🔗 The indie web should be a universe of discovery:

The indieweb should feel like the Norrington Room: an expansive world of different voices, opinions, modes of expression, and art that you can explore, peruse, or have curated for you. It’s not about any particular goal aside from the goal of being enriched by people sharing their lived experiences, creativity, and expertise. It’s a journey of discovery, conversation, and community, not a journey of extraction.

Curators and linkblogs are one part of it. Webrings like the indieweb webring scratch the surface of it. Blog directories like ooh.directory and blogrolls are part of it. But I feel like we’re missing something else. I’m not sure what that is! But I sure wish we had the equivalent of knowledgable booksellers — indie tummelers, perhaps — to guide us and help intentionally build community.

I’m not sure we are missing anything.

There is no shortage of people who are trying to do this sort of thing. The problem is that they are all fighting an uphill battle against the extractive industries who are plundering the public commons for their own gain.

We need to break the notion of “discovery” away from the myth that some system will find interesting stuff and hand it to us without us having to do any work. Even if such a solution were possible—and I am skeptical about that—anyone who tries to build it will eventually corrupt it due to the need to figure out how to get it to make money.

Maybe the idea of discovery on the web was originally idealistic and well-intended, but it has become a bait-and-switch. It is a way to trick people into dumping their lives into digital platforms that are then used to serve them advertising.