Hardcore IndieWeb fully embraces existing IndieWeb principles; there’s really nothing new or different there. The key aspects of Hardcore IndieWeb are control over your content and portability of your website:

• If your content doesn’t primarily exist on your own hard drive, you don’t fully control your content.
• If you don’t have a copy of your published HTML and web assets on your own hard drive, it’s not truly portable.

“Did I just read 2,500 words that tell me to write my own HTML and upload it to a web server?” Yeah. You did.
If this seems like ridiculous advice in 2026, I think that’s largely the result of how we’ve strayed so far from the original simplicity we had when working with the web.

Yes indeed.