When the Independent Web Connects Too Much
I've spent years trying to figure out what I actually want from the internet. I'm old enough to remember when getting online took intention and patience, and the web felt like a huge collection of places waiting to be found. You could spend hours following links from one personal site to another with no idea where you'd end up.
I don't miss dial-up, broken websites, or searching for anything before search engines got good. I do miss the feeling that the internet belonged to the people using it, not to a handful of corporations trying to monetize every second of our attention.
In August I wrote about the differences between the small web and federation, and my thinking hasn't changed much. The Fediverse, the IndieWeb, and the loosely defined smolweb all have qualities I appreciate. They also have shortcomings that sometimes make me wonder whether we're building something better or just recreating old problems with new technology.
A recent discussion about Webmentions, privacy, and the Fediverse brought some of that into focus.
A disagreement about Webmentions
It started with Kev Quirk's post about privacy and Webmentions. A reader had raised concerns about Mastodon replies being reproduced on external websites without the original authors knowing or agreeing.
Kev's first response was to question whether there was much of a privacy issue. A public Mastodon post is public, and the Fediverse is designed to spread content across independent servers. Technically, I think that holds up.
V.H. Belvadi then raised copyright and the persistence of content after deletion, which complicates the idea that anything public is fair game for republication. Manuel Moreale followed by drawing a line between linking to someone's content and copying it onto another site.
That distinction matters. Webmentions were built mainly to notify a site when another site links to it. The spec also allows displaying linked content as comments, so nothing technically prohibits it. But whether you can do something and whether you should are different questions.
Public doesn't mean giving up every expectation
If I publish something publicly, anyone can read it, quote it, criticize it, or link to it. That's the web working as intended. Automatically reproducing my words as part of someone else's website is something else.
I don't think every quotation needs permission; that would make ordinary discussion nearly impossible. But the author should keep some reasonable expectation of control over their work.
Deletion is the hardest case. If I delete a Mastodon reply, I'd expect it to disappear from wherever it was distributed. Federation already muddies that, since independent servers may hold onto copies or caches. A website that has reproduced the reply is one more place it can linger.
Yes, nothing public is guaranteed to vanish. Screenshots and archives existed long before ActivityPub. That doesn't mean we should abandon the expectation entirely.
What bothers me about the "public is public" argument is that it ignores the difference between accessibility and consent. Linking or quoting is fine. Quietly importing someone's words into another website, when they may not even know it's happening, is a different matter. The technology explains why it happens. It doesn't justify it.
Kev changes his mind
On October 24, Kev published Pure Comments and the Fediverse, saying Moreale's argument had changed his thinking. He plans to remove Fediverse integration from Pure Comments and keep ordinary Webmention support.
That matters to me directly, because this site runs on Kev's PureBlog. Just last week I wrote about returning to PureBlog and mentioned my interest in its Mastodon cross-posting and syndication. I'm still enthusiastic about that.
But the discussion made me see a distinction I hadn't thought much about. Syndicating my own writing through Mastodon is my choice. Someone replying to it there may have no idea their response could end up on a completely separate website. Both are interoperability, but they don't carry the same expectations or permissions. That's worth taking seriously when the whole point of these tools is giving people more control over their online presence.
I respect Kev for reconsidering something he'd already put work into. It's easy to get attached to a technical solution you've built, and publicly changing your mind is harder than defending your first position forever.
He also noted that the integration was complicated to maintain. Independent sites talking to decentralized networks without a corporate middleman sounds great, but someone still has to build and maintain it. Add privacy questions and unexpected behavior on top of that, and the case gets harder to make.
I'm not convinced removal is the only reasonable answer. Better disclosure, linking instead of reproducing whole replies, and better handling of deleted content might cover a lot of it. But I understand the decision.
My complicated relationship with the Fediverse
I want to like the Fediverse more than I do.
The concept appeals to me enormously: people and communities running their own servers, talking across platforms, free of any single corporate owner. To be fair, it does a lot of that well.
But decentralization doesn't automatically produce a better social environment. I've written about federated spaces and their gatekeepers, and I've run into many of the same things that drove me off conventional social media: fights over acceptable opinions, communities turning inward, people more interested in policing how others participate than talking to them, and the usual chase for attention and approval.
Plenty of people there are interesting, generous, and thoughtful, or I wouldn't keep exploring it. But removing corporate ownership doesn't remove human behavior.
