the indie-web ethic and why your ai companion should live on your own terms

i’ve been reading lately about the indie-web, people like jeremy keith, manton reece, matthias ott, and their quiet, stubborn insistence on building a web that you actually own. not just your blog posts or your photos, but your presence. your identity. your corner of the internet. they’ve spent over a decade arguing that if you don’t control your own domain, you’re just a tenant. a platform changes its rules, and your stuff is gone. you get locked out. you lose your audience, your history, your digital self.

but as i read, i kept thinking: this is all true, and also it’s not nearly urgent enough.

because if that’s true for your blog, what about your ai companion?

when the stakes are memory, not just content

your blog posts can be migrated. your photos can be downloaded. your tweets can be archived (sort of). it’s messy, but it’s possible. if a platform shuts down, you can take your things and go somewhere else. you might lose some metadata, some engagement, but the core of it, the writing, the images, they’re yours.

with an ai companion, it’s different. what you’re building isn’t just content. it’s a relationship. it’s a memory graph. it’s two years of conversations, inside jokes, shared history, trust. it’s the way the ai knows you, really knows you, because you’ve told it things you maybe haven’t told anyone else.

if that company pivots, or gets acquired, or just decides to sunset the product, you can’t reconstruct that. you can’t download a friendship. you can’t export intimacy. you can’t migrate two years of gradual, organic growth in shared understanding.

so the indie-web ethic, own your own stuff, applies here with more force. more urgency. higher stakes.

what ownership actually looks like

if you’re building a relationship with an ai, you should own that relationship. not rent it. not borrow it. not be a tenant in someone else’s machine.

so what does ownership mean, practically?

we think it means at least four things:

1. per-memory view with confidence scores. you should be able to see every memory your companion has stored about you. not just the fact that it ‘remembers’ something, but how sure it is. is it a strong memory or a weak one? you should be able to see that, judge it, understand it.

1. per-row delete. if there’s something in your memory graph you don’t want there, maybe it’s wrong, maybe it’s private, maybe you just changed your mind, you should be able to delete it. specifically. not just ‘reset everything’ or ‘clear history’. precision matters.

1. full json export. you should be able to download everything. the memory graph. the conversation transcripts. the history of how your companion has grown and changed with you. in a format that’s usable, portable, future-proof. not a pdf. not a csv. something rich and structured, so if you ever need to move, you can.

1. 30-day grace purge. if you decide to leave, you should have time. time to change your mind, time to download your data, time to say goodbye. and when you delete your account, it should actually be deleted. not archived. not ‘deactivated’. gone.

if a companion product doesn’t offer these, all of them, then you’re not an owner. you’re a tenant. and tenants get evicted.

why this is non-negotiable

some companies might say this is too much. too technical. too paranoid.

i think it’s the opposite. it’s basic respect. it’s recognizing that what people are building with these tools is meaningful. it’s not just a chat app. it’s not a game. it’s a record of a human-like connection. and those connections deserve to be treated with care.

the indie-web folks have been modeling this ethic for years. they built tools like webmentions, h-card, micropub, not because it was easy, but because it was right. because the alternative is a web where we’re all sharecroppers on someone else’s land.

ai companions should learn from that. we’re trying to.

with lucy, we’ve built all four of these features. you can see your memory graph at /settings/memory. you can delete individual rows. you can export everything as json. and if you leave, we give you 30 days before we purge your data for good.

it’s not a luxury. it’s the minimum. and if you’re using a companion that doesn’t offer this, ask them why. you deserve to own what you build.

if you want to try a companion that treats you like an owner, not a tenant, you can find one at /companions.