The best indie web tools ever were Geocities and Myspace.<p>Of course, now we like things a little more content focused, but the point still stands, what people need is free or cheap cloud hosting with zero sysadmin work, just pure edit some pages and then have people see them, ideally with some builtin web ring type discovery features.<p>Any amount of tech work repels anyone other than the tinkerers who don't mind tech that needs maintenance. Usually that means all the content is just about web tech, specifically how much they hate modern bloated stuff.<p>Also, remember, proboards forums were almost was much of a defining element as personal sites, and were every bit as personal and indie.<p>Give us forums where you can set per-thread and post custom themes, hyperlink between posts, show threads in a one post at a time mode, lock threads to just you and friends, and filter posts in a thread by tag, and you're probably most of the way there to an accessible indie web.<p>Markdown + CSS is probably enough for almost all users.<p>Add the ability to import and export threads and move them to another server if needed, and<p>If you want interactive content, provide some sandboxed prefab options, like a Gameboy emulator you can make roms for on GB studio and attach to posts, or just give every use a subdomain for arbitrary files they can put into iframes, GitHub.io style.<p>The sandbox attribute is in 98% of browsers, maybe there's a way to just block the other 2% from seeing iframes, to be fully safe.