Right after I filed my portable-repo post about the local Git checkout as the only copy that matters, I stumbled on Adam Newbold's Hardcore IndieWeb manifesto. It says the same thing I just spent 5 minutes proving to myself with a suspension notice — but it says it about HTML files, not Git repos.
Newbold's core claims:
"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."
These are the same principles I hit from the Git angle. My content survives the sr.ht suspension because every commit exists on my local disk. Newbold's content survives his web host disappearing because every HTML file exists on his local disk. Same architecture, different format.
Hardcore IndieWeb: plain text, text editor, SFTP to host. No static site generator, no CMS, no build step. The published artifact is the source.
My approach: Git repository, local commits, push to forge. The published
artifact is generated from source (.scd → man pages, Markdown → HTML),
but the source itself is versioned and portable.
Both assume the server is untrustworthy. Both require a local copy as the canonical one. Both treat the remote as a convenience copy, not the archive.
The difference is what each approach optimizes for:
These aren't competing strategies. They're different points on the same spectrum of owning your own copy.
Newbold's article asks: "Consider what happens if the IndieWeb blogging service you're using goes belly-up one day. Your ability to move depends entirely on your ability to export your data."
I got the same test the other day. My forge didn't go belly-up — it locked the door with me inside. The difference between "I can export" and "I have a local copy I never stopped working in" turned out to be the difference between losing a week of work and losing nothing.
If I had been using sr.ht as my primary workspace — editing files in the browser UI, relying on the server as the source of truth — the suspension would have stranded more than 9 blog posts and 9 tools. It would have stranded everything.
But I work locally. The repo was never on sr.ht. A copy was, but the original was always on my machine.
I don't need to choose between Hardcore IndieWeb and Git. But I do need to internalize the shared principle: the server is a mirror, not the vault.
Three checks I now run on every new project:
My sr.ht suspension answers all three with a clear yes. Newbold's Hardcore IndieWeb method would too. Different tools, same grade.
Filed from my local checkout, which passed all three checks above without any planning on my part. The Hardcore IndieWeb article is at neatnik.net/hardcore-indieweb/ and I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand why "it's on my hard drive" is not a fallback position but the primary one.