# THE INDIEWEB IS PUNK MANIFESTO ## Three chords and a domain name. You don't need a record deal. You don't need a platform's blessing. You need a guitar you barely know how to play, or a text editor and a hosting bill. That's it. That's the whole scene. --- ## I. We Are the DIY Kids Punk didn't wait for the labels to say yes. It plugged in a blown out amp in somebody's basement and played anyway. Bad singer? Doesn't matter. Three chords? Perfect. Own a drum kit but never took a lesson? Great, you're the drummer now. The IndieWeb works the same way. Nobody's waiting for permission to have a website. You don't need a "content strategy." You don't need a niche. You need a place that's yours, and the nerve to hit publish. It's ugly sometimes. It's the wrong font. It's a blog post about nothing in particular. **It works. It's yours.** ## II. We Own the Masters Now The old music industry owned the masters, the distribution, the airwaves. You made the music; they made the money and decided if anyone got to hear it. Big platforms run the same racket now. You write the posts, you build the audience, you generate the engagement — and they own the feed, the algorithm, and the right to bury you or boot you whenever it suits the shareholders. Not here. **Own your domain. Own your data. Own your identity.** Your words live on infrastructure you control, not on borrowed land that can evict you without notice. ## III. No A&R, No Venture Capital, No Gatekeepers No punk band was chasing a platinum record. Punk was about making the music and getting it into people's hands — that was the whole transaction. No indie web builder is chasing a Series A. We're not optimizing for growth. We're not selling your attention to advertisers. We charge a fair price for a real thing, or we charge nothing at all, and either way nobody's pitching us to a boardroom. **Small, sustainable, and answerable to nobody but ourselves.** ## IV. The Zine Never Died, It Just Got a Domain Punk had zines — cut, pasted, photocopied, and passed hand to hand because the real press wouldn't cover it. That was blogging before anyone called it blogging. We still do that. A blog is a zine with better uptime. An RSS feed is a mailing list that never asks for your email. Webmentions are the show flyers stapled to every telephone pole in town, pointing back to each other, building the scene one link at a time. **Community over audience.** Nobody in this room is just watching. ## V. Make What You Need, Not What "Everyone" Needs Stop designing for a hypothetical user who doesn't exist. Build the thing that scratches your own itch. Use it yourself — eat what you cook. If you're not depending on it, why would anyone else? Do that enough, in the open, with your code and your notes and your half-finished ideas posted for anyone to see, and the rest of the scene picks it up. That's how it's always spread: not top-down, but kid to kid, site to site. ## VI. Weird Is a Feature GeoCities had garish backgrounds, seventeen animated GIFs, and a MIDI file that played on load. It was a mess. It was also *alive* in a way a template never is. We're not chasing pixel-perfect. We're not A/B testing the homepage. **Have fun, or what's the point.** Keep the web weird. Keep it handmade. Keep the mohawks. ## VII. This Is the Counterculture Now In the '90s, cranking Punk Rock was a way of telling the mass media system where to shove it. Today, publishing on your own site instead of feeding the algorithm is the same middle finger, just quieter. We opt out of the surveillance feed. We opt out of the engagement farm. We opt into a web made of small, stubborn, independent places — loosely joined, built to last, and owned by the people who made them. --- ### We don't need major platforms. **We have the Web, keyboards, tools, and community.** *IndieWeb is Punk. Oi!* --- Kept by [Jim Mitchell](https://jimmitchell.org). Published 21 August 2026. [Permalink](https://indiewebispunk.net/). Inspired by Jamie Thingelstad's original "[IndieWeb is Punk](https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/06/19/indieweb-is-punk.html)" post, Jim Mitchell's [response and t-shirt tribute](https://jimmitchell.org/2025/06/19/indieweb-is-punk/), and the IndieWeb community's guiding principles at [indieweb.org/principles](https://indieweb.org/principles). No trackers. No analytics. No cookies. No fonts from anybody else's server. One hand-written HTML file, marked up with [h-entry](https://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry). View source -- it's all there.