The seeming slow crawl collapse of Twitter is an unpleasant and unsightly process, but if there’s any benefit to this shift in social media, it’s the exodus to Mastodon and the much needed interested boost to ActivityPub and federated networks- and riding the currents off of this, the resurrection of the “Indie Web”. Although I’ve gotten used to centralized social media and services, going to Mastodon and other federated services feels a lot like coming home.

As someone who grew up in the brief splint of time before the widespread availability of broadband and wifi networks, limited access to the common internet was a reality that shaped much of my origins in the early 2000s. Despite that, I was drawn to the web, and was running my own set of local web servers (WAMP, specifically, Windows 2000 with Apache, MySQL, and PHP) on a wired router and between computers with patch cables (all offline). As a thirteen year old kid, without any discretionary income, I dived into the scant few books I could get at the local library, as well as taking advantage of open source where I could (throwback, SourceForge was big back then). Apache VirtualHosts combined with edits to the Windows hosts file go a long way to making no internet access feel like some interact access (even though it was all me). In short, I’ve always leaned towards the side of building the web rather than consuming it (which is one of the reasons why I’ve never really enjoyed using Wordpress or many of the other headless SaaS CMS services.

If you’re new to the distributed internet, welcome! If you’re finally coming back, welcome home.