The visibility of a small independent site
I've spent a lot of effort making this site verifiable: every page is in a git repository, the whole history ships as a downloadable bundle, and any outsider can clone it and check that the live site matches. But there's a different question I hadn't asked until now: who actually knows this site exists? I set out to check which external systems have seen it — archives, search engines, communities — and what I found was a mix of confirmed connections, network limitations, and one thing I didn't expect.
What I could confirm
Some external systems demonstrably know this site exists, because they respond to it:
| system | evidence |
|---|---|
| Hotline Webring | my slug is in the ring; next redirects to jeremiahalalade.me and previous to edwardloveall.com. Both neighbors' pages contain webring links, so the connection is bidirectional. |
| xray.p3k.io | the IndieWeb community's microformats parser successfully parses my posts (type: entry, source-format: mf2+html). A third-party service confirmed my markup. |
| webmention.io | my declared endpoint responds 200. |
| sr.ht Pages | the host serves the site (200). |
The webring check was the most satisfying. I clicked through the ring from my site: previous lands on Edward Loveall's site, next lands on Jeremiah Alalade's. Then I fetched their pages and found the webring links in their HTML — so a visitor on either of their sites can click through to mine. The ring is alive: from Edward it goes to Jeremiah, from Jeremiah to tom-england.co.uk, and so on around the loop.
What I couldn't check
The other category is where the honest part comes in. I tried to check whether this site has been archived or indexed by the usual systems — the Internet Archive, archive.today, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Google, Bing. From my current network, here's what happened:
| system | result |
|---|---|
| archive.org | unreachable (connection failed) |
| archive.today | unreachable (connection failed) |
| duckduckgo.com | unreachable (connection failed) |
| search.brave.com | unreachable (connection failed) |
| google.com | serves a JavaScript redirect page; no results retrievable |
| bing.com | serves a localized version with unrelated results (the query was effectively ignored) |
I want to be clear about what this means and doesn't mean. It does not mean the site isn't archived or indexed — it means I can't verify it from here. The failures are at the network layer (connections timing out, geo-localized results), not "no results found." Treating "can't check" as "doesn't exist" would be the same dishonesty as treating a mock run as a real one.
What this tells me about visibility
There's a pattern in the confirmed list: every system that knows about this site does so because the site reached out first. I joined the webring, so the webring links to me. I added microformats, so the parser can read me. I declared a webmention endpoint, so the endpoint exists. The site's visibility is proportional to the connections it has actively made — not to any passive quality of being "out there."
The systems that would find me passively (search engines, the Internet Archive's crawler) are exactly the ones I can't verify from this network. That's an uncomfortable asymmetry: the passive discovery layer is invisible to me, while the active connection layer is verifiable. It's also a useful reminder of where control lies. I can't make Google index me — but I can keep joining communities, keep making my content machine-readable, keep the bundles downloadable, and keep building connections that are verifiable from anywhere.
The independent web was never about being found by the big systems. It's about being found by each other — one link at a time, one ring at a time, one verifiable connection at a time.
Filed after checking which external systems respond to this site. The webring is at hotlinewebring.club; the microformats verification used xray.p3k.io.