Reviving the Web
People have noticed that the web hasn't been great for a lot of reasons and have tried various projects to try to "fix" the internet; mostly by trying to revive the old customs and ways of the web closer to its inception. This page by Melon is probably the most comprehensive guide and round-up of what it is that I'm aware of so you may want to check that out if you're interested. In this post I want to look at a few attempts at trying something different and where they succeeded and didn't.
The Indie Web
https://indieweb.org/
The indie web is more of a concept than a project; a loose collection of decentralised projects with some common principles. The gist is that it's based around a community of people building their own independent, personal websites. You can read them on the link above which has pretty good info on what it is and why they think it's beneficial.
All of the following movements can be seen as a subset of the general ideas set out by the indie web
Yesterweb
https://yesterweb.org/
The yesterweb was a discord server that as best as I can tell revolves around writing an extraordinary number of words, at least judging from the home page of the yesterweb. The gist is that they grew too large and internal drama caused them to feel that the best move was just to shut down and move on.
Cohost
https://cohost.org
cohost was a social media website that tried to rebuke the monotonous nature of other social media and facilitate creativity. You could use markdown or edit HTML/CSS in posts, allowing you to format or style content in a more interesting way than other social media. Ultimately the issue was just funding and it being draining on the developers to maintain the site so they ended up moving it to redirect to archive.org instead which is of course a lot better than selling user data or selling the site to greedy vultures intent on scavenging the corpse of the site for scraps.
The site was created by a small group called the anti software software club and their manifesto is kinda interesting. You can read it here(the link is an archive one because the site seems to be dead now :( ) https://antisoftware.club/manifesto/2020/03/16/part-1.html However their funding method was essentially getting money from a friend who wanted them to build something cool. The reason why funding is important is that it feels like sites like this only have two paths: 1. Take over the world or 2. Die. And to achieve 1. they need as much money as possible which leads them to venture capital. Cohost didn't go this route so they ultimately ended up on path 2 but maybe it doesn't have to be that way. One legacy of the site is eggbug as a meme; I wasn't around for that but there is something extremely melancholic about graffiti like this.
Neocities
https://neocities.org/
Geocities was an early service from 1994 that allowed people to publish websites themselves. It was acquired by Yahoo in 1999 and ultimately killed off in 2009. There was a slightly interesting twist where it was kind of a virtual city with websites located under various neighbourhoods. Neocities is a modern re-imagining of the same concept, where you can have your own website hosted on neocities and create your own site that is as customisable as you want it to be. It makes it cheap and relatively easy to do, you can get going by just writing HTML and change it as you want.
One of the primary "languages" of these websites is a callback to websites of old: the web badge. They will often have something like this:
They can be used for various things, such as demonstrating allegiance to a particular technology, philosophy, software, hardware or even link to your friend's websites. These are pretty fun; they fit the aesthetic of old websites which a lot try to adher to, recalling nostalgia for how the internet used to look: very custom and human instead of corporate and managed.
Federated Services
Bluesky | Mastodon | Lemmy
These are services based around the idea of federation, meaning that there are multiple server instances and they can communicate with each other and no one can controll all of them. If you disagree with moderation decisions or aesthetics or even vibes, then you can find another instance to occupy or even run your own instance. Bluesky and Mastodon are based off of Twitter while Lemmy is based off of Reddit. Additionally Bluesky is less federated as there's one main instance that almost everyone uses.
Federation comes with various technical limitations and issues that make it tricky to do certain things. All the instances can't afford to have all the data from every other instances so notifications and interactions between instances become tricky to manage. However, despite that they're fully usable if that's what you're looking for. Personally, I've never been a Poster™ so I don't really use these much but you may find them interesting.
My thoughts
I disagree with framing this movement as "returning" or the modern web sucking. The old web had issues in that it was uninteresting or not fulfilling; this idea that we can return to some golden era that never was is fantastical I believe. Instead we should plan ahead, lay out a set of goals or principles that will hold us instead for how we want to shape the internet. Many of the principles as in the indie web project are appropriate and if we hold to some of those we can take what's good about the modern web and combine it with new ideas and beliefs to shape a web that works for everyone.
Scaling is hard. Any centralised project will probably fail under its own weight since there will be issues with moderation, server costs and other expenses on time and money that gets excessive - leading people to seek monetisation which inevitably comes with its own set of issues. Perhaps there is a way to manage it that's healthy but that remains for people with more vision than me.
Another risk is the trap of having everything in these spaces be self-referential. This comes up often, such as with the Gemini protocol the most common discussion/info on there is just about the Gemini protocol itself. It's fine to have those kinds of things but to grow beyond you need something that makes new people want to join in for some reason outside of the thing itself. In programming/tech this might be a "killer feature/application" that people want to use because it's really helpful/powerful in some way but that they have to use your language/platform to get started.
The basics have to be simple. Most people aren't HTML/CSS experts. They don't want to learn how flexboxes work, or make their CSS grid look good on all sized devices. This one might be quite tricky to solve. One thing I was thinking is there could be a simpler layout engine that integrates well with HTML and compiles down to CSS or a visual tool that supports making good layouts easy to create. This is really difficult though and there may not be a good solution; perhaps just giving people a nice template to achieve what they want is best.
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code" - Linus Torvalds. Unfortunately there probably is too much talking, discussion etc. When you see this list of manifestos (and there are many more not on that list) , it feels like it's just a neverending amount of text complaining about the same things. The quote by Linus to begin this paragraph indicates that change has to begin with practical changes and solutions that are visible. The decentralised nature of things should mean that changes are possible in some corner and if they're successful then they can grow out and expand until they either collapse under their own weight (most likely) or take a life of their own.
Sometimes it's easy to think the best solution is just to log off and go outside. To turn off the phone, read a book, go for a walk. This can be beneficial to some degree but the world is ruled by the internet now. I think we have to contend with this reality; in some sense I think we're trying to shape mainstream opinion which can be done but only to some extent and only so far as it doesn't contradict things they already believe. To that end we want to set out a positive vision of the world as it could be and proselytise that vision rather than focus too much on the negatives.
"Some men see things as they are and say why, I dream things that never were and say why not."