What Influenced my IndieWeb Carnival theme in April 2024? #
Context #
Firstly what is the IndieWeb Carnival? It is a wonderful monthly merry-go-round of different hosts putting forward a theme, and contributors making and submitting a blog post on their site relating to the theme. It's wonderful way to experience a sense of community, contribution and collaboration. You can find out all about the IndieWeb Carnival and I would use this post as a point of encouragement to anyone reading to consider making submissions to it! It is an excellent way to get yourself out there and to meet new people!
Earlier this year, I had a wonderful and short interview with Zach over the different things that influenced my Indie Web Carnival theme in April 2024. This is part of a series of interviews Zach has done with other Indie Web Carnival theme hosts, and you can find those all here. Additionally, you can find my Indie Web Carnival post theme announcement here, and the roundup featuring all the fantastic blog posts here.
The Interview #
- What drew you to this theme?
I suppose on some level I am impressionable. At the time I had seen quite a lot on both the subject of quality dropping within the field of software programming and in related areas. The specific talk that led me to this line of thought and inspired at least one of the points in my original article(The Lycurgus Cup and its relation to the loss of knowledge in materials science) was one by Jonathan Blow, Preventing the Collapse of Civilization https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko . At the time, I was very negative about the state of software development and software quality. I believe and I still stand by my points in it, that a lot of code is left in Javascript, unoptimised, and is bad. A lot of the designs are often unoptimised and give a harmful user experience.
Part of what pushed me to host the Indieweb Carnival in April of 2024 is a few emails from foreverliketh.is. I'll quote my message from our emails verbatim:
I've thought about my theme and it'll be
> "Good Enough" - The Drop in Quality's siren call
I know we discussed it before, but I think this is a subject that fits easily enough into meta art discussions, the states of different industries, the state of public attitudes, historical collapses of different civilizations, and selection pressures. There's probably a lot more different ways to talk about it, and probably reversals on the idea "When good enough really is good enough" and the like. The main thing I want, is for it to be an open theme not just in the domain discussed but in the way they talk about it.
- Did you consider any other prompts before settling?
There is a saying in programming. "When I wrote this code, only I and God knew. Now only God knows". This absolutely applies here. I have nothing in my wiki or in my email correspondences on what other themes I had considered.
- How did you decide on your prompt's wording?
So one thing I do know about my prompt as seen before in my emails is that I was consciously thinking about different ways a theme can be taken. The title of my article for this theme was "The Drop in Quality's siren call", while the theme was "Good Enough". I think designing the prompt to be something that could be taken in many different ways was the correct choice. Another thing is I wanted my theme to allow for both optimistic and pessimistic expression, as well as wide applicability and I believe I demonstrated that in my own article as it talks about the drop in quality and the loss of knowledge over time due to complexity.
- Did hosting change how you think about the theme?
Yes. One thing I was very surprised by was the sheer number of optimistic blog posts on the subject! I have always been a pretty glass half-empty sort of fellow, and I've been making a good effort lately to be... I'm gonna say on the more optimistic side of pragmatic. I would say the thing it changed my mind most about wasn't actually the theme, but rather it changed my mind on how insular and lonely the internet is. Regarding my original opinions I still somewhat hold a negative stance, but I try to be optimistic on it. I feel like the wide introduction of LLMs has negatively affected the quality of all sorts though.
- Did the submissions surprise you in any way?
I would say, it surprised me in the number of blog post submissions I got. Getting close to an email a day, some days 2, was very inspiring and motivating made me felt in some ways seen. I feel like that "feeling seen" part is quite common with the internet and personal websites actually, as most personal websites don't have tracking(and if they do, usually easily blocked tracking). I had felt that outside of forums and social media, the internet was a very lonely and very insular sort of environment. Aside from that, I would also say the creative directions people took the theme. Some took it to talk about their website's quality, others took it to talk about work, some took it to talk about keeping things simpler and good enough, while others used it to talk about the state of the world or spiritually how it feels to accept in calmness things aren't perfect which was also nicely contrasted by someone making a blog post on it being a quest for perfection.
Another thing that surprised me was the multi-lingual nature of it all! I hadn't expected to get Spanish or Italian submissions for what is a primarily English-dominated area of the internet, but it also helped make me feel like everyone has their own paths in life.
While it's not part of the questions, one of the other things that really surprised me was the level of trust I was given in hosting this, and making it a good experience for all involved. I suppose one of the things the internet does great, is cultivating a lot of low-trust environments, so it was very pleasant to be on the receiving end of this sort of trust. Relating to that, I do wonder and fear that LLMs will only accelerate how low-trust it is. I recall reading one of Andrei.xyz's blog posts on the subject where he completely cut himself off from others who've use AI to generate their blog posts. I completely understand this stance. Since then, I'd been browsing hackernews and reading blog posts on it quite often, and some of them... you realise it is AI generated after a paragraph or two and my goodness, I glaze over it and completely skip it. "AI generated" is what I think to it, and I'm probably right to skip it. Doesn't help hackernews is very pro-AI.
Overall, I have to say this was absolutely an incredibly positive and uplifting experience for me, and I am very grateful, first to foreverliketh.is for pushing me towards doing this, and the rest of the Indie Web community for supporting and entrusting me with doing it!
Conclusion #
Well there you have it, what influenced my Indie Web Carnival April 2024 theme! Thanks Zach for sending in the questions!
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Published on 2026/09/28
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