Supporting independent creators means more than buying them a coffee. The independent web runs on people who build themes, tools, zines, platforms, and essays in their spare time, and most of the meaningful support is free: attention, links, labour, and presence.
Adapted from How You Can Support Indie Creators, and You Need To on brennan.day.
The alternative to supporting independent work is funding the corporate kind by default. Cory Doctorow's enshittification describes the platform decay cycle: good to users, then users are abused for business customers, then everything is extracted for shareholders. Pew Research found that around 72% of Americans say tipping is now expected in more places than five years ago, yet the people whose work actually builds the open web are rarely tipped at all.