ive been thinking a lot about what the web used to be; a realm full of disjointed communities and content that was inextricably hard to discover, and was sometimes even harder to locate the second time around.
we routinely lost information when something better took its place, and we lost personal connections almost as often as we found new ones. those transitional years – the short period where personal websites and niche communities thrived in isolation – may have regularly been compared to the wild west, but there was an earnest honesty in that content that we discarded along the way. people were present and the web was their playground, each of them forming an integral part of what was a rich, eclectic, and fatally fractured digital-only ecosystem.
i hope that presence hasnt been lost forever.
social media sells itself on keeping people together and in touch, search engines seek to bridge the gap between distant content and our fingertips, and the resulting centralisation of information has gradually taken the adventure out of what was once an exciting and new world. algorithms now reign and the content we see is the content were shown, not the content weve found. presentation has been homogenized, style is reserved for brands and advertising, and variety is, at appearances, waning.
i could mention the damage that being always-connected and always-stimulated has done to our social lives and mental well-being – “how could you not know about the sub-saharan situation? are you stupid?“. but after a year like 2020? its too passé to even think about.
instead of looking at it as all dark clouds and doom im making myself a part of that presence i fear weve lost, and on that journey found that there are still communities out there fighting to keep that wholly personal part of the web alive: initiatives like the indieweb that seek to create a space outside of the ubiquitous “corporate-web”; a space with personal ownership, community, and people at its foundation, and tools like fraidycat that simply but intuitively put us back in control of what and how we consume content on that very same corporate-web.
digging deeper we find mmm.page, feeling like it hails from a time when websites were personal scrapbooks or collages, before “feeds” became the status quo, made modern using the same tools and techniques of the wix and wordpress-likes that it nonetheless feels distant from. its a beacon of personality and expression, the exact same that we once had with our consistently-inconsistent geocities and angelfires of the past.
the irony of posting this on a wordpress site isnt lost on me.
im fearful of what we may still lose and mournful of what weve already lost, but still hopeful and excited to see what comes next.