Appropriate all the good values and ideas from https://indieweb.org/, re-heat it add some feel-good word salad and we have this "Small Web".
Yes, by all means let's get back to a more decentralized and distributed web. But providing a service where you are still hosting your site on someone else's servers and on someone else's domain and calling for values is just digital green-washing.
Not to mention how IndieWeb sites already provide way more interoperability than any of these site.js things, while not being beholden to a single stack with a single design philosophy (or an asinine requirement that every site be run as a single tenant on a dedicated server).
Plus, some of us already have post privacy, allowing access via other IndieWeb identities -- as well as making the allowances for people to log in without having to run their own damn website.
IndieWeb principles are based on modularity, communication, community, and compassion. None of those are things I'm getting from Aral's latest vanity project.
... and forget to mention Indieweb. Another all-in-one solution compatible with Indieweb and Fediverse tech, with optional hosting as a service, would be a great project to that goal, and an addition to the ecosystems. But no, has to be its own thing.
It makes no sense to turn this into a purity contest. "a company once provided a room for an event", "they provide service credits for all open-source projects that apply" or something like that does not invalidate a movement. In the same way that I don't support going through the sponsor lists of the events Aral talks at to call him a hypocrite - as long as it is peripheral it's sometimes hard to avoid and sometimes very useful support you can grab without any commitments.
If this was a mistake and they have changed their mind, sure. If not, (even when warned) it shows they don't have any principles, You won't catch Richard Stallman or anyone rightfully for privacy rights at such an event would you?
I would definitely be suspect and would actively call out privacy conferences being hosted and invited by surveillance capitalists.
You seem to be under the impression that IndieWeb is a formalized organization where the people operating under its banner are being paid by said organization.
In reality it's a set of shared goals, which a lot of the people disagree on facets of implementation and the like, and a collection of generally-agreed-to protocols that people can choose to support as part of interoperability with other websites.
I am fairly active in IndieWeb spaces and I disagree with others in these spaces all the time. I've also certainly never accepted any Google money (or any other sponsor) for my contributions, not that it's even been offered. This is the first I'm hearing of "us" being sponsored by Google.
I've seen plenty of material support from Mozilla (because there are several Mozillians involved in the projects) and Okta (for the same reason). But those aren't in any way signs that those companies are steering the decisions being made -- they're just offering things like hosting rooms and providing food at our mini-conferences and providing t-shirts and whatever (and those t-shirts, as far as I know, never have any sponsor logos on them).
Also, we take a more user-centric view of things; while we'd all like people to be on their own self-hosted websites and free of the big social networks and so on, we understand that it's not realistic to just ask everyone to jump ship all at once, and running your own web presence is not what most people want to do. It's much better to build bridges so that people can connect in whatever way works for them, and that's why there are services like brid.gy and so on which people run out of the kindness of their hearts, and paid services like micro.blog that try to make it easier for people to dive in without having to Do All The Things, and people who work on IndieWeb integrations for Wordpress and so on.
And I'm very grateful for things like brid.gy; most of the comments/responses I get on my website come in through that, via people on Twitter and Mastodon and occasionally Reddit. Sometimes I get webmentions from other IndieWeb users, but they're the vast minority. And same goes for private-post logins; most people log in via Twitter or Mastodon, and a bunch use my email-based login mechanism as well, and very few actually log in via IndieAuth. If I were to restrict my interactions to pure IndieWeb I'd have a very lonely presence.
Quick, let's drop every open source project that had any kind of contribution from Google because every thing done by a trillion-dollar company does is evil and mere relationship with them implies you are compromised.
Yes, by all means let's get back to a more decentralized and distributed web. But providing a service where you are still hosting your site on someone else's servers and on someone else's domain and calling for values is just digital green-washing.