The indie web, it’s these thousands of websites delivering millions of pages, built up with passion, opinions and information by Net users assuming their rights as citizens. The indie web is a new type of link between people, it’s a free and open space of shared knowledge where vanity has no place.

While commercial websites display more and more agressive messages, target and track their users, the indie web respects the individuals, their intelligence and their privacy; it’s an open forum for thoughts and debate. While purely commercial websites turn into information and entertainment magazines, while tycoons of media, telecom, computing and military agencies fight for the control of the Internet, the indie web offers a free vision of the world, bypasses the economic censorship of news, its confusion with advertising and infommercial, its reduction to a dazing and manipulating entertainment.

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Let me take you through a story on what it feels like to be isolated from the world, not by choice, but rather, by force. This is a story of discrimination, of monopoly, of people shrugging to these issues and of utterances that affect lives of millions.

Living in Iran, or any sanctioned country for that matter, you learn to read “anyone, anywhere” with an appendix of “except you”. You soon learn “worldwide shipping” excludes you, that’s when you start wondering, are you not living in “the world”? Where is this “world” they talk about?

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This, in part, is caused by the global monopoly of American companies such as Google, Amazon, GitHub and alike in their respective fields. This means if The United States decides to pressure a specific target, the target population is likely to be left without much of an alternative or option, since a great proportion of the land is covered by American companies.

Iranian users rely heavily on use of VPN services and proxy servers to bypass censorship, but now with most Cloud Providers blocking access of Iranians, we are left with limited, usually more expensive options for setting up these servers.

Mahdi Dibaiee