Web Revival

Small Technology are everyday tools for everyday people designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

Small Tech is…

• Personal
• Easy to use
• Non-colonial
• Private by default
• Zero knowledge
• Peer to peer
• Share alike
• Interoperable
• Non-commercial
• Inclusive

It’s likely most Hackaday readers could recite a list of problems with the web as it exists here in 2024. Cory Doctrow coined a word for it, enshitification, referring to the shift of web users from being the consumers of online services to the product of those services, squeezed by a few Internet monopolies. A few massive corporations control so much of our online experience from the server to the browser, to the extent that for so many people there is very little the touch outside those confines.

Contrasting the enshitified web of 2024 with the early web, it’s not difficult to see how some of the promise was lost. Perhaps not the web of Tim Berners-Lee and his NeXT cube, but the one of a few years later, when Netscape was the new kid on the block to pair with your Trumpet Winsock. CD-ROMs were about to crash and burn, and I was learning how to create simple HTML pages.

The promise then was of a decentralised information network in which we would all have our own websites, or homepages as the language of the time put it, on our own servers. Microsoft even gave their users the tools to do this with Windows, in that the least technical of users could put a Frontpage Express web site on their Personal Web Server instance. This promise seems fanciful to modern ears, as fanciful perhaps as keeping the overall size of each individual page under 50k, but at the time it seemed possible.

With such promise then, just how did we end up here? I’m sure many of you will chip in in the comments with your own takes, but of course, setting up and maintaining a web server is either hard, or costly. Anyone foolish enough to point their Windows Personal Web Server directly at the Internet would find their machine compromised by script kiddies, and having your own “proper” hosting took money and expertise. Free stuff always wins online, so in those early days it was the likes of Geocities or Angelfire which drew the non-technical crowds. It’s hardly surprising that this trend continued into the early days of social media, starting the inevitable slide into today’s scene described above.

Flashpoint Archive is a community effort to preserve games and animations from the web.

Internet history and culture is important, and the web is evolving at such a rapid pace that what might be commonplace today could be obsolete tomorrow. This project is dedicated to preserving as many experiences from these platforms as possible, so that they aren't lost to time. Since December 2017, over 200,000 games and animations have been preserved across more than a hundred browser plugins and web technologies.

In addition to our preservation efforts, we also provide a highly flexible software package for reliable navigation and playback of preserved content. Among the software that powers Flashpoint is a fully-featured launcher that acts as a frontend for the collection, a proxy that tricks games into thinking they're running on the live web, and a sandbox that allows for secure playback of plugin-enabled content - all of which are open-source software.

The project was originally started by BlueMaxima in an attempt to outrun the disappearance of webgames prior to the death of Flash. It has since evolved into a major undertaking involving hundreds of community contributors from around the world, encompassing both games and animations created for numerous internet plugins, frameworks, and standards.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/21859865

I would classify him as a user interface researcher obsessed with excel/spreadsheets.

The Gemini protocol is brutally simple, which makes it just about too useless for apps, tracking, and commercial purposes. Gemtext, the format for Gemini pages, is very basic; with about half as many features as markdown, it's barely a step above plain text. As a result, Gemini is a small universe of blogs and personal sites.

Its simplicity makes it easy for people to create compatible clients and services for it. It's self-hosting friendly and there are also hosting services, like smol.pub and some pubnixes.

Of course, you'll need to get a Gemini browser or visit a Gemini-to-web proxy to access it.

Escargot is a new service that makes old versions of MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger work again.

We are focused on a total revival of the MSN Messenger and Windows Live experience. Our sister project NINA is focused on the revival of AIM/AOL/ICQ services, and supports your Escargot login.

In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.

The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.

I just heard about RetroAIM. Which is a way to use AIM (AOL Instant Messanger) in the modern day, running your own servers.

