====== The Web as Ecosystem ======

===== The Web Is Not Mechanical =====

The word "network" predates computers. A net was a woven thing — threads knotted into strength, rail lines, telegraph wires. When engineers linked machines through ARPANET, they borrowed the textile word. Tim Berners-Lee chose "web" for the same reason: hyperlinks radiating outward like silk strands, entering anywhere, traveling invisible filaments to somewhere unexpected.

The Internet is not a machine in metaphor — it is a weaving. Threads under tension, holding because they cross.

===== Indra's Net =====

From the Avatamsaka Sutra: an infinite net hanging over the palace of the god Indra. At each node sits a brilliant jewel. In the surface of each jewel, all other jewels in the net are reflected, infinite in number. Each reflection contains all other reflections. When any jewel is touched, all others are affected.

The hidden interconnectedness and interdependency of everything and everyone. Every part intimately connected to every other part.

This is the web as it was meant to work.

===== Mycorrhizal Networks =====

For a long time, forests were understood as competitive — trees hedging each other out for resources. We now know this is false.

[[https://www.nationalforests.org/blog/underground-mycorrhizal-network|Mycorrhizal networks]] exist underground throughout forests, created by fungal hyphae joining with plant roots. These networks connect individual plants, transferring carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen, water, and chemical warning signals. Relationships are mutualistic: trees provide carbohydrates to fungi (~30% of the sugar connected trees generate); fungi enhance trees' ability to absorb water and nutrients.

**Discovered** by Professor Suzanne Simard at UBC in 1997, who used radioactive carbon isotopes to prove resource sharing — up to 40% of the carbon in a tree's fine roots can come from other trees.

**Mother trees** — older, larger trees — can be connected to thousands of other trees, supplying younger seedlings with nutrients and dramatically increasing their survival rates.

**The Wood Wide Web** — a 500-million-year-old underground network facilitating nutrient exchange and chemical warning signals. When a tree is under attack by insects, it sends signals through the network prompting neighboring trees to produce defensive compounds.

===== The Lesson for the IndieWeb =====

When independent sites link to each other intentionally — along shared values, not algorithmic recommendation — we stop being dependent on corporate search engines. We become dependent on each other instead.

This is the pro-social principle of the [[indieweb:indieweb_defined|IndieWeb]] in ecological terms: not isolated individuals competing for traffic, but an interconnected community where relationships matter and every connection strengthens the whole.

Link to sites you actually read. Maintain a blogroll. Join a webring. Become a node.

===== See Also =====
  * [[indieweb:start|IndieWeb Index]]

  * [[indieweb:neighbourhood|Being a Good Neighbour — Webrings, Blogrolls, Discovery]]
  * [[indieweb:indieweb_defined|What Is the IndieWeb?]]
  * [[indieweb:directories|Directories & Blogrolls]]
  * [[protocols:smallweb:solarpunk|Solarpunk and the Small Web]]
  * [[folkzone:permacomputing|Permacomputing]]
  * [[start|Return to wiki home]]