A path into the IndieWeb ordered by difficulty, from buying a domain to running your own services. No computer science degree needed: curiosity and willingness to try.
The core principle: own your domain, own your content, own your identity.
A good first step. PorkBun has first-year costs as low as a couple dollars. Choose something personal: your name, a phrase, whatever feels right. This is yours.
Email bonus: PorkBun offers free email forwarding. Set up name@yourdomain.xyz and forward to your existing inbox. More professional, no new email account.
IndieWeb wiki: A Domain of One's Own
| Platform | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| omg.lol | $20/year | Profile, weblog, status, email forwarding, kind community: no code |
| Pika.page | Free (50 posts), $6/mo | Distraction-free editor, guestbook, image uploads |
| Bear Blog | Free | Text-only, ultra-minimal |
| DreamWidth | Free tier | Old-school community blogging, successor to LiveJournal, comments |
All give you RSS feeds and data export. You're not locked in.
You'll learn Markdown: plain text with simple formatting:
# Heading Paragraph with **bold** and *italic*. - List item - Another item
NeoCities (free): build from scratch, beginner-friendly tutorials, supportive community.
HTML is a skeleton: angle brackets telling the browser what's a heading, paragraph, or link. CSS is styling: colors, fonts, layout. That's it.
<h1>This is a heading</h1> <p>A paragraph with <strong>bold</strong> and <em>italic</em>.</p>
Learning resources:
Tools like Eleventy take Markdown files and generate a full website. You write content, the tool handles page generation, navigation, and RSS feeds.
Your site is the hub. Everything else is a spoke.
Multiple homes are good: mirror to NeoCities, post to tilde.town, sync to twtxt. The site remains the canonical source.
/about page: who you are, what you care aboutThe technology serves the writing, not the other way around.
This isn't all-or-nothing. Keep your social media. Start an IndieWeb site alongside it. POSSE means your site is canonical while you share everywhere your readers are.