normal people don't use the internet

I've been thinking about the small web , the indie web , and the seeming resurgence of personal blogs. Let me get right to it: The only people talking about this community-centric (?), personally driven Internet are tech people. Programmers, developers, and so on. Nobody outside of tech is talking about this, unless they happen to be terminally online. (Like me, hello!) This "indie web" is incredibly technical—just try parsing microformats. And, of course, none of that is necessary...but what is a non-technical person supposed to do? Pay money to use Squarespace? Create a Mastodon account? (A social network that has become primarily for programmers and journalists, it seems.)

No, I don't think any normal person who wants to escape the cage of social media is going to rent a VPS and install a headless Linux OS just to host a blog they have to code themselves. (Maybe they know HTML 2.0 from the early days, but now there's HTML 5? Not that there's much difference, mind you, especially for a personal website, but two to five is a big jump!)

Normal people don't use the internet; they use social media. All of the blog posts from developers who have largely left behind social media, who code a "status" page on their personal website that they coded themselves, celebrating their one or two years free of social media (all the while running curated groups chats on #pick-your-platform) are completely disconnected from the normal person who doomscrolls and follows influencers. Amongst the #SponCon, they still see life updates from their friends; they still have individual and group chats on proprietary platforms; they search on google dot com and read the AI summary because, well, there it is.

Normal people don't scrub the URLs they share for tracking links! They don't even know how to parse a URL—the domain looks right and, well, most of the other information they don't even see because they're using the share sheet on their phone's browser.

I think this has actually divided the internet. For all intents and purposes, normal people simply don't access the internet as it was 20 years ago (which is roughly what I would pin this small/indie web is trying to reach—not to go back in time, but to find that same freedom). They're using siloed social media, they're logging into Google Workshop or whatever, they're ignoring Gmail, they're making a restaurant reservation on OpenTable, and so on.

All of this is honestly just to complain about tech people blogging. I can't read another resume building post on what development to CSS is coming! Who cares!!! Email your colleagues! If you want the small web, start journaling. Start commenting on the world around you. At least start talking about some hobby in programming, not your fucking day job, god.