More people should be tending their "digital gardens" just to have something to curate and share. Bring back the weird, the odd, the deep-dives into topics you never imagined having such detail, bring back the strange animated GIFS, the websites always "under construction", give me your weird, give me your odd, this should be everyone's place to be free.
If you haven't checked out the "Surpise me" button on https://wiby.me I strongly suggest you do. These digital gardens are still out there even if sadly stuck in time.
How odd. My 3rd click, it brought me to news.ycombinator.com - exactly what brought me there in the first place and open in another tab. I was very confused as I assumed the tab had closed but no, it just appeared to be luck of the surprise.
I wonder how many of these things have data exports, would be great to get a list of all the URLs. I'd like to peruse them, and save them to archive.org.
I've used that button so many times to find things. I wish there was another directory that had the same unique feel but a bit more modernized. Wiby seems to be only one era or feel.
Nah, just been working on low level stuff and I haven't had the time to do a lot of the manual quality tuning that's always been necessary once in a blue moon.
Downside of being a one man show is I only have so much attention to spend on tasks, so sometimes quality tuning gets a bit neglected.
I was just thinking today that I should just start posting my stuff on a personal site. Photos, blogs, life updates, etc.
It gives me that control that I want, and I don't have to worry about Meta, etc trying to monetize it. Plus I get to unplug from those "n liked your post" dopamine hits.
I don't really share anything I make/do on the internet but I've found posting my photography on a personal site feels pretty good even if I don't expect anyone to ever see it there. Recently I made a /now page and even started blogging infrequently - again, there are likely 0 viewers, but there's some pride in knowing I've staked out a corner of the internet for myself.
People, especially the younger generations, are already too cynical. A lot of them don't seem to believe anyone does anything on the Internet except to make money. I find that profundly depressing.
I think that's wrong. Loads of my mates are 18-24 and many don't realise how basically all the "Hey look at this cool useless cheap crap" vids are all just ads. They even buy that crap, was no signal to think about it without being reminded to think about it.
I would encourage it. A few years ago, I started a site/blog on both Web and Gemini. I mostly keep track of projects I build, books I read, some interesting events, and some cheatsheets and links I revisit a lot. Writing things down definitely keeps me more motivated, and it is nice to look back in time and reflect occasionally.
And I made the site simple and contrary to current Web on purpose: plain HTML, no JS, no popups, only graphics are photos and diagrams.
My daughter asked me to set her up with a blog on her own server. We did it, and there is now a Hello World post somewhere out there on the web. But it wasn't a good experience, compared to what I know posting on Instagram is like. And that's just on the publishing side. The chances of her site being even indexed, let alone visited, is tiny.
It's surprising* that rolling your own on the web has gotten harder, not easier, in the last 20 years. But it has.
*Surprising in the narrow sense that technology usually improves. I know all too well why lone sites don't do well on the web.
But why care about whether your daughter's site is indexed. Share it with friends and if there is actually interesting content on there they will share it further. This whole idea that search engines are the be all and end all of being on the web and once you have visitors you need to somehow capture them is a big part of what is wrong with the web IMO. I much prefer a more organic web where people put themselves out there and don't worry much about it becoming popular or worse, profitable. Do it for yourself or a select group of people you actually know and can interact with, not faceless Referrer: google visitiors.
Part of the fun of publishing is having readers. But even if you're OK nominating specific readers rather than letting anonymous ones find you, you wouldn't believe how skills like clicking a link have atrophied. You can send someone a URL, and they won't actually click on it because it arrived on their phone, they wanted to look at it on a laptop (because it's your kid's grandma who can't see well anymore), and they can't remember how to scroll back in SMS history, let alone send themselves a link.
So what do they do instead? They type <granddaughter's name> into their browser, and then call me asking if they should buy McAfee because the computer says they have a virus.
I agree that search engines are not the only way to reach content on the web (web != social networks). But for most people today, they are.
Well, anything in current social networks is also impossible to find. It is made for ephemeral content, if it goes viral, you get tons of likes. If not, it might as well never have existed.
