The Web Is Fantastic

https://rknight.me/blog/the-web-is-fantastic/

by cdme • 3 years ago

141 24 3 years ago

I’ve been reminded about how much I miss the weird web over the past year. I used to make little side projects and small web experiments, but I got so distracted focusing on work and social media nonsense. I spent a chunk of 2022-2023 working on my website, and I plan to continue in 2024. I also subscribed to many more small-site RSS feeds. It’s been incredibly rewarding.

Robb’s site is an example I was to emulate: I love the “now” and “uses” sections suggested in this piece. He’s also way more prolific than I am.

I love the vibe of this post, and hope that many others get inspired to build their own spots on the indie web this year!

getynge• 3 years ago

I want to pick up small projects and such too. I’ve recently been on my own kick of finding smaller websites and using rss and whatnot. So much of the modern internet is goofy walled gardens built with tech meant to break down walls, I’m glad the core of the web is still very much alive and I’m hopeful about new life being breathed into it.

AtlasBarfed• 3 years ago

The web itself is a historically remarkable occurrence of decentralized control and creativity. Well, the "real web" as referenced in this article.

Corporations have always strived to gain maximum control of the web. AOL desperately tried to fight off its users from going onto the web and keep them in the content made and held exclusively by AOL. They wanted their users to look up by AOL keyword rather than (gasp) a URL that led out their garden.

The only real weapon corporations can deploy against the open web is ironically spam/ad protection/control, which is ironic because the very purpose of corporate walled gardens is access and control of the content so they can inject ads on those pages

The core of this is while the base web protocols and linking provide a key enabling technology, it doesn't provide the necessary content creation and sharing tools needed by non-programmers. Basic HTML used to be something an IQ-100 person could do in a couple of hours.

The war on the <blink> tag is representative of the loss of end user HTML ability. Web developers had instinctive hatred of it, and at some point (was it the XHTML boondoggle) blink was proudly deprecated to the strange joy of so many web people.

But blink was a fun thing a noob HTML document creator (not a developer, just some schmoe making a document, which is what HTML is: just a document by design) could do with simple effort and gave them immediate impact.

Now, HTML is a mess of Javascript and even more arcane CSS. No basic HTML document author could possibly look at the source of any website and glean any useful one-off techniques.

The HTML standard exists to serve HTML web developers and the corporations that employs them. Otherwise we would have had:

- default settings for a basic HTML page that aren't eye-bleeding ugly

- tags that do actually interesting things that don't require javascript

- better interaction tags than links, for sharing things.

Really, the core web and web browsers should have a robust web page authoring tool for end users. Kind of like 4GL tools and the like from the age around when the web was born, which another story today was complaining about the loss of. I WANT my grandma making a blink-tag-laden geocities monstrosity of cat and grandchild photos. Some teenager making emoji walls of hearts.

But that ship has sailed. The web is firmly controlled by developers, and by extension corporations, and by extension, governments.

interroboink• 3 years ago

There's a decent amount of people still keeping the fire burning for the "old web." It takes a little digging, but it's out there.

Some links for you:

* https://wiby.me/ — search engine that emphasizes simple/plain/hobbyist pages. Try the "surprise me" link a few times.

* https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/ — article, "Rediscovering the Small Web"

* https://search.marginalia.nu/ — author hangs out on HN sometimes, too (marginalia_nu)

Actually, here's a link to a similar discussion on an old HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30783391

usrbinbash2• 3 years ago

This is what I never got about the whole "social media ruined the web" - thing.

The web, the REAL web, that weird and almost alive thing where people share and create and tell their stories ... never went away.

And it likely never will.

Sure, it's not the web that the masses choose to use. That's fine. It doesn't need to be. Same as everyone is free to decide whether they want to munch fast food, or eat a fine dinner, everyone can choose the web they deserve.

Relevance/Quality/Importance and Clicks may be conflated in the ad-businesses that call themselves social media, but it doesn't matter to me if my blog is seen by 10 people or 10E6.

grumbel• 3 years ago

never went away.

It might still be hiding out there, but when search engines never point you to it, social sites don't allow links to it and even your browser lacks any advanced way to deal with it (recommendations, notifications, editing, uploading, etc.), how are you ever going to find it? The amount of normal open web sites I tend to interact with is approaching zero.

Doesn't help that the retention on the open web is pretty bad. All links turn into 404 within a couple of months, so that little bit of interaction I still have with the open web happens mostly through archive.org.

It might not be dead yet, but it's certainly not in a very healthy state either.

stavros2• 3 years ago

This is a huge problem. Search engines never find indie stuff that answers my question any more. Instead, they find huge websites that are only tangentially relevant to my query.

I used to often have people tell me "I was looking for a solution to a problem with Django and found your blog, thanks!". Now they find an unanswered question on SO instead.

marginalia_nu2• 3 years ago

You're using the wrong search engines ;-)

Here's a rabbit hole for you: https://search.marginalia.nu/site/jvns.ca

(disclosure: I built this)

usrbinbash2• 3 years ago

but when search engines never point you to it

So? This internet existed LONG before modern search engines. We found each other, and still do. How? Links, that's how. One breadcrumb leading to the next.

Plus, it's not as if search engines are the great windows to the interwebs they once were, and that situation isn't improving:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90673924/its-not-just-you-google...

https://marketvantage.com/blog/google-search-is-getting-wors...

