"We Need to Rewild the Internet" and other small web recommended reading

[matsushima]

If you were born around the 1970s, you probably remember many more dead insects on the windscreen of your parents’ car than on your own. Global land-dwelling insect populations are dropping about 9% a decade. If you’re a geek, you probably programmed your own computer to make basic games. You certainly remember a web with more to read than the same five websites. You may have even written your own blog.

But many people born after 2000 probably think a world with few insects, little ambient noise from birdcalls, where you regularly use only a few social media and messaging apps (rather than a whole web) is normal.
We Need to Rewild the Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon

I've been slowly working my way through this article during my lunch breaks at work this week.

I thought of the smallweb community and wondered what other books, articles, etc. you would recommend as a sort of "small web syllabus." (I have tech, digital literacy and social media tags in my bookmarks that others might find interesting to peruse, although the media diary is mostly for my own recordkeeping and, thus, incomplete.)

Comments

[picori]

If we're talking specifically about the small web, then What is the Web Revival? is good because a lot of people will hear the term "web revival" thrown around in small web spaces, but not all of them know what it means. I think this essay outlines it pretty well. There's also What The Small Web Is Missing, which may not count as "syllabus" material, but I think it offers a good suggestion for what kind of content would draw more people's attention to the small web overall (as opposed to being viewed as a fad of some sort).

Maybe not directly related to the small web, but pandora's vox: on community in cyberspace has always been an interesting read just because of how much of it applies to the state of the web today (it was written in 1994, for context). Very interesting, at least to me! :)

(Thank you for the links to your bookmarks as well—they look super interesting and I'm really eager to dive into them when I get some free time!)

[alaterdate]

Wow! Pandora's Vox sure is interesting. Thanks for sharing, these are great.

[bluedreaming]

I’m not sure if this exactly small web, but I read about digital gardens several years ago and was struck by the idea:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007716/digital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet
https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
https://tomcritchlow.com/blogchains/digital-gardens

Also personal canon:
https://www.brendanschlagel.com/2017/11/05/canonize-creating-personal-canon-template

[alaterdate]

I've read Appleton's digital garden post before and I've loved the idea of updating/editing posts. It really lowers the pressure of "needing" a perfectly finished piece before posting and the anxiety of changing an opinion you've already publicly stated. I also love how the format of digital gardens tries to combat context-collapse.

Hadn't heard about creating a personal canon, but I love it!

[matsushima]

I've been fascinated but also slightly put off by the digital garden concept, or at least, by the reading I've done about it? Much of what I've read acts as if they are inventing or re-discovering the idea of an imperfect, unfinished post, or learning in public, and I'm like, hello? we've been doing this on LiveJournal/Dreamwidth since 1999! I don't often go back and edit posts here (at least, not significantly) but I go back and cross-reference old posts, showing development of an idea - and I don't think anyone reading my (or anyone else's) LJ/Dw is expecting "public blog post" quality?

[alaterdate]

Yeah it fell into one of those revival hypes like common place books and zettelkasten that somehow makes people act like the concepts are brand new or long lost. Which is why I like Hoare's 'Click Around and Find Out' article because he's like "news flash: we've been here the whole time!"

For me, my dreamwidth is very much a separate entity to my website, where my website felt to me like any posts need to be complete and set in stone. Thus I update it even less often than Dw. So "digital gardening" has appealed to me in the vein of not even having to make a new post about something, but simply going back to the original page and adding on "this bit is new" or "I've changed my mind" with timestamps and without linking to other pages that people might not even click on. With a bonus of not having another damn html file to deal with on my end lol.

[matsushima]

I think of my Dreamwidth (LiveJournal) as my home on the internet: it's the first tab I open when I go online and it's where my "stuff" is. I have a professional(ish) site for my poetry but that's a portfolio of published short stories and poems. I think what I like about it is the privacy - a lot of digital gardens that I've seen, and the people who tend to talk the loudest about "learning in public," are often about coding or business, which seem like low-stakes things to mess up? but I'm here talking about my time in a cult and converting to Judaism and I appreciate that I can do that with others but not in front of the entire internet, you know? (There's also privacy concerns because I'm a queer schoolteacher in a place without LGBTQIA+ employment protections.)

I've adopted some digital gardening techniques or habits into my journaling, mostly linking back to previous posts on the same topic and creating tables of contents for series of posts on the same thing. (I refuse to use Dreamwidth tagging. I don't even have a good reason except that I never got started.) Now that I'm thinking about it, though, I never update the older posts with links to newer reflections - I should start doing that!

I had a poke around your site (hope you don't mind) and I love your characters page. I might have to make one, that seems like a lot of fun!

[alaterdate]

I think what I like about it is the privacy - a lot of digital gardens that I've seen, and the people who tend to talk the loudest about "learning in public," are often about coding or business, which seem like low-stakes things to mess up?

That's true! A lot of the personal sites I come across are usually run by somebody who codes for a living and while they do put up some personal stuff it's often a site they clearly want to use for networking. Privacy is definitely a concern. I've seen people make locked journal sections on neocities, but they are so easy to get around. I definitely appreciate the ability to make locked posts on Dw.

I was thinking mostly of using digital gardening for reviews that I post, because I tend to revisit things and realize that I am often harsh on the first pass. Tables of contents is a great idea! I like to micro-organize things, but don't want a million tags so I should try that out.