The number of clicks required to get to that one click is quite high. The competition is Instagram, which actually has a negative number of clicks to get going (they won't let you continue browsing without an account).
This is purely my personal philosophy but I view that, ultimately, my validation is when I'm happy with my actions, position in life, and personal accomplishments.
I love sharing those with friends and family. But I hate the opaque algorithms on social media sites that are tuned to prioritize engagement & time spent on the service. I find that these algos are rewarding rage bait due to their engagement farming.
Sharing with those that I want to share with, in an environment free of algorithms and capitalistic intentions provides that validation. And having a random site visitor here and there who enjoys what I have to say is just icing on the cake.
As I get older, I realize that we were never meant to have 10,000 people looking at what we ate for lunch, or the mess our cat made while we were at work. Interactions like that back in the 1500s would have made us more influential than Kings. A close-knit community that cherishes the expression of all our oddities, curiosities, and hobbies is something that just can't be replicated in current social media.
I've thought about building personal site, but the opportunity cost is just too high. The time I spend making a site has to come from somewhere and there just isn't anything I do that I want to take time from.
A personal site should be personal, in the sense that the things you share are things you value and the only value derived from it is from sharing what you value with other. That's why personal sites are the ones that are easy to tell apart. Personal should be personal, otherwise it is simply trying to establish a professional profile.)
Of course, if you have no interest in sharing your passions, don't do it. Your free time is valuable and you should only use it for things that you value.
That's perfectly fair. In my own case, blogging has changed how I conduct my hobbies, for the better. They say you don't understand something until you have to explain it to someone else. It has made my projects more robust, and often simpler, and the process has helped me uncover mistakes. I'm not sure that it has actually come with a cost. The mechanics are trivial thanks to GitHub and of course Git.
Just picked up on what GP did first. I'm one of those weird people who listen to albums more than singles, so I don't always know what's a deep-cut. Deja Vu is in regular rotation for me. Country Girl is the only track I'm tempted to skip on that whole album.
Jimi Hendrix "If 6 was 9", 1967: "If all the hippies cut off all their hair
I don't care, I don't care... White collar Windows users, flashin down the street pointing their plastic finger at me, hoping soon my kind will drop and die: I'm gonna wave my freak flag high!"
As much as I like "digital gardens" and think that they are a step in the right direction, rewilding requires much more than cultivating lots of isolated patches of ground - the article even mentions a nature reserve which was "too small and too disconnected to be rewilded. Its effectively landlocked status made over-grazing and collapse inevitable".
They'd be discoverable by search or linking. The distributed web is compatible with feeds. It's what's happening on this site too. Except the content would be packaged and redistributable and wouldn't disappear when the original service goes down or such.
Sure, but (gen-pop) search itself has been degraded / hijacked beyond recognition compared to two decades ago, and walled gardens heavily discourage linking. Factor in that most people access internet from devices designed to consume in very specific ways from a controlled list of sources and we may as well be lamenting that nobody's finding the one physical copy of your book that's sitting on a shelf in a brick and mortar library in Omaha.
It feels like a chicken and egg problem to me -- realistically you need to meet people where they're at and appeal to the current channels' algorithms to get your content discovered, but in doing so you also reinforce the strength of the walled garden itself and participate in the diminishment of both search and the "wild" internet at large.
Mhh dunno, I don't think it helps to think about the unfortunates stuck to their media feed at this stage. Might as well make the dweb about something us nerds want. It's gonna be good... and then it'll be about keeping the parasites out that live off that cultural capital.
Something durable, censorship-resistant, network-agnostic, optionally trust-based. Maybe a bit of IPFS + i2p + content-adressable, composable, cross-linkable, multimedia documents + federated services? I feel the components already mostly exist actually...
I remember when they were on the agenda path to eliminate gifs. You'd see posts on hacker news written by Giffy, a company seeking to make its existence justified by getting rid of gifs, all over hacker news.
When I would say: This is a terrible idea, they just want to control and own the content. a gif you own, a gif you can download and so what ever you wanted, etc. boy was I down voted into oblivion.