The Small Web movement is a growing community of individuals opting to step away from the dominant, corporate-driven web, commonly referred to as Web 2.0, the Big Web, Big Tech, or the ‘core’ web. Instead, many are exploring a more decentralized and personal part of the internet, known as the Small Web, Indie Web, the Personal Web, the Old Web, Web Revival and the Peripheral Web (these terms are often all used interchangeably, though, some have similar but different definitions. Hover over each of the terms to learn their definitions). The concept of the Small Web stands apart from terms like the dark web or deep web, and focuses more on the ownership and nature of the online spaces people use.

The Core Web/Web 2.0/Big Tech/Big Web (more terms you will come to find are often used interchangeably) represent the mainstream internet most people use daily, centered around platforms like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit. These platforms are part of an ecosystem controlled by large companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, which shape users’ online experiences by leveraging algorithms, targeted ads, and data collection to maximize profits. Big Tech keeps users within the boundaries of its platforms, often exploiting personal data for commercial gain while shaping what users see and interact with on their platforms.

In contrast, the Small Web is the digital equivalent of a countryside—a less commercialized and more community-driven part of the internet. Platforms like Mastodon, Neocities, SpaceHey, IRC, and Matrix chat rooms serve as alternatives to the corporate-dominated web. These spaces typically reject the invasive practices of targeted advertising and heavy data collection, offering users a more authentic, privacy-respecting experience. The Small Web tends to be discovered organically through personal exploration and recommendations rather than being indexed and readily visible through mainstream search engines. While it requires more effort to find and engage with, the Small Web offers more personal freedom and creative expression.

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The Small Web is more than a collection of niche platforms—it’s a grassroots revolution pushing back against the corporate-controlled, data-driven nature of today’s internet. As Big Tech continues to encroach on our online freedoms, the Small Web offers a beacon of hope for those yearning to reclaim their digital autonomy. It empowers users to take control of their online experiences, free from the algorithms that dictate what we see, think, and share.

By joining the Small Web, you become part of a community that values personal privacy, creative freedom, and authentic human connections over profit-driven motives. This movement is about rediscovering the internet’s roots—an open space for innovation, individuality, and real interaction – where real people can thrive above the noise of business and brands. You’re not just a passive consumer on the Small Web; you are an active participant in building a better, more sustainable digital world.

Somewhere between the late 2000’s aggregator sites and the contemporary For You Page, we lost our ability to curate the web. Worse still, we’ve outsourced our discovery to corporate algorithms. Most of us did it in exchange for an endless content feed. By most, I mean upwards of 90% who don’t make content on a platform as understood by the 90/9/1 rule. And that’s okay! Or, at least, it makes total sense to me. Who wouldn’t want a steady stream of dopamine shots?

The rest of us, posters, amplifiers, and aggregators, traded our discovery autonomy for a chance at fame and fortune. Not all, but enough to change the social web landscape.

But that gold at the end of the rainbow isn’t for us. “Creator funds” pull from a fixed pot. It’s a line item in a budget that doesn’t change, whether one hundred or one million hands dip inside it. Executives in polished cement floor offices, who you’ll never meet, choose their winners and losers. And I’m guessing it’s not a meritocracy-based system. They pick their tokens, round up their shills, and stuff Apple Watch ads between them.

So when we wonder where all the websites have gone, know it’s the curators we’re nostalgic for because the curators showed us the best the web had to offer once upon a time. And the curators— the tenders, aggregators, collectors, and connectors— can bring us back to something better. Because it’s still out there, we just have to find it.

Here’s the best part. You can be that curator right now, at this very moment. You can start to rebuild the interconnectivity that made the web fun to explore. And you don’t need to be a computer scientist to do it.

Manifesto for a New Web

This is a set of three core commitments derived from the practical experiences of the Yesterweb staff after two years of community organization. They concentrate what we have learned and how we operate into a general template that can be applied to any community at a foundational level. We propose these commitments as the basis of unity for those individuals or groups who wish to move in the same direction, while allowing a diversity of focus, interests, and missions. They are neither rules nor guidelines: they are expectations that are upheld by all participants, to the best of their ability, who believe in building a new culture for the web.

