An interesting article

[mekare]

I stumbled across this essay on community organisation and core web vs. peripheral web structures today. A fascinating read! It's been written by former organisers of a webring called yesterweb which seemed to have exploded in popularity before being shut down. The reflection on this experience (and general web trends) is really interesting.

Some excerpts:

The peripheral web can be described as the outskirts of the core web, with platforms such as Mastodon, SpaceHey, Neocities, Discord and IRC chatrooms, Matrix rooms, various imageboards, and others, including various functional clones of core web applications. It is the digital countryside of the corporate megalopolis. Advertising, sales, and data collection are substantially reduced if not entirely eliminated, providing better conditions for people to socialize in and a healthier experience overall. It is composed of web platforms that are hosted on separate infrastructure from the core web by individuals or organizations with various sources of funding. The peripheral web is discovered largely through word-of-mouth and personal research. In other words, bridging the peripheral web to the core web takes a significant amount of effort: the vast majority of internet users remain unaware of its existence.

The rapid increase in popularity of platforms like Neocities and Spacehey were a strong indicator that nostalgia was a significant force driving migration to the peripheral web in recent years. The community was first created when pandemic restrictions were just starting to loosen up. Nostalgia was often the first thing that stood out and appealed to new members: there is comfort in nostalgia, especially during particularly rough times.

However, Nostalgia would often lead to a regressive attitude within the space that made it difficult to achieve any sort of change. Users focused highly on nostalgia would value aesthetics as their primary focus which would lead to a distrust of new tools that did not meet their nostalgic criteria.

The organization began as a handful of individuals working to discover and address the needs of the community. As the community grew larger, it transformed into a loose organization composed of staff members. Finally, a well-defined organization formed at the core of the staff that created a distinction between organizers.

In its loosely organized phase, attempts were made to draw the whole community into organizing efforts. Results were poor because of low participation, and because the participants were mostly composed of the newest members who had the least knowledge about the community. We could not ensure an accurate representation from this setup, so we moved the decision-making as a responsibility for staff members. This would not work out either as moderators had varying levels of commitment and we could not reasonably expect them to take a greater responsibility.

Comments

[merest]

I'd actually extend that from leftist politics to just politics, period. I've seen a number of movements go up in flames because members were insistent that their right wing darlings just had to get shoved into their gamer thing/image board/Streamer stuff, and it's just as destructive. You just don't see it as much where the Twitter and Tumblr diaspora predominate.

Politics have their place, but once you put it on a pedestal, you rapidly start creating something that looks more like a political party than a hobby or special interest group.

Which was Sadness and Madness' core mistake, IMO. They wanted control of a group capable of changing both the internet and the world, and what they got instead were a bunch of hobbyists who mostly just liked crunchy GIFS and CSS art. Not listening to what their community wanted and trying to force them in a direction they didn't want to go ultimately caused nothing but harm.

Had they been more honest about their intent, and not tried to obscure their terrible leadership decisions with thousands of words of pseudo-intellectual drivel after deleting and hiding any proof of what they did wrong, I'd hold some respect for them.

But they didn't, so I don't.

There are good sites on Neocities, but the loudest and most prominent voices are all the same kind of domineering, cancel-happy drama-queens that ultimately lead me to move away from most social media. working in such close proximity to them was making what I actually wanted to do - build my site and post things that made me happy - much less fun.

In the end, I ended up swapping hosts. I get better analytics, faster load time, and no like4like, follow2follow, "join my {social media I want nothing to do with} here!" Style of culture that has come to dominate the the site.