An Island in the Net in 2030?
I have been blogging independently since 2001. That’s twenty-four years of publishing without intermediaries, algorithms, or permission from platform gatekeepers. When I started, this was simply what you did for an online presence. The web was distributed by default. You owned your space and controlled your words.
By the mid-2010s, that shifted. Social media centralised conversation. Platforms convinced people that convenience was worth surrendering agency. But I kept blogging. Around 2017, I discovered the IndieWeb community and its WordPress plugins. Finally, there were standards — microformats2, Webmentions, ActivityPub — that could rebuild what we’d lost.
Now, in 2025, eight years later, those standards still feel marginal. I’m writing this not from frustration, but from clarity about what 2030 must look like if we’re serious about a web that belongs to its inhabitants rather than its landlords.
It bothers me that we’re still here. After nearly a decade of IndieWeb tooling and proof of concept across hundreds of websites, the WordPress theme ecosystem has largely ignored microformats2. I cannot tell if this is ignorance or indifference.
When someone installs a WordPress theme in 2025, microformats2 support is treated as a luxury feature. It should be foundational. Microformats2 are semantic markup that allows machines to understand your content’s structure — to distinguish a comment from a bookmark from a response to another post. Without them, your website is visible to humans but opaque to the open web.
A theme designer could add microformats2 support in hours. The technical barrier is minimal. Yet adoption among popular themes remains negligible. This isn’t a technology limitation. It’s a failure of imagination, or worse, a choice to ignore possibilities that don’t serve centralised platforms.
ActivityPub exists. Webmentions exist. The protocols work. Yet in 2025, these remain niche concerns, known only to people who dig deeper. Millions of website owners have no idea these standards exist, let alone how to implement them.
And then there is the CorpoWeb. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram grow larger, more controlling, more toxic each year. They’ve built trillion-dollar businesses on the premise that centralisation is inevitable. They’ve convinced us that reaching billions of people is worth our autonomy. They’ve done everything possible to keep open standards marginal.
This is what bothers me. Not that standards exist — they do. But that we accept their marginality. We treat decentralisation as optional rather than necessary.
Five years from now, this landscape must look completely different.
By 2030, ActivityPub and Webmentions should be the standard way websites communicate with each other, regardless of platform. This should be as simple and ubiquitous as email. When you publish a post on your WordPress site, it should automatically be discoverable by sites running Mastodon, Ghost, Pixelfed, or any ActivityPub-compatible platform. When someone on another site links to your work, you receive a Webmention as naturally as an email notification. This shouldn’t require plugins or expertise. It should simply be how the web works. And when this happens, the workarounds we currently use — POSSE (Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) and PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to Own Site) — become unnecessary. Your own site becomes the hub by default, not through deliberate effort.
For WordPress specifically, microformats2 support must become standard across the majority of themes. Not optional. Not a feature for the technically skilled. Standard. When a theme designer releases their work, microformats2 should be built in, as assumed as responsive design is today.
The corporate platforms face a reckoning. By 2030, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram will have made a choice: embrace ActivityPub and become Fediverse nodes, or collapse under their own toxicity and business model contradictions.
I don’t expect Facebook to evolve willingly. But I expect the cost of refusal to become prohibitive. By 2030, the Fediverse will be large enough that their isolation becomes their weakness rather than their strength.
This may be utopian thinking. But the pieces exist now. The infrastructure is here. What’s required is adoption — a shift in what we collectively accept as normal.
Digital sovereignty isn’t abstract. It’s whether you control your words or a corporation does. Whether your writing remains accessible in 2045 or disappears when a platform shuts down. Whether your reader relationships are yours or belong to an algorithm.
When I started blogging in 2001, I didn’t think about these things explicitly. But I knew instinctively that hosting my own space mattered. By 2017, when I discovered the IndieWeb, I finally had language for what I’d always felt: autonomy isn’t a luxury. It’s fundamental.
The CorpoWeb has spent two decades convincing us otherwise. It’s normalised the idea that convenience is worth surrendering control. That the alternative — a distributed web where you control your corner and communicate across open standards — is too difficult, too lonely, too marginal.
By 2030, this narrative must break. Not because the IndieWeb is perfect. But because the cost of centralisation has become undeniable. Abuse, misinformation, manipulation: these aren’t bugs in the corporate platform model. They’re features. Engagement is maximised by outrage, by isolation, by algorithmic sorting that divides rather than connects.
A distributed web built on open standards isn’t immune to these problems. But it distributes both power and responsibility. You control what appears on your site. You moderate your own space. You choose which communities to join. No algorithm decides for you. No corporation profits from your attention.
This is why these standards matter. They’re not just technical specifications. They’re the infrastructure of autonomy.
If 2030 is to look different, we must act now. Three things are essential.
**First, educate theme designers.** WordPress developers must understand that microformats2 isn’t optional or a nice-to-have. It’s foundational. The IndieWeb community has done good work, but it’s been too quiet, too contained within circles of people who already care. We need louder voices and clearer demonstrations. Theme designers need to see concretely that adding microformats2 support strengthens their themes and makes them compatible with more services and possibilities.
**Second, apply market pressure.** Users must demand this. When you choose a WordPress theme, ask about microformats2 support. When it’s missing, say so. Build alternatives. I started building Cornerstone — available on GitHub — precisely because I wanted a theme designed from the ground up with IndieWeb principles embedded. As more alternatives emerge, the market will shift.
**Third, create corporate pressure.** The CorpoWeb evolves because users demand it or competitors make it economically necessary. By 2030, if the Fediverse has grown large enough, adopting ActivityPub becomes necessary for remaining relevant.
None of this happens without builders. People willing to create alternatives and insist that another web is possible. The IndieWeb community is full of such people. But we’re still too small. By 2030, we must grow.
I’ve waited twenty-four years for the web to become what I always believed it should be. I’ve watched centralisation triumph and autonomy become a privilege. But I’ve also watched the IndieWeb emerge and prove that distributed alternatives work.
Five years is both short and sufficient. Short enough that 2030 should be recognisable from where we stand. Sufficient time for new themes to be built and conversations to shift from marginal to mainstream.
I don’t know if 2030 will look as I hope. But I know what’s possible. And I know that we — the builders, the bloggers, the people who care — have the power to make it real.
The question isn’t whether it’s possible. It’s whether we choose it.
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_This post is a submission to theIndieWeb Carnival December 2025, responding to the prompt: where do you see the IndieWeb in 2030?_
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