. From npm create astro to deployed-on-Vercel took eleven minutes. That included choosing a theme, writing a test post, and configuring a custom domain. Eleven minutes.

The point isn’t that these tools are perfect. They’re not. Astro’s error messages can be cryptic. Hugo’s template syntax has a learning curve that resembles a cliff. Eleventy’s documentation assumes you already know what you’re doing. But they’re good enough that the tooling is no longer the bottleneck. The bottleneck is having something to say.

The Ownership Argument

Let me make the case plainly. When you publish on your own website:

• You own the content. Not “you own the content subject to our license agreement.” You own it.
• You own the URL. If someone bookmarks your article, that link works as long as you keep paying for your domain. Cool URIs don’t change, as Tim Berners-Lee wrote in 1998. He was right then. He’s right now.
• You own the audience relationship. No algorithm between you and your readers. They come to your site, or they subscribe to your RSS feed, or they get your newsletter. Direct. Unmediated.
• You own the data. Your analytics, your subscriber list, your content archive — all of it lives on your infrastructure or in your export files.
• You control the experience. No ads you didn’t choose. No “recommended content” from competitors. No dark patterns designed to maximize engagement at the expense of reader wellbeing.

This isn’t ideological purity for its own sake. It’s practical risk management.

I’ve watched too many people lose access to audiences they spent years building. A photographer with 200,000 Instagram followers who gets shadowbanned for unclear reasons. A writer whose Substack newsletter gets deprioritized after they criticize a policy decision. A developer whose Twitter account gets suspended in a mass moderation sweep and takes two months to recover.

These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re Tuesday.

When your website is your home base, these platform disruptions become inconveniences rather than catastrophes. Your Instagram got nuked? Annoying, but your portfolio lives on your domain. Your Twitter thread went viral and then got buried? The blog post version ranks on Google. Your Medium paywall situation changed? Your readers have your RSS feed.

Ownership means resiliance. That’s not a philosophical position. It’s an engineering decision.

The RSS Renaissance

Speaking of RSS. It’s back. Properly back.

For years, people declared RSS dead. Google killed Reader in 2013 and the conventional wisdom was that feeds were a relic of a simpler web. Social media would handle discovery and distribution. Algorithms would curate better than chronological feeds ever could.

The conventional wisdom was wrong.

RSS never actually died. It just went underground. Podcasts — the fastest-growing media format of the 2020s — are built entirely on RSS. Every podcast app is, at its core, an RSS reader with an audio player attached. The technology was never the problem. The marketing was.

Now RSS is experiencing a genuine renaissance, driven by exactly the same forces pushing people toward personal websites. Readers want control. They want to choose what they see. They want a chronological feed that doesn’t hide posts because an algorithm decided they weren’t “engaging” enough.

The tools reflect this shift. NetNewsWire is free, fast, and beautiful on Apple platforms. Miniflux is a minimalist self-hosted reader that does exactly one thing well. Feedbin syncs across devices and handles newsletters too — you can subscribe to email newsletters via a special Feedbin email address and read them alongside your RSS feeds. Feedly has added AI features for power users who want to filter high-volume feeds.

And on the publishing side, every modern static site generator outputs RSS by default. Astro, Hugo, Eleventy — they all generate valid RSS feeds as part of the build process. You don’t configure it. You don’t install a plugin. It just works.

The result is a reading experience that feels almost radical in 2027: you open your feed reader, and you see every post from every site you follow, in the order they were published. No algorithmic ranking. No sponsored content. No engagement bait. Just the words people wrote, presented chronologically.

It’s calm. It’s respectful. It’s how reading on the internet should have worked all along.

Webmentions and IndieWeb Protocols

The indie web movement isn’t just about individual websites existing in isolation. It’s about building connections between them using open standards.

Webmentions are the most visible example. Think of them as a standardized way for websites to notify each other when they link to each other’s content. If I write a blog post that links to your article, my site sends a Webmention to yours. Your site can then display that mention — as a comment, a like, a reply, or a repost.

It’s the social layer of the web, rebuilt on open protocols instead of proprietary platforms.

The IndieWeb community has developed a suite of building blocks that work together:

• Micropub: A standard for posting content to your site from any client. Write in your favorite app. Publish to your domain.
• IndieAuth: Authentication using your own domain. Your website is your identity. No email/password combo. No OAuth dance with a third party.
• Microsub: A standard for feed readers, separating the feed-fetching backend from the reading interface.
• h-card, h-entry, h-feed: Microformats that make your content machine-readable, allowing other sites and services to understand and interact with your posts.

I’ll admit this ecosystem is still rough around the edges. Setting up Webmentions requires either a service like Webmention.io or custom server-side code. IndieAuth works but isn’t widely understood outside the IndieWeb community. The tooling assumes a level of technical comfort that excludes many potential participants.

