I found about V.H. Belvadi’s IndieWeb Carnival on friction from Manuel Moreale’s IndieWeb Carnival: On the importance of friction. I have some thoughts on the topic, so I decided to write my entry.
I’m not very involved with indie web. I have been blogging since 2010, and it’s always been a hobby for me. Reading wise, I do not actively seek small blogs. There are several in my RSS reader, but most of them surfaced on the orange site. Then the all social media decided to blow up one after another, and I quit most of it. These days, I find new and interesting blogs on Mastadon or Lobsters.
Back to our topic, when I think about friction, I imagine it as anything that comes between a user and their intended result. If we take that definition, the corporate web is the very definition of friction. It’s supposed to be a straightforward experience that’s supposed to suck us in and keep us engaged. But does it?
Friction is the reason Every F*cking Bootstrap Website Ever exists and feels relevant. That website is an amalgamation of every mid to large size company’s web presence. And that’s not frictionless. You have newsletter popups, cookie popups and paywalls everywhere!
Even large services, where user retention is supposed to be paramount, there’s a conflict of priorities. You have ads, and no one likes them. At best, they’re tolerated. Services want you to stay on the page, but they also want to show you ads. And these ads are friction. You’re there for entertainment, or connecting with someone. These bumps along the way are the friction preventing you from accomplishing what you set out to do!
On Google, the sponsored results dominate the top spots. And many times, they are not what you’re searching for! There’ll be a competitor’s ad on top instead of the website or service you were looking for. Parasitic SEO was a thing until recent Google changes, where big websites just displaced small websites with legitimate research by spamming product reviews!
On YouTube, 2 out of the first 6 videos are ads. If you don’t pay for Premium, you’ll get 2–3 ads before you even see the video you wanted to. And then the YouTuber will have their sponsors. Build your website with Squarespace, first protect your privacy with SharkVPN, then remove your private data with Incogni once it’s out there!
Your scrolling on Instagram/Tiktok will be interrupted by ads after every few scrolls. You may have trained yourself to skip, but the interruption is there nonetheless.
Want to read something? You’ll be greeted with paywalls or newsletter popups on almost every big website. Even sites like Medium and Substack, where reading is the primary purpose, you can’t read much without being interrupted.
Now look at indie web. A personal blog is most likely to not have any of this friction. You can go read the content, maybe see a newsletter box at the end and that’s it. You don’t have to be engaged by clicking an “expand article” or “read more” link. You don’t have to see a popup the moment your mouse leaves the window. Isn’t that less friction than most websites?
I guess what I want to say with these examples is that frictionless is, at best, a middle ground for any service out there. Until there’s someone else paying for the service, it’ll be frictionless. Once that stops, friction will seep in. That’s how these websites make money.
And that’s why, in my opinion, small web is so wonderful. Even drowning in the sea of AI slop, you’ll find people writing about things they care about. And they don’t have to add friction anywhere.
I don’t know if it’s sustainable. It probably means this frictionless experience will stay small. We can’t sustain millions of users this way. Mastodon shows that we can. It requires some community support, but it works. There will always be space for small blogs to exist without friction, and that is the real frictionless web.