Some corners of the Fediverse also treat technical knowledge as a prerequisite for participation. Question how your content is being distributed, and the answer can amount to: you should have understood how federation works.
Maybe so. But if the goal is an accessible alternative to mainstream social media, expecting ordinary people to understand distributed systems isn't realistic. The Fediverse doesn't need to behave like Facebook or X, but "the technology works differently" isn't a convincing reply to a reasonable concern.
The Fediverse works. The trouble is that the technology and the social expectations around it don't always agree.
The smolweb isn't a perfect answer either
My frustrations with the Fediverse usually push me back toward the smolweb and independent sites. I like websites that exist mainly to publish something worth reading, with no algorithm deciding what deserves attention and no ad tracking following visitors around.
Discovery is the smolweb's biggest problem. It's wonderful that anyone can build a personal site and stay independent of the big platforms. It's less wonderful when almost nobody knows the site exists. RSS, blogrolls, directories, and Webmentions help, but they take effort from both writers and readers. The commercial web made discovery effortless, even if it manipulates the process.
I write mainly for myself, and an article nobody reads isn't wasted time. But wanting readers shouldn't require giving up independence. There's a lot of room between chasing engagement metrics and publishing into an empty room, and I don't think the smolweb has figured out how to live there yet.
That's part of the Fediverse's appeal: a way to reach people beyond your own site without depending on corporate platforms. The hard part is getting that without taking on a new set of expectations and obligations.
Maybe we're solving the wrong problem
I wonder whether we've become too focused on recreating social media minus the corporations. The Fediverse decentralizes the social network, which is useful, but it still puts the network at the center.
What if the goal were making the social network optional?
A personal website stays the home for someone's writing, photos, or ideas. RSS lets people follow along. Webmentions connect related discussions. Links handle discovery. Email lets someone reach you directly. ActivityPub can fit into that without being required.
That's why I'm still interested in Mastodon syndication: use the Fediverse to distribute my writing while this site stays its permanent home. But I don't need every conversation federated, every response displayed under the original post, or another timeline and set of metrics telling me whether I'm engaging enough.
Sometimes I want to read something and move on. Sometimes I'll write a response on my own site. Sometimes an email is plenty. The web already supports all of that. Maybe the work is making those things easier, not stacking new layers on top.
Independence should include the ability to say no
One of the best things about the independent web is deciding how much participation you actually want.
You should be able to publish without accepting comments, or participate in the Fediverse without your conversations being copied onto unrelated sites. A developer should be able to support Webmentions without feeling obligated to add ActivityPub. A reader should be able to follow good websites without joining yet another platform.
I care about that flexibility more than universal interoperability. I want independent websites connected, not inseparable.
There's a real tension here. Federation is supposed to reduce the control centralized platforms have over our content. But once content moves across many independently run systems, controlling where it appears and how long it stays gets much harder. Decentralizing control doesn't necessarily give the individual more of it. Federation can still be worth it, but that tradeoff deserves more thought than celebrating the absence of a central authority.
Kev approached the question from how federation works. Moreale asked whether the expectations it creates are reasonable. Belvadi asked what happens to content after it's been copied elsewhere. All three added something. Building tools that connect the web is fine. The problem starts when every possible connection is treated as something that should happen automatically.
The web I actually want
We can't recreate the internet of thirty years ago, and nostalgia tends to skip the parts that weren't good. Nor do the Fediverse, the IndieWeb, or the smolweb solve what the modern web has become. Each fixes some problems and creates others.
I want an internet where publishing doesn't mean handing my work to a corporation, finding interesting people doesn't mean submitting to an algorithm, and talking to someone doesn't automatically become a public performance. I want websites to stay individual places, not interchangeable parts of one giant social network. I want to follow links, stumble onto something unexpected, and meet people who see things differently than I do.
And I want the people building tools for that web to remember that what's technically possible isn't always what's desirable.
On the surface, the exchange between Kev, Belvadi, and Moreale is about Webmentions and copied replies. To me it's about what kind of internet we're trying to build. Decentralization, interoperability, and independent publishing are worth pursuing, but none of them should become ends in themselves.
I still want the Fediverse to succeed, and I'll keep exploring how it can complement independent publishing. But a website doesn't have to join a social network to matter, and not every interaction needs to be spread across every platform.
Maybe the future of the web isn't another social network, even a decentralized one. Maybe it's a collection of independent websites, connected when their owners and visitors want them to be, and perfectly capable of standing on their own when they don't.