Table of Contents
Platform Statistics (2024–2025)
Reference numbers for IndieWeb-adjacent platforms and the context for why they matter.
Medium
- 100 million monthly visitors
- $2 million+ paid to writers monthly
- Membership: $5/month — a portion goes directly to every writer whose work you applaud, highlight, or spend time reading
- Largest demographic: 25–34 year olds (33%)
- Average session: 2 minutes 16 seconds — intentionally non-sticky
- Subscriber count: 400,000 (2019) → 700,000+ (2021)
The payment model: no advertisers, no shareholders taking the cut. You highlight a sentence, the writer gets paid directly.
Tumblr
- 135 million monthly active users
- 620 million blogs
- 12.8 million posts daily (2,000/second)
- Gen Z: 50% of active users, 60% of new sign-ups
- Average session: 20 minutes 46 seconds, 6.39 pages per visit — not doomscrolling
- When Brazil banned X: Tumblr traffic surged 350%
- When TikTok's future was uncertain: Tumblr-tagged posts jumped 395%
People are fleeing corporate social media — not to new platforms, but to old ones.
NeoCities
- 55,000 sites (2015) → 1 million (February 2025) → 1.3 million+ (2025)
- 95% associated with indie web culture
- 90% opposed to AI-generated content
- 85% focused on community building and web design
- Free tier: 1GB storage, 200GB bandwidth
The "Where Not What" Framing
Screen time is not the problem. The platform is the problem.
| Activity | Character |
|---|---|
| Scrolling TikTok for 2 hours | Passive consumption loop |
| Reading a 10,000-word essay on Medium | Focus |
| Building a Neocities page | Productive creation |
| 20 minutes on Tumblr following poets | Intentional community |
The digital detox app market was projected at $0.39B (2023) → $19.44B (2032). Apps to help you use your phone less, accessed on your phone, sending notifications to remind you not to use your phone. The problem is not duration — it is intentionality.
Harm reduction: replace the bad with the good. Don't delete Instagram; follow 50 poets on Tumblr and watch your dashboard fill with actual art instead of sponsored content.
Entry Points by Effort
See Getting Started on the IndieWeb for the full skill ladder. Quickest paths:
- $5/month — Medium membership funds the writing commons directly
- Free, no code — Tumblr; post weird things, reblog other people's weird things
- Free, some code — NeoCities; one Saturday afternoon, HTML + CSS documentation, something permanently yours