That is the top of the influential XOXO pageant for web creators

Although I’d heard this XOXO pageant could be the final one, many individuals I spoke to appeared to not imagine it. I used to be advised by earlier attendees that pageant organizers Andy Baio and Andy McMillan — affectionately referred to as “the Andys” — “all the time say that.” However from the pageant’s starting, it additionally appeared clear that the Andys didn’t plan to do that endlessly.

Anyway, this 12 months’s XOXO felt like an Irish wake to me. It was like we had all gathered over the physique of a selected interval on the web to pay our respects.

XOXO started in 2012, born on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, the place Baio labored. The essential thought was to have fun “disruptive creativity” — that’s, to take all of the artists who make a dwelling on-line and produce them along with technologists. Kickstarter was a part of this: a spot for individuals to fund their inventive tasks with out having to, say, pitch VCs or impress an A&R man. On the time, the concept was that the web would make it doable for individuals to make a dwelling with out the compromises made by company tradition. My former colleague Casey Newton attended in 2014 and wrote of the pageant, “It’s a spot the place the concepts are harmful, the place tradition issues, and the place artwork, not commerce, lies on the heart of the whole lot.”

Ten years after Casey’s go to, I attended for the primary time. The pageant, held at Revolution Corridor in Portland, Oregon, appeared to have been stripped to the minimal viable product. It was shorter than earlier iterations, and the murals, rental drones, rock concert events, and different goodies from a decade in the past had been nowhere to be seen. However then 2024 is a worse time for impartial creators than 2014 was. 

“There simply grew to become a better and better understanding over time that platforms will not be your pal,” Baio says, in an interview after the pageant. “They’re your companions however they’re uncomfortable companions, and the extra you depend on them, the extra in danger you’re, that they’re going to change or shift in some uncomfortable means.”

These shifts affected XOXO, too. The pageant had scaled down as a result of there have been fewer sponsors. The tech firms that had been vital for the creator financial system stopped spending cash on impartial occasions like XOXO. As an alternative, they centered on their very own occasions, which they may management. “Within the final 5 years they’ve reduce their, I assume, advertising budgets,” Baio says. “They’ve tightened their belts.” 

Nonetheless, it was mainly a celebration. There have been massive outside tents, tabletop video games, two days’ value of programming and hangouts, karaoke — The Verge’s Sarah Jeong did “Enter Sandman” — and loads of food and drinks. Darius Kazemi, an web artist, attended each pageant besides the primary and advised me that this last one was his favourite. “I do suppose smaller occasions are higher, typically,” Kazemi says. “They’re extra productive when it comes to making good dialog and emotional connections with individuals, that sort of factor.”

Plus, the one monitor of talks meant that each one attendees had been centered on the identical issues. On Friday, there was an “Indie Media Circus,” that includes talks by 404 Media, Casey, now of Platformer, and Ryan Broderick of Rubbish Day. An “Artwork and Code” part featured the work of indie artists, comparable to Julia Evans of Wizard Zines, Teresa Ibarra of “Analyzing my textual content messages with my ex-boyfriend,” and Shelby Wilson of The HTML Assessment.

The evenings featured new and upcoming video video games comparable to Time Flies — a standout amongst my associates — Despelote, and XOXO custom Johann Sebastian Joust, a no-graphics recreation that entails shifting in time to the Brandenburg Concertos. There was a tabletop night as effectively, which I missed as a result of I used to be at a celebration thrown by The Verge, the place, as soon as once more, I obtained drunk with Casey.

If this all appears fairly dorky, that’s proper. XOXO is a gathering of the terminally on-line, a lot of whom met one another on Twitter. One recurring punchline all through the 2 days of talks was that every time somebody wished to evoke platform degradation, a photograph of Elon Musk would flash up of their slides. “What difficulties have elevated for us within the final 5 years?” says McMillan. “It’s all stuff to do with fucking Elon.”

“Properly, not all of it,” Baio says.

“It actually hasn’t helped issues,” McMillan says.

“It’s so agonizing to have one thing that’s just like the connective thread between a group go away,” Baio says. 

