Web Revival!

I have been thinking about how I miss the old internet before social media turned it into a dumpster fire of shills competing to sell advertising and clicks. It turns out that I'm not alone in thinking this! Here are a few hashtags that I've started following, annotated with my hot take on what they cover:

• #indieweb is about building the tools for a non-corporate social network, a reaction to companies like Facebook/Meta, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etc. that prey on its users.
• #openweb is more about the technology to have build one's own website and control your presence on the web.
• #socialweb and #humanetech, in comparison, are focused more on human connection than technology (e.g. humanities, culture)
• #fediverse is about websites that specifically use the ActivityPub decentralized protocol (e.g. Mastodon) to create an alternative non-commercial social media ecosystem, something of a blend between both humane and technical concerns but leaning technical.
• #indiemakers is a loose term that applies to people making a living on the Internet as independent creators. The business model is direct communication with fans, who support makers by buying goods and services. It is not quite the same as the Influencer economy, but is in the ballpark of the creator economy.
• #slowweb and #smolweb is about the slow cozy life online, your snug home on the Internet where you hang out with your online friends. It reminds me of the best days of Tumblr when you had your circle of buddies checking each other out.
• #webrevival is about getting the weird vibe of the early internet back: Geocities, MySpace, experimental Flash sites.

Personally, I'm very interested in the creative expression that I associate with #WebRevival and #HumaneTech. While web technology and that stuff is cool, I'm more interested in seeing what people do when they are online. Tech is the means to an end! I think this is an underexplored area, but there are two pretty good links on the subject that I've found that are not stuffed with technical jargon:

• Melonking's Wiki Page on WebRevival which has links to other resources.
• onionboot's video A Web Revival: the Internet didn't die, you're just not on it which is the story of his stumbling into lowtech web stuff. He has a followup dissecting the different parts of Web Revival in IndieWeb vs 'indie web' vs web revival, addressing comments in his first video.

Written Proposal CC-BY-4.0

This is the kind of energy I miss! To this end, I wrote a Web Revival Group Proposal that I'd like to start in my local neighborhood. I'm not sure if there is any interest in my small town, but even if I can find one or two people who want to form a group that would be AMAZING!

I've released the proposal document under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, meaning that anyone can freely take what I've written and remix it for their own needs. All I ask is attribution; I want to see what other people are doing!!!