kemper.FYI

Not to get too melancholic about it, but it felt 2025 was the year the industry hit a low point, and dragged me down with it. You likely feel the same way, based on your overwhelming feedback (except for one of you who said Claude Code was “good, actually”). I don’t want to go as far as to call it a mid-life crisis, but more a general sadness and sense of ennui at a world seemingly hellbent on seeing the two possible ways of doing something, and choosing the bad one every time. 2026 has only accelerated this trend, whether it be represented in shows like CES, or the continued hosing down of fires with investor capital.

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In a more practical sense, I’ve also found renewed interest and joy in all the stuff that Torb describes. Paring down my RSS feeds away from the general tech news and focusing on real people doing real things and thinking real thoughts has been nothing short of a revelation. All that cool, innovative, fun, creative, wonderful stuff that I missed is all still there, it’s just buried.

I, on the other hand, am absolutely appalled by the magic that internet is. Even though having understood the finer intricacies of TCP/IP, it still feels like magic to me. The world however, has taken it for granted. We, collectively, have not only lost the fascination towards magic but have also left our inner child behind by becoming preoccupied with thoughts and activities which, in the grand scheme of things, will turn us into emotional robots.

The IndieWeb is, as far as I can tell, a community of people who advocate certain digital principles and support each other in working towards those. The most famous principle is Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. There are a variety of initiatives such as the monthly blog carnival (which I have hosted in the past) and online/in-person meetups.

The indie web, on the other hand, is a (very) much larger universe of websites run by individuals who wish to express their independent creativity.

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Over the next five years to 2030, we are going to see an explosion of indie web creators. The technical hurdles that exist today in setting up a website will be blown aside by AI. Soon, anyone will be able to establish their own website simply by writing down what they want it to do.

We are all so online, yet being online feels so solitary. I can’t feel the people across the feeds from me. Social media is designed for consumption of content, distribution of branding, broadcasting of prestige, not spontaneous encounters or the warm, funny, and weird moments that happen when humans simply exist together.

But what if we had the tools to reshape it? We could make our own public parks, cafes, bodegas, waterfalls, and mountains. We could carve out spaces that we inhabit and maintain, becoming active stewards rather than just users.

If dead internet theory posits that the internet will eventually become only bots, alive internet theory proclaims we will never let the open internet die. We will always find a way to look for each other, to answer a call for help, to share a laugh and an argument right after one another. If there’s one trait of the human race that every apocalypse movie agrees on, it’s our will to survive.

The way our online writing world has been siloized, basically no one has that. We’re going to try to fix that, and not with just my software, but by setting some new standards for interop, extensions to RSS, so that there’s no exclusivity to making software for writers or publishers. That’s what I mean when I say something is “on the web.” If your system is not 100% replaceable, today, they you are not on the web and should not claim it. If you’re thinking about freedom, btw – this should be part of your big picture. So many smart people don’t want to know how our networks work, and that makes you a victim. And it’s not that hard to understand, no matter what people have led you to believe.