"DNI"s on the indie web (and in general) are stupid (sorry)

24 May, 2025

this is not a dig at anyone in particular, and i mean that.

every now and then, i come across a website in which someone has plastered a big fat list of the types of people they don't want to view or interact with their website; a dni.

skip the yap and read the tl;dr

what is a dni?

to anyone not in the know: a dni is, as i said, a little list of the types of people someone doesn't want to interact with them. it's widely used on social medias like tumblr, twitter, and instagram. i'll use a picture of one of my old dnis from years ago as an example.

yes i was being 100% serious when i wrote this yes i was an enstarrie fuck my life

this is a decent example (i guess) of a dni. most dnis out there will look (somewhat) similar, always having general groups of people, along with some members of their fandoms that they don't want to follow them. it's fine to set boundaries, but my issues with them are too difficult to ignore.

you don't need a dni

if you're online and want to set a boundary, the first thing you should do is block people. period. you will be amazed how well that works. blocking people who you don't like or people that post things you don't like will show less of the stuff you dislike on your feed. you don't need to make a public, arbitrary list of things and people you don't like when you can just erase them from your side of the internet with (usually) one button. most popular social media sites also give you the option to hide certain keywords or hashtags, further preventing you from seeing those things you don't like. curating your own online experience is key to enjoying yourself, and that's something i've learned over the years.

people don't follow them anyway

what i've noticed over my years on places like kinstagram and tumblr spaces for my favorite fandoms is that people rarely ever read dnis. quite a bit of the time, people only have them on their profiles or hidden in rentries and carrds, which people aren't going to look at the second they see something you post. they could like and repost without even reading your dni, and while you assume they're breaking a boundary, it's way more likely that they didn't even look at your profile, and thus didn't see your dni. that isn't a spiteful move on their part, people shouldn't have to worry about if their constantly breaking people's boundaries just by liking a post.

and there are accounts that put their dnis on their posts, on tumblr especially, but people aren't obligated to follow them. more often than not, people will just reblog things they like, not even caring about the dni criteria plastered all over it. if people like something you create, they're going to want to show other people or spread it around, that's just life. you can't control who does or doesn't view your work unless you yourself put in the effort to prevent them from seeing it.

and that says nothing of the effect these types of posts have on the people that do read them. by putting your dni in every single post you make, you're possibly making those that do repost your work look like they agree with your criteria. maybe it's just me, but i never reblog or interact with posts with dni criteria on them, even if i don't fit them and could feasibly interact with the poster. it feels very self-centered in a way, like i'm broadcasting this one specific person's dni criteria to my entire followerbase because i wanted to reblog a drawing they posted.

the dnis people write are so... strange

this section is just personal nitpicks but dni culture is so stupid. what even is "basic criteria" anymore? it used to mean a smorgasbord of things—bigots, terfs, and generally harmful people—but it's been twisted so much that it has lost all meaning. so many people have their own opinions on what "basic criteria" is, adding things like lesboys, "toothpaste flag users", comshippers, and other generally stupid discourse.¹

and even outside of the issue of "basic criteria", some of the dnis people write are just.. well, duh. the amount of people i see with nazis and groomers on their dnis drive me insane, like obviously no one but other nazis and groomers want them to interact with them. and then there's the plethora of dnis that sandwich terms like those next to very unimportant and nothingburger things, like someone putting "dni bigots, vriska is your favorite homestuck character, and holocaust deniers". this makes NO type of sense to me, what is the point of putting these things next to each other? one of those things is not even an actual issue compared to the other two, like i'm sorry but would talking to a vriska fan kill you. genuinely.

what the fuck does any of this have to do with the indie web???

to me, it is just nonsensical that people put dnis on their websites. like it feels a bit.. strange to gatekeep your website from certain groups because you have problems with them. unlike social media, you can't just block people and prevent them from viewing your website², so there's no real way to filter out the people you don't like. there's no point in having a dni, anyone with an internet connection and free reign of the internet can look at your website. the wide sphere of the indie web and much of the internet in general relies on an honor system, you really just have to trust that unsavory people aren't on your website. it does suck somewhat, but it's a trade-off of having complete reign over a part of the internet.

by putting a dni on your website, you're essentially telling everyone what type of person you are: exclusionary. regardless if you think of yourself in that way or not, the fact of the matter is that when it comes to dnis, most of the time they aren't for the safety or well-being of the person on the other side of the screen and are just there to give the person creating it a false sense of security. like i said before, you can't control who views your website. i don't apply this disdain toward dnis to adult websites or the like because of the law; being an asshole online (mostly) isn't illegal, but showing underage people porn is. there's a difference between following legal guidelines and telling people to fuck off because of fandom drama.

and that paragraph might sound like i'm downplaying things like bigotry, dumbing them down as just general assholery, but i hate these assholes just as much as the next guy and i'd be damned if they wandered onto my website without my knowledge. that's the thing, though: without my knowledge. you don't know exactly who every single person is that's ever viewed your website, several people that you might not want to be on there have probably seen it. the whole kiwifarms/nekoweb debacle is a good example of this; a bunch of ableist, racist dicks found nekoweb and one (or a few) took it upon themselves to leave disgusting remarks on people's pages. who knows how many of those people saw the websites hosted on nekoweb? we can't know, and probably never will. we can't control who shows up on our sites, and having a big fat dni isn't going to stop anyone.

excuse me for the word vomit, coherence isn't my middle name and neither is consistency or succinct writing. every time i do a huge write-up like this, i always write too much and sometimes double back on things i've said.

TL;DR

no one reads dnis, no one follows dnis, and it'll be a cold day in hell when someone follows a dni on a website.