1. The commitment to social responsibility and partisanship:

Safety and self-defense are a basic necessity of any community, which includes the recognition that it is impossible to accommodate all people in the same social space due to the inevitability of antagonistic beliefs. Diversity of opinion is respected up until certain bounds that reflect oppressive intentions such as discrimination against age, sex, gender, class, nation/race/ethnicity, religion, or disability. When these conflicts inevitably appear, the community must strive to understand the situation and take the side of the oppressed at any cost. In cases where it is ambiguous whether the harm is intentional or accidental, an investigation through dialogue is necessary to determine malice or ignorance, as ignorance can be resolved with education.

2. The commitment to collective well-being and personal growth:

Sustainable amounts of selflessness and sacrifice, ideally from all individuals, are required to build a healthy community. Building and maintaining a new culture requires a consistent social effort as well. We should be mindful of collective health, taking compassionate consideration of the personal growth of everyone (actively or passively) involved in any situation. In our communication we should train our ability to listen and to empathize, patiently striving for unity and dialogue rather than division and debate, and approaching conflict with the intention of resolution. It is important that the community does not create goals purely out of opposition or antagonism toward something, and instead works in a positive and creative manner, toward building solutions either in individual or collective practice.

3. The commitment to rehumanizing social relations and reversing the process of social alienation:

The development of information technology capital has further disintegrated our social being, but being social is a mental necessity. We are left with the burden of re-learning the way we relate to each other and rebuilding our social bonds in a way that treats everyone as equals. This includes unlearning dehumanizing behaviors such as treating others as potential sources of profit/assets or romantic/sexual objects without knowledge or consent, and establishing rules to demarcate separate spaces in which all participants are aware and do consent (if such spaces are deemed necessary by the community). We should question the impact of our environment on our behavior, and carefully conscientiously transform that environment so that a better culture and humanity can flourish.

The Web Revival is one name for a wider internet-based movement! The name itself is derived from the Folk Revival of the mid-20th century. The Folk Revival promoted a feeling of humanity, creativity and equality at a time of rapid mechanisation; whereas the Web Revival promotes these values in the face of the rapid digitisation that surrounds us today.

The Web Revival is about reclaiming the technology in our lives and asking what we really want from the tools we use, and the digital experiences we share. The Web Revival often references the early Internet, but it's not about recreating a bygone web; the Web Revival is about reviving the spirit of openness and fresh excitement that surrounded the Web in its earliest days.

The Web Revival is not one single movement, but a loose collection of ideas and groups that fall under many names, such as:

Some other names related to the Web Revival:

• Wild Web - Punky freeform, zine crafting, art homepages and chaotic sites - Such as MelonLand
• Net Positive - Sites focusing on whimsy, learning and encouragement such as 32bit Cafe
• Smol / Small Web - This name is often favoured by minimalist sites such as m15o’s Status.Cafe
• Indie / Open Web - Professional independently-run sites with a focus on free and open source code - Indie Web
• Old / Retro / Web 1.0 - Retro enthusiast sites focused on supporting and using old hardware - The Old Net
• Garden / Poetic Web - Sites focused on reflection, gathering thoughts and obscurity - Naive Weekly
• Neocities - A brand name for the web hosting company and community that houses many Web Revival sites - Neocities *… and many others!

What ties it all together?

Web Revival enthusiasts come from all walks of life, however most share a few things in common:

• Creativity is First- Most see the ability to design, decorate and graffiti digital spaces as essential and powerful
• The Internet is Fun - Most want the Web to be a playground that's free to explore and enjoy Corporations are Boring - Most are sick of the monetisation, data abuse and endless breaches of trust in corporate culture
• The Web is Friendly - All feel that the Web should be friendly and supportive; caring is a radical act
• Right to Repair - They value the freedom to make, break and repair their stuff - tinkering is a form of debate and protest
• One World Wide Web - They want free open knowledge and global connectivity, without paywalls, bubbles or borders
• Chaotic Effort - They believe that value comes from time and effort put into projects they love for no reason other than love
• No to Web3 - To most, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, unfairly trained AIs and buzzword tech are unwelcome and uncool

These ideals are expressed by creating websites, zines, online spaces, video games, artworks, journals and much more!

