alt Hacker NewsTo give it a different light: by using an indie web approach (i.e. self host), there is an intrinsic guarantee that a publisher has put at least some effort and resources to make their materials public.
This ensures that the published materials have certain authenticity and inherent amount of quality. Publishing them "the indie way" functions as a kind of proof of work: not a guarantee of excellence, but evidence that something meaningful was at stake in producing and sharing it.
By contrast, the corporate web has driven the cost of publishing effectively to 0. This single fact opens the floodgates to noise, spam, and irrelevance at an unprecedented scale.
The core problem is that the average consumer cannot easily distinguish between these two fundamentally different universes. Loud, low-effort content often masquerades as significance, while quiet, honest, and carefully produced work is overlooked. As a result, authenticity is drowned out by volume, and signal is mistaken for noise.
To sum it up: this is not so much a problem of the internet as a lack of discernment among its users.
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IME, this is just about the opposite of true.
I recently did a deep dive of an (allegedly) human-curated selection of 40K blogs containing 600K posts. I got the list from Kagi’s Small Web Index [1]. I haven’t published anything about it yet, but the takeaway is that nostalgia for the IndieWeb is largely misplaced.
The overwhelming majority of was 2010s era “content marketing” SEO slop.
The next largest slice was esoteric nostalgia content. Like, “Look at these antique toys/books/movies/etc!”. You’d be shocked at the volume of this still being written by retirees on Blogger (no shade, it’s good to have a hobby, but goddamn there are a lot of you).
The slice of “things an average person might plausibly care to look at” was vanishingly small.
There are no spam filters, mods, or ways to report abuse when you run your content mill on your own domain.
Like you, I was somewhat surprised by this result. I have to assume this is little more than a marketing ploy by Kagi to turn content producers who want clicks into Kagi customers. That list is not suited for any other purpose I can discern.
> To sum it up: this is not so much a problem of the internet as a lack of discernment among its users.
This is very true. I've found that there's more good content than there ever was before, but that there's also much more bad content, too, so the good is harder to find.
RSS helps me, curated newsletters help me. What else helps build this discernment?