You can't do email the "old way" because you'll be buried in spam, and even if you can handle that, others who don't do it the old way may never get your mail.
You can't put a server on the internet the old way because there is nonstop automated door knocking for security violations. In the old days, the attacks were much less sophisticated and mostly a "gentleman's agreement" meant they didn't happen at all.
You can't just open a port and expose a service if you're on CG-NAT or if your provider prohibits or blocks it otherwise.
You can't really do instant messaging the old ways (remember pidgin?) because 99% of the people you'd want to message are on systems with no external API to connect to.
Aside from that yes. I still have an old school static IPv4 address that serves an old school, mostly static HTML web site (and behind authentication some other useful stuff to immediate family members). Uh oh, did I just invite more door knocking?
The post author mentions in the comments he doesn't like the politics of the Mullvad and Brave creators.
Brave creator Brendan Eich is also the creator of JavaScript, which powers most of the web today. Eich donated to Republicans and pro-marriage causes, yes.
The author thinks that should disqualify his tooling from the open indie web.
I find that kind of political gatekeeping fit for a bygone and dead era. It’s a point of view that says we must cut off from our lives everyone who disagrees with our politics, even in the slightest.
Commercialized sites like Reddit are on the decline in part because of over-zealous mods driven by politics who ban and silence dissent. Facebook and pre-acquisition Twitter were also focused on silencing dissent; so much that they banned a sitting US President.
But the indie web of the ’90s? It was filled with free speech and live-and-let-live libertarians. Reddit originally was a bastion of free speech, and its founders were libertarian-leaning. Their vision has been polluted by the commercialization and big media takeover of Reddit..
The indie web is not likely to revive for many reasons. But it certainly will not revive with the kind of political gatekeeping the blog author is advocating.
Wonder if they're one of those people who thinks one of the founders donating to a right wing political parties make the service not worth dealing with:
Alternatively, it could be a lack of servers meaning that a few services seem to be blocking all traffic from them. I've had that issues when trying to use it for services like Reddit.
Didn't a lot of people come to the internet proper after first using outfits like AOL and Compuserve ? I wonder if those outfits served as "training grounds" or "boot camps", and what kind of culture shock their customers had upon hitting the "real net" (newsgroups etc.), and whether they learned "enough" netiquette before "graduating to" the wider net.
An alternate framing for these types of "the old web was better" articles is: "I really liked the web better when only privileged, highly educated people could put up content". The reality is that there was a lot of implicit gatekeeping going on in the early web because of the technical hurdles.
The early web that many people are nostalgic for stretches to the early millennium, by which time it was pretty straightforward for ordinary people to set up a blog on a number of platforms. That era of the web was still characterized by longform text that could actually express nuance, and there was either only gentle or no monetization (as opposed to the SEO and attention economy), and that is what people are usually contrasting the later web to.
Won't it still be useful to have access to content posted by educated and well-meaning people without a direct commercial intent? The ancient original filter (access from universities) is long gone, and both low-content posts (a minor problem), and intentionally intrusive, addictive, and deceptive content (the major problem) abound.
Hence the longing for the times when this was not yet the case, and the quest for places that still maintain these qualities. (These places are often intentionally hard to find from outside; see the dead forest hypothesis.)
The era of MSN, MySpace and self/ISP-hosted pages didn't feel like gatekeeping at all; sure, there was some privilege involved (internet access still is a privilege in 2026), but there was less shame about attempting stuff.
Articles like this one, talking about how the original web is still around, miss a key point IMO: that indie web that exists today is socially irrelevant. In the early millennium it was common for people meeting IRL to feel a sense of community because they followed a shared ecosystem of blogs, whether about a band, a religious denomination, a city neighborhood, or a travel subculture.
Today if you read indie web content, it is highly likely that you are the only person you know IRL that reads it. So, when social isolation is a problem many people today complain about, it can be glaring that the indie web doesn't scratch that itch as it once did.
Quite ironic to post this on a platform that uses 1/4 of the screen for advertisement and a drowning GDPR prompt. (Also the CSS makes it tedious to read on a computer.)
Mostly true but not quite.
You can't do email the "old way" because you'll be buried in spam, and even if you can handle that, others who don't do it the old way may never get your mail.