Early on, XOXO was known as a “assembly of the mutuals,” as in individuals who adopted one another on Twitter. However when Musk took over the platform and commenced shredding it, it meant many customers peeled off to Bluesky, Mastodon, and “darkish social” areas on Slack and Discord.

XOXO initially got here into being as a response to the commodification of festivals that had as soon as been about oddballs — like South By Southwest. Step by step, these occasions had been swamped with advertising sorts, pushing out the weirdos who’d made the festivals attention-grabbing within the first place. Attendance at this 12 months’s XOXO was capped at 1,000 paying attendees, and there was a lottery system for getting in. However to even make it into the lottery, you needed to fill out a questionnaire that the Andys reviewed. They prioritized the individuals who would make the pageant attention-grabbing.

After the primary 12 months, “all these individuals confirmed up in our inbox and had been like, ‘How can we do some like, stealth advertising activation, no matter bullshit,’” McMillan says. He careworn that the purpose of the lottery was to not choose whether or not individuals had been cool sufficient to return — “we’re two of the least cool individuals on the planet, sorry” — however moderately, whether or not they had been members of the group that the pageant was constructed round. “Anybody who’s silly sufficient to say, ‘I like crypto, it’s my whole being, I need to come right here and speak about crypto an entire bunch,’ okay, nice, you’re going to hate it,” McMillan says. “You’re not going to get prioritized within the lottery fairly a lot.”

Even the identify is a means of choosing for attendees. In the event you’re the sort of one who will get turned off by a pageant named, functionally, “hugs and kisses,” you aren’t going to use.

When XOXO started, Playing cards In opposition to Humanity had emerged as a megahit from a Kickstarter marketing campaign. (Max Temkin, CAH’s creator, was banned from the pageant in 2014, after allegations of sexual assault got here to gentle.) However as time wore on, the challenges of attempting to make a dwelling as an indie creator more and more grew to become a pageant focus.

In 2014, Kazemi’s speak about successful the inventive lottery was one of many pageant’s breakout hits. In it, Kazemi spoofed the archetype of talks given by profitable inventive individuals and steered it was extra vital to proceed rigorously creating (that’s, “shopping for extra lottery tickets”) than attempting to strategize round the way to choose the fitting numbers.

In his most up-to-date speak, Kazemi revisited his 2014 themes. He’d give up his job, moved to Portland, and begun dwelling the indie dream. Besides, it turned out, dwelling the indie dream simply meant completely different issues. Kazemi described turning into a landlord as a part of staying afloat and likewise famous that his output of inventive tasks had declined relative to 10 years in the past. Different creators make different compromises — podcasters doing advert reads for less-than-savory firms, as an illustration — as a way to proceed making issues.

The Andys advised me that they’d deliberate to make 2020 the final pageant — however their plans had been interrupted by covid-19. “We did make the choice in 2019,” says McMillan. “We had been like, ‘I feel we now have yet one more left in us.’” This last pageant, 5 years after the final one, was attending to unfinished enterprise. However the Andys need you to know: XOXO is over. “We aren’t coming again subsequent 12 months,” McMillan says. “That was the top of XO.”

Persons are nonetheless making impartial tasks, utilizing assets as solely the web can. Erin Kissane, as an illustration, talked about processing covid knowledge with the Covid Monitoring Undertaking. Molly White mentioned “Web3 is Going Simply Nice,” the timeline of varied crypto crises. Kazemi’s work at Tiny Subversions has concerned a fork of Mastodon and instructing individuals the way to run their very own social media websites.

It wouldn’t shock me — or for that matter, the Andys — if this group of individuals had been to create spinoff get-togethers from connections made at XOXO; it’s a tightly knit group. “I’ve been considering loads about Darius, like his speak asks, ‘What’s subsequent? What are we going to do subsequent?’” McMillan says. He doesn’t have a solution, and he doesn’t anticipate to be accountable for no matter it’s. “That’s vital to consider, and answering that query within the not-too-distant future might be vital.”

Replace and correction, September eleventh: Provides that Max Tempkin of Playing cards In opposition to Humanity was banned from XOXO in 2014. Corrects quotes concerning the lottery incorrectly attributed to Baio — McMillan was the individual within the joint interview who mentioned them.