But the philosophy is sound. Instead of one company owning the social graph, the social graph emerges from the connections between independent websites. Instead of an algorithm deciding what you see, you decide which sites to follow. Instead of a platform mediating every interaction, websites talk to each other directly.

It’s federated social networking, but without the complexity of ActivityPub or the fragmentation of the Fediverse. It’s just websites, linking to each other, the way the web was originally designed to work.

Why Personal Sites Beat LinkedIn for Your Career

This is the section where I’ll probably annoy some people. Good.

LinkedIn is where careers go to perform. Personal websites are where careers go to exist.

Here’s what I mean. A LinkedIn profile is a template. Everyone has the same layout, the same sections, the same “Open to Work” banner. You’re one of 900 million profiles, differentiated only by your job title and the keywords you’ve stuffed into your summary.

A personal website is yours. The design, the content, the structure — it all communicates something about who you are beyond a list of job titles and endorsements from people you met at a conference once.

When I’m hiring, I look at personal websites first. Not because they’re prettier than LinkedIn (they often aren’t). But because they tell me things LinkedIn can’t:

• Can this person write clearly? A blog with thoughtful posts tells me more about communication skills than any LinkedIn recommendation.
• Are they genuinely curious? Someone who maintains a website about their interests — even if those interests are unrelated to the job — demonstrates sustained engagement with ideas.
• Can they build things? The website itself is a project. It has a tech stack, a deployment pipeline, a design system. Even a simple site reveals technical choices and taste.
• Do they finish things? A blog with regular posts shows follow-through. LinkedIn endorsements show nothing.

The career advantage isn’t theoretical. I’ve spoken with hiring managers at companies ranging from startups to major tech firms. The consensus is remarkably consistent: a candidate with a thoughtful personal website gets more attention than a candidate with a polished LinkedIn profile.

One engineering director told me: “LinkedIn tells me what someone has done. A personal website tells me how they think.”

That distinction matters more than most people realize. In a job market increasingly shaped by AI-generated applications and keyword-optimized resumes, a personal website is a signal of authenticity. It says: this person cares enough about their craft to build something outside of work, maintain it over time, and put their thinking on display.

It’s also a networking tool that works while you sleep. A blog post that ranks for a specific technical topic will bring relevant people to you — people who are interested in the same problems, who work in the same space, who might have opportunities that align with your skills. No cold outreach required.

Compare that to the LinkedIn engagement loop: post something, hope the algorithm shows it to the right people, respond to comments from strangers who just want to boost their own visibility. The ROI on personal website content compounds over time. The ROI on LinkedIn posts decays within hours.

How We Evaluated

To understand the current state of the indie web revival, I looked at data from several sources and talked to people who are living the transition.

Quantitative signals:

• Domain registration data from ICANN reports shows a 23% increase in new personal domain registrations in 2026 compared to 2024. The growth is concentrated in .me, .dev, and .blog TLDs.
• The Astro framework reported 2.8 million monthly npm downloads in May 2027, up from 800,000 in early 2025. Hugo’s downloads have grown similarly.
• RSS subscriber counts are harder to track globally, but services like Feedbin and Miniflux have reported user growth of 40-60% year over year since 2025.
• Google Search Console data from several personal blog owners I spoke with shows that personal domain content consistently outranks identical content posted on Medium or Substack for long-tail queries.

Qualitative signals:

• I conducted informal interviews with 15 creators who moved from platforms to personal websites in the last two years. Their motivations clustered around three themes: ownership, creative control, and frustration with algorithmic distribution.
• I reviewed IndieWeb community forums and chat logs from the past year, looking for patterns in what tools people are adopting and what problems they’re encountering.
• I analyzed the “now page” movement — personal website pages that describe what someone is currently working on — as a proxy for indie web adoption. The now page directory (nownownow.com) has grown from about 2,000 sites in 2023 to over 5,800 in 2027.

Limitations of this evaluation:

This is observation, not rigorous research. The domain registration data doesn’t distinguish between personal sites and commercial projects. The npm download numbers include CI/CD pipelines and bots. My interview sample is small and skewed toward English-speaking tech-adjacent creators.

I’m not claiming that everyone is building personal websites. Most internet users still live entirely on platforms, and that’s fine. What I’m arguing is that a meaningful and growing minority are choosing a different path — and their reasons for doing so are worth understanding.

The SEO Advantage of Owning Your Domain

Here’s a practical reason to care about personal websites that doesn’t require any philosophical commitment to the indie web: search engine optimization.

Google has made it increasingly clear that it values what it calls E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. A personal website with a history of publishing quality content on specific topics builds all four of these signals over time.

