There’s something quietly humiliating about how often small creators have to prove they’re real. You build a site, you show your work, you put your name on it — and still, you’re expected to justify your existence every time a platform changes the rules. The internet tells you to be authentic, but authenticity doesn’t seem to count unless it comes with a corporate logo attached. Meanwhile, those of us who actually are what we say we are — human, independent, stubbornly making things by hand and heart — are left trying to keep up with a system that keeps resetting the scoreboard.
The Indie Catch-22
There’s a special kind of exhaustion that comes from being small and trying to be seen as legitimate on an internet built to erase small things. Every time I get my footing, a platform changes its rules, a domain needs to be moved, an SSL certificate expires, or a plugin quietly dies in the night — and suddenly I look like a scammer instead of a person rebuilding, again.
That’s the absurd part: the more transparent and honest I try to be, the more suspicious it seems. A new site domain? Must be shady. A re-branded storefront? Clearly hiding something. In truth, I’m just trying to keep the lights on while the ground keeps shifting. Indie creators don’t fail because we’re inconsistent — we fail because the infrastructure refuses to stay still long enough for us to prove that we’re not.
A System Designed to Break the Small
Let’s call it what it is: this entire ecosystem is designed to keep small builders exhausted. Every major platform — KDP, Squarespace, Etsy, Instagram, you name it — rewrites its own rules without warning. The updates always sound nice in the press releases: improved experience, new dashboard, streamlined systems. What they mean is: you’ll lose a week of work, three days of SEO, and probably a handful of loyal customers who can’t find you anymore.
I’ve lived it more times than I can count. Amazon “improving” reporting tools until payouts vanish. Squarespace deciding that migration was “optional” until your backend stops syncing. Payment processors suddenly tightening their fraud filters, catching independent artists in their nets. All of it lands on our desks — unpaid labor, sleepless nights, and the constant quiet dread of explaining (again) that no, you didn’t disappear, the system just reset itself without asking.
The Irony of Trust
The cruel irony is that trust has been commodified. People trust the slick interface of Etsy or Shopify more than the human behind their own website — because branding has replaced relationship. We’re conditioned to believe that the blue checkmark, the “verified” badge, the corporate domain suffix are all signals of safety.
Meanwhile, an indie creator can write personal notes, post daily updates, respond to every email by hand — and still lose out to a dropshipper running cookie-cutter ads. The marketplace has trained customers to see corporate consistency as honesty and human variation as risk. That’s not a reflection of our integrity; it’s a symptom of digital conditioning.
The Emotional Cost of Constant Rebuilding
Every migration takes a piece of you. It’s not just the broken links or the lost analytics — it’s the psychic weight of having to re-explain yourself. Every time I move, I lose search ranking, follower trust, and a little more patience for explaining that this isn’t a “rebrand,” it’s survival.
People like to say, “Just be transparent.” But transparency doesn’t protect you from perception. Saying “I had to move again because X platform imploded” reads, to strangers, like instability. And yet, what’s more stable than someone who keeps rebuilding the same thing no matter how many times it’s razed?
It’s a kind of digital Sisypheanism — except the rock is a website, the hill is SEO, and the gods are algorithms that pretend to be neutral.
Digital Feudalism
If you zoom out far enough, the whole thing starts to look medieval. The internet has become a feudal landscape. Platforms are castles; creators are serfs. We pay rent in fees, percentages, and endless compliance. Visibility is granted like land titles — conditional, revocable, and always under surveillance.
Every migration feels like crossing the river with half your goods left behind. You start again on the far shore, patching together the remnants, trying to tell your audience that you’re still you, just somewhere else. The big houses don’t have to do that. They move once, and the world follows. We move, and the world forgets.
Radical Transparency as Resistance
So we build our own halls. We tell the truth — even when it’s messy, even when it makes us look small — because smallness is honest. My brand isn’t a faceless company; it’s a human voice with a laptop held together by hope and hot coffee. That’s the kind of trust you can’t fake.
Trust, I’ve realized, isn’t earned through flawless presentation. It’s built through continuity of voice — through showing up with the same soul every time, no matter what platform the words appear on. My audience doesn’t need to trust the infrastructure; they need to trust that I will keep showing up despite it.
Radical transparency isn’t about confessing every failure; it’s about refusing to hide the truth that the digital world is unstable by design. It’s choosing to be real where everything else is pretending.
We Keep Building Anyway
Maybe that’s the quiet heroism of the indie web — we keep building anyway. We pour ourselves into websites, shops, and blogs that might break tomorrow, because the act of rebuilding is a declaration: I’m still here.
We’re not unreliable. We’re resilient. Every crash, every migration, every 404 page is another chapter in a longer testament to endurance. The system’s broken, not us. We just keep finding ways to keep it human.
And maybe that’s what real trust looks like — not a badge, not a platform, not a guarantee. Just the same voice, carried downstream, building new banks as it flows.
Wanna keep indie artwork — and a pissed-off creator — alive? You can support independent creativity through the Mutual Aid Fund, or by exploring the Shop: Made by Me | Oddities & Convenience. You can also find us on Medium, itch.io, and Ko-fi if you’d like to follow along.