You can't put a server on the internet the old way because there is nonstop automated door knocking for security violations. In the old days, the attacks were much less sophisticated and mostly a "gentleman's agreement" meant they didn't happen at all.
You can't just open a port and expose a service if you're on CG-NAT or if your provider prohibits or blocks it otherwise.
You can't really do instant messaging the old ways (remember pidgin?) because 99% of the people you'd want to message are on systems with no external API to connect to.
Aside from that yes. I still have an old school static IPv4 address that serves an old school, mostly static HTML web site (and behind authentication some other useful stuff to immediate family members). Uh oh, did I just invite more door knocking?
I'm still running multiple email systems the "old way". Been doing it for 30 years and don't intend to stop now, both at work and at home.
There are a few extra hoops these days to jump through ... but still it moves.
> And obviously you’ll want a VPN too (skip Mullvad) — Proton’s VPN works fine for that.
Why skip Mullvad ? I thought it has a great reputation.
The post author mentions in the comments he doesn't like the politics of the Mullvad and Brave creators.
Brave creator Brendan Eich is also the creator of JavaScript, which powers most of the web today. Eich donated to Republicans and pro-marriage causes, yes.
The author thinks that should disqualify his tooling from the open indie web.
I find that kind of political gatekeeping fit for a bygone and dead era. It’s a point of view that says we must cut off from our lives everyone who disagrees with our politics, even in the slightest.
Commercialized sites like Reddit are on the decline in part because of over-zealous mods driven by politics who ban and silence dissent. Facebook and pre-acquisition Twitter were also focused on silencing dissent; so much that they banned a sitting US President.
But the indie web of the ’90s? It was filled with free speech and live-and-let-live libertarians. Reddit originally was a bastion of free speech, and its founders were libertarian-leaning. Their vision has been polluted by the commercialization and big media takeover of Reddit..
The indie web is not likely to revive for many reasons. But it certainly will not revive with the kind of political gatekeeping the blog author is advocating.
Wonder if they're one of those people who thinks one of the founders donating to a right wing political parties make the service not worth dealing with:
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2026/7/20/donation-controversy
Alternatively, it could be a lack of servers meaning that a few services seem to be blocking all traffic from them. I've had that issues when trying to use it for services like Reddit.
Previous discussion: "The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469
Didn't a lot of people come to the internet proper after first using outfits like AOL and Compuserve ? I wonder if those outfits served as "training grounds" or "boot camps", and what kind of culture shock their customers had upon hitting the "real net" (newsgroups etc.), and whether they learned "enough" netiquette before "graduating to" the wider net.
An alternate framing for these types of "the old web was better" articles is: "I really liked the web better when only privileged, highly educated people could put up content". The reality is that there was a lot of implicit gatekeeping going on in the early web because of the technical hurdles.
The early web that many people are nostalgic for stretches to the early millennium, by which time it was pretty straightforward for ordinary people to set up a blog on a number of platforms. That era of the web was still characterized by longform text that could actually express nuance, and there was either only gentle or no monetization (as opposed to the SEO and attention economy), and that is what people are usually contrasting the later web to.
Won't it still be useful to have access to content posted by educated and well-meaning people without a direct commercial intent? The ancient original filter (access from universities) is long gone, and both low-content posts (a minor problem), and intentionally intrusive, addictive, and deceptive content (the major problem) abound.
Hence the longing for the times when this was not yet the case, and the quest for places that still maintain these qualities. (These places are often intentionally hard to find from outside; see the dead forest hypothesis.)
The era of MSN, MySpace and self/ISP-hosted pages didn't feel like gatekeeping at all; sure, there was some privilege involved (internet access still is a privilege in 2026), but there was less shame about attempting stuff.
Articles like this one, talking about how the original web is still around, miss a key point IMO: that indie web that exists today is socially irrelevant. In the early millennium it was common for people meeting IRL to feel a sense of community because they followed a shared ecosystem of blogs, whether about a band, a religious denomination, a city neighborhood, or a travel subculture.
Today if you read indie web content, it is highly likely that you are the only person you know IRL that reads it. So, when social isolation is a problem many people today complain about, it can be glaring that the indie web doesn't scratch that itch as it once did.
Quite ironic to post this on a platform that uses 1/4 of the screen for advertisement and a drowning GDPR prompt. (Also the CSS makes it tedious to read on a computer.)
Why the refusal of Mullvad, though?