Hello World

Following the tradition of development tutorials I am today launching 🎉 my new blog with a hello world post. Its not perfect, its not finished, and it will have issues, but its live!

Hi and thanks for checking by 👋

I have been working in the web and digitalisation industry for almost 10 years as a technology expert. When I started using the web we were neck deep in a phase called web 2.0. It was a time where forums, chats and social media platforms made it easier for everyone to contribute to the web. Platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter finally pulled a critical mass of users into to the internet.

With great user demand comes financial opportunity 💰 and this spawned many of our todays boons and problems of the web. On the one hand individual users can use these platforms to communicate around the world, distribute their niche skills, exchange knowledge and sell products to an immense amount of people. On the other hand personal data was used by these platforms to implement user targeted advertisement—the users became the product themselves.

But there was also a time before this fascinating triumph of the internet where people primarily used scattered personal websites (often called blogs) and email to communicate on the web. It was a time with much slower asynchronous conversation compared to the current realtime conversations that happen on social platforms. It was a time where users personal data still belonged to them and was hosted on their own websites and servers. It was a time without personalised ads and spammy notifications. It was the web 1.0.

Many web professionals now look back at this nostalgic time and question themselves “how can we fix the old distributed web to get users away from centralised social platforms to a more personal web where every user has his data on his own website”. Many of these ideas are clustered under the term IndieWeb.

The most important idea of the IndieWeb is a concept called POSSE or Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. It means that when someone posts an idea, article, photo, comment, etc. it should be done on his own domain/website/blog or whatever you want to call it. Social media platforms are then used to distribute this content to a wider audience.

Therefore those web professionals started or revived their old blogs to build alternative distributed communities that live in parallel to the big corporate platforms. These websites use old and new innovative technologies to provide things we love about social media for distributed personal sites…and of course it’s quite nerdy and fun 🤖.

So today I join the IndieWeb 🥳! I will post all kind of different thoughts on this blog, but you can expect lots of insights into the web and digitalisation in general.

If you are interested in how this blog is created you can check out my about page. In case you would like to receive updates on new posts you can find subscription options on my subscribe page.