A Medium post does not build your E-E-A-T. It builds Medium’s. The domain authority, the backlinks, the topical authority — all of it accrues to medium.com, not to you. When you leave Medium, you leave that SEO equity behind.

The same applies to LinkedIn articles, Substack posts, and any other platform-hosted content. You’re contributing to someone else’s domain authority with every piece you publish.

With your own domain, every article you write strengthens your site’s authority. Every backlink points to your domain. Every returning visitor signals to Google that your site is a trusted source. Over years, this compounds into a genuine competitive advantage for search visibility.

I’ve seen this firsthand. Blog posts on my personal domain consistently outrank equivalent content on major platforms for specific queries. Not because my writing is better. Because my domain has twelve years of consistent publishing history, hundreds of backlinks from other sites, and topical authority in specific niches.

The SEO playbook for personal sites is straightforward:

1. Pick a few topics and go deep. Topical authority matters more than breadth. A personal site with fifty well-researched articles on web performance will outrank a generalist site with five hundred shallow posts.

2. Publish consistently. Not daily. Not even weekly. But regularly enough that Google sees your site as actively maintained. Monthly is fine. Biweekly is great.

3. Write for humans, optimize for machines. Good titles, clear meta descriptions, proper heading hierarchy, internal linking between related posts. The basics haven’t changed.

4. Own your canonical URLs. If you cross-post to Medium or Dev.to, always set the canonical URL to point back to your personal site. This tells Google which version is the original.

5. Build backlinks naturally. Write things worth linking to. Participate in communities. Guest post with links back to your domain.

This isn’t complicated. It’s just slow. The SEO advantage of a personal domain takes years to build. But that’s exactly why it’s valuable — it’s a moat that can’t be easily replicated or taken away from you.

Generative Engine Optimization

The rise of AI-powered search — Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT with browsing — adds a new dimension to the ownership argument.

These generative engines don’t just link to sources. They synthesize information from multiple sources and present it as a unified answer. The question for content creators is: will your content be included in that synthesis?

Early data suggests that personal domains with clear authorship, structured content, and topical authority are more likely to be cited by generative engines than platform-hosted content. The reasoning is intuitive: AI systems are trained to value authoritative, well-structured, original content. A personal site with consistent publishing on specific topics looks more authoritative than a Medium post from a user with less than three articles.

graph TD
    A[Your Content] --> B{Where is it published?}
    B -->|Personal Domain| C[Builds your authority]
    B -->|Platform| D[Builds platform authority]
    C --> E[Cited by AI search engines]
    C --> F[Ranks in traditional search]
    C --> G[Appears in RSS feeds]
    D --> H[Lost when platform changes]
    D --> I[Competes with platform content]
    style C fill:#4CAF50,color:#fff
    style D fill:#F44336,color:#fff
    style E fill:#2196F3,color:#fff
    style F fill:#2196F3,color:#fff
    style G fill:#2196F3,color:#fff
    style H fill:#FF9800,color:#fff
    style I fill:#FF9800,color:#fff

The key practices for generative engine optimization on personal sites:

• Clear authorship signals. An about page, author bio on posts, schema markup identifying you as the author. AI engines are increasingly weighting content from identifiable humans over anonymous or platform-attributed content.
• Structured data. JSON-LD markup for articles, FAQ sections, how-to guides. The easier you make it for machines to understand your content’s structure, the more likely they are to extract and cite it.
• Original analysis and data. AI systems are looking for primary sources. If your post contains original research, unique data, or first-hand experience, it’s more valuable to a generative engine than a post that summarizes other people’s work.
• Semantic clarity. Write clear topic sentences. Use headings that accurately describe the content below them. Define terms before using them. AI systems parse content structurally, and clear structure improves extraction accuracy.

This is still an emerging field. Nobody has definitive answers about how generative engines will rank and cite content in three years. But the directional signal is clear: owning your content on your own domain gives you more control over how it appears in AI-generated answers than publishing on a platform where your identity is secondary to the platform’s brand.

My cat, incidentally, has strong opinions about AI search. She expresses them by sitting on my laptop whenever I try to research the topic. I choose to interpret this as philosophical skepticism about the entire enterprise.

The Counterarguments

I should be fair. The indie web isn’t a silver bullet.

Discovery is hard. Without an algorithm pushing your content to new readers, you have to build your audience manually. This is slow, difficult work. Social media, for all its flaws, is extraordinarily good at distribution. A personal website has none of that infrastructure.

Maintenance is real. Websites break. Dependencies get outdated. SSL certificates expire. Hosting providers change pricing. Running your own site means accepting responsibility for keeping it running. Not everyone wants that responsibility, and that’s a legitimate preference.