I don't mind at all! The characters page is one of the reasons I even tried making a website in the first place. It really is a lot of fun! I like trying my best to design pages and make them pretty or themed. I hope you can have fun making one too!

[matsushima]

I love the idea of a personal canon but I feel a little intimidated by it, too. (I have a mostly complete media diary but that only goes back as far as when I started it a few years ago.)

[alaterdate]

Small Web is kind of broad so these may not fit exactly what you were thinking, but I'll link some of my bookmarks.

Making the Web Fun Again
"The purpose of this project is not to inspire nostalgia. It’s to rebuild the platform for us to be able to be creative again. To have sites that we can do whatever we want with. This is not nostalgia speaking. We really did lose our platforms for creativity and rich self expression online, and I want to help bring them back."

Into the Personal-Website-Verse
"The personal website. It’s a place to write, create, and share whatever you like, without the need to ask for anyone’s permission. It is also the perfect place to explore and try new things"
Has a nice list of things one can do to connect more with other people who have personal sites.

Click Around and Find Out
"If you care about the indie web growing, by all means write, by all means create, by all means curate. But most of all, just read. Or listen, or experience. Spend an afternoon clicking around, like everybody used to. The more people who do that, the more everything else will slot into place without even having to think much about it. If 2024 truly is a tipping point into a new world, then it can’t happen in a vacuum."

The Internet Used to be Fun
'a collection of articles that to some degree answer the question “Why have a personal website?”'
Lots of good links in here!

How to Write About Blogs
"On the topic of blogging and personal publishing, I found so many interesting articles and nuggets of wisdom the last couple of months through RSS feeds, Mastodon and micro.blog."
More links!

E/N
"E/N description: The website's author covers a myriad of topics. It's not narrowly focused. The author writes about everything or at least everything that's important to the author. The site might contain something useful for anyone who visits. The content means everything to the publisher, but it could mean nothing to the rest of the world. "
This last one is just a little something about a type of site referred to as Everything/Nothing and helped me get over the sour taste of all those neocities manifestos that say something like 99% of people on there shouldn't have a website because they're "boring people" that I had the misfortune to stumble upon.

Though I don't agree with absolutely everything he says, I've also found two of Jaron Lanier's books interesting: You Are Not a Gadget and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. In the former he discusses how the structure of the web and software holds us back from creativity and pigeon holes people into set behaviors and the latter is a bit more of the same, but with more emphasis on social media addiction.

[matsushima]

… neocities manifestos that say something like 99% of people on there shouldn't have a website because they're "boring people[.]"
YIKES! I do feel weird about how, for my students, the internet (or social media) is an extension of their school social life, and not an escape separate from it, but "most people shouldn't have a web presence" isn't the answer to that problem!

[sonofgodzilla]

Oh my goodness, just reading that exercept made me uncomfortable. I can't believe I forgot little details such as the amount of bugs. I can't believe I didn't notice when it stopped happening.

[annathecrow]

I thing I was the most influenced by Melon's Intro to the Web Revival #1: What is the Web Revival? and Every site needs a Links Page / Why linking matters. Or for more practical advice, the entirety of 32bit.cafe.

[finch]

I was going to link to that second one if you hadn't beaten me to it!

[finch]

I have a bunch on my website but I think my go-tos would be Rediscovering the Small Web and Stop Talking To Each Other And Start Buying Things

[matsushima]

Oh, I love your links page! I remember those little banner link images very fondly.

[satsuma]

here's my bookmark collection of smallweb resources -- some of them are more interested in the whys eg. Organizing Principles for Community Software while others are focus on the practical aspects, like How you used to get people looking at your website before "going viral" was a thing

[hojarasca]

just this quote :⁠—

Weeks or months, years even, may pass before someone else finds what you've written but it's important to understand: This is what separates the web from what came before it.

(from continuous partial mythologies, aaron straup cope)

[rigormorphis]

I really like Olia Lialina's FROM MY TO ME, not least for how it talks about nostalgia:

"The fact that the time of personal pages is over is self-evident. What is obfuscated by today’s early web nostalgia (netstalgia) trend, though, is the fact that there was never a time for them. [...] Don’t see making your own web page as a nostalgia, don’t participate in creating the netstalgia trend. What you make is a statement, an act of emancipation. You make it to continue a 25-year-old tradition of liberation."

[enchantedsleeper]

Oh, I'm going to love going through all of these - thank you for this excellent post!

My own contribution is a New Yorker article from 1995, The Dawn of the Home Page, which a friend who is also interested in small web stuff sent me a few months back. It's a fascinating time capsule from an era when people understood the web through analogies like dorm rooms and communes.

I particularly loved a "cyber-rap" (ignoring the cringe terminology) that the author quotes partway through, which is actually called 'Forging Culture' by Justin Hall, and is archived in full here. Like picori mentions upthread, it's something that is still startlingly applicable to the internet today:

Culture doesn't come from Warner Brothers and Sony. Culture is that woman friend of yours who tells the most outrageous stories.

Culture doesn't cost big bucks, and hang in a gallery of modern art. Culture is your friend who likes to draw...

The web is an opportunity to make good our fifteen megabytes of fame.

...The more widespread and grassroots the Internet, the more difficult it will be to dominate and control it. You can contribute directly to the humanizing of the wires by telling your story, adding your persona to the unaffiliated.

It's a really nice rallying cry for the small web xD