Full disclosure: I'm a long time supporter of this project (plus long time friend of Aral, the founder, aswell).
So in short I guess what eventually Indie's end goal is is being the dual of Apple. Whereas Apple's business model is based upon making user friendly software and devices in a closed ecosystem, Indie wants to do the same by doing this in a open ecosystem, using open tools and basically operating completely in the open, to the point that everything which is going to be produced will be free (as in free speech) from day one.
Another goal of Indie is to break the hegemony of Google and Facebook (and the startups that (want to) follow in their footsteps). The reasoning behind is is that these companies operate in a way that seriously undermine, dare I say destroy, human rights and democracy. Whilst Indie is aware that these problems cannot be tackled with technology alone, there's room for some fresh thinking and alternatives. That there's room for technology which respects the user, not only from a user experience perspective, but also from a human rights perspective. The first of these alternatives, Heartbeat - which is aiming to become a free (as in speech) and open, well designed, fully distributed social network is to be launched next year.
I hope this gives a better idea about what Indie is trying to accomplish. For some more background information see Aral's talk "I, Simulation" http://vimeo.com/106681730 and/or the transcripts and videos from the first get together: https://ind.ie/about/summit/
Or just ask away here, I'll try to answer them while Aral is out in the UK celebrating his birthday :)
(A small note beforehand: feel free to write any reasoned criticism about Indie or its ideas if you would like to do so. However, due to the rather "radical" rationale behind Indie recently some not-to-be named people thought it was best to let their criticism known by verbally assaulting members of the Indie team via email and/or other forms of communication, even going as far as doing some nasty tactics popular with the 4chan crowd (if you get my drift). I'm open to having (serious) discussion about (the rationale behind) Indie, but if we head into that area it's pretty safe to say discussion will be over.)
You wrote a lot. And sadly my criticism is exactly about that:
I'm still unclear what you wish to achieve. And that's not even the criticism, that's a statement of fact. I don't understand what you're doing. You have an elevator pitch that's 5 minutes long.
And i'm a highly active open source developer who spends a lot of his time contributing to dogma-free projects that practically anyone can and does do whatever with (CPAN).
Now consider how far you're gonna get with your average person if you can't make me understand. That said, if you're interested in chatting, i'll happily give you mind dumps. You can find me on the original free social network: IRC, specifically freenode or irc.perl.org under the same name has here. :)