Web Revivalists will often choose to use alternative technology and software in their lives, or to modify and remix the technology they find around them.

this new year offers many echoes of a moment we haven’t seen in a quarter-century. Some of the most dominant companies on the internet are at risk of losing their relevance, and the rest of us are rethinking our daily habits in ways that will shift the digital landscape as we know it. Though the specifics are hard to predict, we can look to historical precedents to understand the changes that are about to come, and even to predict how regular internet users — not just the world’s tech tycoons — may be the ones who decide how it goes.

Across today’s internet, the stores that deliver all the apps on our phones are cracking open, the walls between social media platforms are coming down as the old networks fail, the headlong rush towards AI is making our search engines and work apps weirder (and often worse!). But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent. We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before. And while some of the drivers of this change have been hyped up, or even over-hyped, a few of the most important changes haven’t gotten any discussion at all.

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Consider the dramatic power shift happening right now in social media. Twitter’s slide into irrelevance and extremism as it decays into X has hastened the explosive growth of a whole host of newer social networks. There’s the nerdy vibes of the noncommercial Mastodon communities (each one with its own set of Dungeons and Dragons rules to play by), the raucous hedonism of Bluesky (like your old Tumblr timeline at its most scandalous), and the at-least-it’s-not-LinkedIn noisiness of Threads, brought to you by Instagram, meaning Facebook, meaning Meta. There are lots more, of course, and probably another new one popping up tomorrow, but that’s what’s great about it. A generation ago, we saw early social networks like LiveJournal and Xanga and Black Planet and Friendster and many others come and go, each finding their own specific audience and focus. For those who remember a time in the last century when things were less homogenous, and different geographic regions might have their own distinct music scenes or culinary traditions, it’s easy to understand the appeal of an online equivalent to different, connected neighborhoods that each have their own vibe. While this new, more diffuse set of social networks sometimes requires a little more tinkering to get started, they epitomize the complexity and multiplicity of the weirder and more open web that’s flourishing today.

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I’m not a pollyanna about the fact that there are still going to be lots of horrible things on the internet, and that too many of the tycoons who rule the tech industry are trying to make the bad things worse. (After all, look what the last wild era online lead to.) There’s not going to be some new killer app that displaces Google or Facebook or Twitter with a love-powered alternative. But that’s because there shouldn’t be. There should be lots of different, human-scale alternative experiences on the internet that offer up home-cooked, locally-grown, ethically-sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet. And they should be weird.

Archive

So after making my Neocities site I decided to explore other people’s sites (which Neocities makes very easy to do with its site directory), and I discovered the web revival movement: a whole world of old web enthusiasts who were just as tired as I was of social media toxicity. It felt so awesome to freely express myself in my own space and to see others’ creative spaces as well! As I spent more time online exploring personal sites and less time on social media, I felt my mental health improve.

There have been studies done on social media’s impact on mental health, which I won’t get into too much here. I’ll just say that one of the reasons the web revival is going so strong right now is because people know that too much social media is bad for their mental health. The constant need for validation, the comparing yourself to others’ carefully curated selves, the everyday exposure to bad news and negativity, and the corporations trying all they can to shove targeted ads in your face are all very draining. People want to get away from all that, but still want to enjoy being online.

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The web revival, despite being very much inspired by the old web, is about moving towards a better future. It is driven a lot by nostalgia, but it’s also a response to what the internet is today. There is a whole community around the web revival; people on Neocities linking to each other’s sites or chatting on forums like the Yesterweb forum and the MelonLand forum, and it’s through this community that people are having conversations about how we can make the internet a better place. In my time on the MelonLand forum, I have seen and participated in discussions about accessibility and modern internet features we like and want to include on our sites.