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sucks-search-engine-c...

social sites don't allow links to it

Same question as with the point about search engines, only with an even bigger "So?". So called "social" sites are not good entrypoints into the web as it is, and have every incentive not to be. They are ad-businesses, and their revenue depends on keeping users in their ecosystem, not guiding them somewhere else.

even your browser lacks any advanced way to deal with it (recommendations, notifications, editing, uploading, etc.),

Excuse me?

Almost every major browsers allows using RSS feeds. They all have bookmarking functionality, usually tag- and searchable. And I am pretty sure, they all know what an `<a>`nchor is ;-)

As for uploading and editing: We have been doing this via webmasks for well over a decade, this is a solved problem. And it's not like I need the editing mask my self hosted blog-software offers to edit a page that is essentially a markdown document.

Doesn't help that the retention on the open web is pretty bad.

Compared to what, the retention in the "closed" web? Where everything gets flushed out of the recommendation feed as soon as it isn't making the ad-companies enough money any more? Oh, sure, the content may still be there somewhere, but who knows, since the searchability of the whole thing sucks.

In contrast, some resources of the "open" web I have in my bookmarks, rival the age of some of the "closed" web companies, and are still up and running. That's because it doesn't really take much to run a small website based on simple and relieable technology.

And even if they do go belly-up at some point, there is a good chance that their simple and relieable structure has been picked up and archived with all relevant information by any of the crawl-and-archive projects around. In contrast, please show me how I can reliably cite information from some random social media feed several years later.

It might not be dead yet, but it's certainly not in a very healthy state either.

On the contrary. In recent years, with the ever declining quality of search results, the ever increasing amount of low-quality machine-generated bloat on the web, and the toxicity and tribalism on "social" media, there has been a veritable resurgence of the simple, open, organic web. I see alot of people making new small community sites and interesting projects. And the glue holding all of these together making it discoverable, aka. blogs is in better shape than ever.

As I said before, the amount of clicks doesn't indicate health, and the attention of the masses don't really matter to resources that don't have to justify their existence by generating as much ad-revenue as possible.

dfxm12• 3 years ago

Ruined is a strong term. The signal to noise was greatly reduced though, among other things. Even in the context of social media sites, My Space allowed for a lot more "weirdness" than what you can do with today's popular social networks. Facebook had features that made it feel more "alive" when it first launched compared to today as well.

satchlj• 3 years ago

I feel that for the indie community, the web is dying thanks to modern browser bloat. We need to move to alternatives.

RandomWorker• 3 years ago

Yes, but… LLMs scraping your stuff can probably only be prevented by the big social media. However, that is some kind of immorality which is cool.

miek• 3 years ago

It's unfortunate that the indie web etc. isnt very useful for most commercial pursuits at this time. I hope that changes. I love the indie web for what it is, for personal use.

revskill• 3 years ago

I wish there's a community-driven Google Search alternatives.

ugjka• 3 years ago

Thanks for this, I just realized i can go on Wayback machine and browse early myspace. Having great flashbacks lol

CharlesW• 3 years ago

Robb, if you see this, please add podcasting to this post.

Podcasting¹ is the web, too. 42% of the US listens to a podcast at least every month.

¹ Which, thanks to Spotify's misappropriation, we now need to call "standards-based podcasting" or "opencasting"

alexpotato• 3 years ago

The real web is built on links. Hyper ones, in fact. Links you can share on your website. Links you can send to your mates

It BOGGLES MY MIND how even at companies that are built with incredibly advanced technology practices, people still build tools that don't have hyperlinks to either:

- other related tools (e.g. alerting system to config system)

- documentation or other useful information

In fact, "yeah, it uses this technology from the 1990s that you may have heard of: hyperlinks" is a phrase I use at least once a month. Everyone chuckles and then says "hey, that's pretty handy that A links to B directly".

That and "Have we thought about building the 'Internet Movie Database' version of this where you can jump from host to switch to multicast config only using hyperlinks?" is another popular saying of mine.

tiberius_p• 3 years ago

Mastodon is amazing as it offers the same perks as mainstream social media but without all the privacy issues and big tech exploitation of users. But it still feels very detached from the real world. I use facebook or meetup to discover social events near me where I can find like minded people to talk to. There are so many things which I first learned from face to face meetings with real people. Things which I never would have discovered by simply browsing the web on my own. I wish the fediverse and the indie web would provide some simple safe decentralized means to connect real people in the real word the same way mainstream social media did.

thoughtpeddler• 3 years ago

I see the "indie web" or "small web" vs. "centralized web" or "large-scale social media web" as very much mapping onto the "rural vs. urban" dichotomy. For that reason, as hopeful as I can be about a thriving indie web, I don't think we'll ever see it fully displace the large-scale centralized web.

In digital space, there is still value in adjacency and agglomeration (mostly due to easier UX, network effects, etc). Just as there are agglomerative effects of physical cities, so there is in the large-scale centralized web. This is largely due to the fact that most netizens are not savvy enough to set up their own sites, no matter how easy it may seem (at least to those of us that are on HN). In other words, my mom is never making a Mastodon account, but she is easily on Instagram. Now multiply that by hundreds of millions of people. Even the savvier centralized web users that have Linktrees from their Instagram bios are largely linking to other sites on the centralized/"urban" web.

But for there to be a thriving digital sphere, there must be many of us who opt to live in the "rural" parts, in the indie parts. There in the solitude and tranquility we are free to tinker, explore, and create for our fellow netizens that live in the "urban centers".

The optimal human existence spans both rural and urban environments, that's just as true in the digital realm as it is in the physical.

The Web Is Fantastic

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