The social features are worse. Comments on personal blogs are a moderation nightmare. Webmentions are better but not widely adopted. The social experience of reading and interacting with content on a personal site is, frankly, inferior to what platforms offer. There’s no easy way to like, share, or reply. The friction is real.

It requires technical skill. Yes, the tools are better than they were. But “better” doesn’t mean “accessible to everyone.” Setting up an Astro site still requires comfort with the command line, npm, and basic web development concepts. Ghost is more approachable, but self-hosting it requires server administration skills. The indie web remains disproportionately populated by developers.

These are genuine limitations, not straw men. I respect people who choose platforms because they value reach over ownership, convenience over control. The indie web isn’t morally superior to platform publishing. It’s a different set of trade-offs.

But I’d argue the trade-offs are shifting. Discovery is less valuable when organic reach is 1%. Maintenance is easier when hosting is free and frameworks handle the complexity. The social features gap is closing as Webmentions and ActivityPub mature. And AI tools are lowering the technical barrier to building and maintaining a site.

The trajectory matters more than the current state. And the trajectory favors the indie web.

What the Movement Reveals About the Internet’s Future

Zoom out for a moment. What does the indie web revival actually mean for the internet?

I think it reveals a fundamental correction. The centralized social media era — roughly 2008 to 2024 — was an aberration, not the natural state of the web. The web was designed as a decentralized network of linked documents. Social media platforms turned it into a collection of walled gardens. The indie web is a return to the original architecture.

This doesn’t mean platforms will disappear. They won’t. But I think we’re moving toward a hybrid model where platforms serve as amplifiers and personal websites serve as home bases. You might post a thread on social media to promote a new article. But the article lives on your domain. The audience relationship lives in your email list and RSS subscribers. The platform is a megaphone, not a home.

This model is more resilient. It distributes risk across many independent nodes instead of concentrating it in a few corporate platforms. It gives creators leverage — if one platform becomes hostile, they can shift to another without losing their content or audience. It aligns incentives: your success depends on the quality of your work, not on your ability to game an algorithm.

It’s also, I’ll admit, slower. Building an audience through a personal website takes years. There’s no viral moment that gives you 100,000 followers overnight. The growth curve is gradual, organic, and sometimes discouraging.

But the growth is real. The audience is genuine. And the asset you build — a body of work on a domain you control — appreciates in value over time rather than depreciating as platforms rise and fall.

Getting Started: The Minimum Viable Personal Website

If you’ve read this far and you’re thinking about building a personal website, here’s the minimal version:

1. Buy a domain. Your name dot com, if it’s available. A variation if it isn’t. Budget: $12/year.

2. Pick a static site generator. Astro if you want flexibility. Hugo if you want speed. Eleventy if you want simplicity. Ghost if you want a CMS without building one.

3. Write three posts. Not one. Three. One post is a fluke. Three posts is a pattern. They don’t need to be long. They need to be honest.

4. Deploy for free. Vercel, Netlify, or Cloudflare Pages. Connect your domain. Done.

5. Add an RSS feed. Most frameworks generate this automatically. If yours doesn’t, it’s a fifteen-minute addition.

6. Add an about page. Who are you? What do you write about? Why should someone follow your work? Three paragraphs is enough.

7. Tell people. Share the URL. Add it to your email signature. Put it on your social media profiles. The best website in the world is worthless if nobody knows it exists.

That’s it. You don’t need a design system. You don’t need a newsletter. You don’t need analytics. You don’t need comments. You can add all of these later. The minimum viable personal website is a domain, three posts, and an RSS feed.

The whole setup takes an afternoon. The commitment is $12 per year and a few hours per month writing. The downside is negligible. The upside is a permanent, searchable, linkable home for your ideas that you control completely.

The Long View

I’ve been writing on my own domain for over a decade now. In that time, I’ve watched three social networks rise and fall. I’ve seen blogging declared dead at least four times. I’ve survived the pivot to video, the pivot to audio, and the pivot to short-form vertical content.

My website is still here. The URLs still work. The content is still findable. The RSS feed still delivers posts to people who subscribed years ago.

That’s the case for the indie web, distilled to its essence. Not that it’s trendy. Not that it’s technically superior. Not that it’s philosophically pure. Just that it lasts.

The internet moves fast. Platforms come and go. Algorithms change. Business models pivot. But a well-maintained personal website, on a domain you own, with content you created — that endures. It’s one of the few things on the internet that actually can.

So build one. Write something. Put it at a URL you control. The indie web isn’t a movement you join. It’s a choice you make. And it’s a choice that, twelve years from now, you’ll be glad you made.

My cat approves of this message. She’s been sitting on my keyboard for the entire writing session, which I take as a signal of deep editorial engagement.