Last year I wrote a thing on Automattic’s design blog about something I keep noodling on, which ultimately boils down to what makes us creative. What gets us to build a website? What the hell is a website today?
I don’t mean “Us” the web community, or tech industry. I mean “Us” as Humankind.
Silly me, I didn’t manage to keep a reference for where I found this article in the first place.
But it is important and has some interesting philosophical questions for the IndieWeb and, for lack of a better framing, future generations of the IndieWeb.
While I have the sort of love and excitement for the web that she talks about, I wonder if others will too?
The other side of me says that one of the great benefits of what the IndieWeb is doing is breaking down all of the larger and complicated pieces of a website down into smaller and simpler component parts. This allows a broader range of people to see and understand them and then potentially remix them into tools that will not only work for them on a day-to-day basis, but to create new and exciting things out of them. I feel like we’re getting closer to this sort of utopia, but even as I see the pieces getting simpler, I also see large projects like WordPress becoming even more difficult and complex to navigate. There is a broader divide between the general public and the professional web developer and not as many people like me who know just enough of both to be dangerous, creative, and yet still productive.
I hope we can continue to break things down to make them easier for everyone to not only use, but to create new and inspiring things.