One of the reasons for this is many posts aren't on hacker news by accident, they are hidden advertisements. Chances are, you got the karma to downvote people. Just starting off at -1 is a disadvantage.
You can try it too: just disagree with what an article says in the comments, 99% of the time you will be downvoted. Agree and you get free karma. This is not always the case, but generally is.
It’s the opposite. Being contrarian is free karma, generally. The downvotes come from picking unpopular positions, whether you’re wright or wrong. I used to get downvoted a lot when talking to people about privacy, but now those sorts of posts get upvotes. Times and prevailing opinions change
I think it's getting harder to "be your own person" digitally.
For example, host your own mail.
Do people host their own webservers anymore? (is a VPS is good enough?)
IRC? muds?
The rise of smartphones made "computing" accessible to everyone, but people can't actually compute.
Computers used to come with a language. You could write your own programs and run them from the getgo. You didn't have to ask permission to digitally sign your own program and run it.
Ugh, yeah, good luck on this one. You can get by quite well using one of the major providers as an (outbound-only, if desired) gateway though.
> Do people host their own webservers anymore? (is a VPS is good enough?)
Yes and yes but mostly it's Docker hell
> IRC? muds?
They're both still around, albeit a shadow of their former selves. IRC is better than ever, use a client like The Lounge and it's basically(*) a modern chat app.
(* Okay, stuff like multi-line and message editing are still effectively missing, but you get embeds and whatnot)
It would disappear anyway. All those personal webpages will be lost in time, like images hosted on long-dead servers and phpbb forums.
"Internet never forgets" is one of these naive fairytales we told ourselves when we were young and internet was new, along with "information wants to be free", "censorship on the internet is impossible", and "easy access to information helps democracy".
I prefer open web for sentimental reasons, but I don't think it's naturally better at preserving the information than walled gardens.
> It would disappear anyway. All those personal webpages will be lost in time, like images hosted on long-dead servers and phpbb forums.
Some will disappear. Others are maintained, sometimes by third parties. Many of them are on web.archive.org. Yes, we should build better solutions to retain random personal webpages but the sitations isn't really that dire.
> "Internet never forgets"
This has alwasy been in the context of things you want the internet to forget and it still holds true.
> "information wants to be free"
And it does - once something leaks it is hard to put it back into the bag.
> "censorship on the internet is impossible"
I don't recall this claim but depending on how you look at things isn't really wrong: Is there any kind of information that you can't find on the internet because someone wants to hide it? Yes, some parts of the web are censored but remember the internet is not just the web and even on the web highly controversial websites can cling to life.
> "easy access to information helps democracy"
It does. Most people do not have easy access to information, at best they have a highly curated selection that the media wants them to see. They could avail themselves to the full picture but are conditioned not to.
Misinformation wants to be free just as much as information. Removing information is the wrong strategy, because internet makes publishing information so much easier. And bitrot+time will effectively remove the information for you if you just make people look elsewhere for long enough.
So you just put out 10 different lies for every truth you want to cover. Most people won't be bothered to check what is actually true. Human attention span is the limiting factor of modern world, not the access to information. Lying to people is easier than ever before in history, so democracy is in fact getting worse over time.
A forum for my car just went dark. Gone are not quite 20 years of posts and discussions that I've searched many times over while troubleshooting mine or in preparation for some job that needed to be done.
I made this discovery after going to post a novel solution for getting into the hood with a seized hood release in hopes that it might spare someone else some trouble in the future.
All things are not in the moment. Sometimes it's good to learn from the past.
It makes me wish for forums where posts and comments are automatically synced and cached locally. Then everyone has a copy in case it closes down, and someone could use the content to bootstrap a replacement.
Note, that isn't the same as an ambitious fully federated mesh network or anything, but being limited in certain ways makes it efficient and easier in others.
The current moment is great if you never need to find an old book, fix an old car, fix an old house, identify an old variety of plant, or any of a thousand other things. Basically, if you have no other interests, responsibilities, or desires other than fads, like a child. That's fine. Otherwise, there are decades of useful experience of large groups of human out there to be mined. It can often save you thousands of dollars, but then again, that's something only a grown-up cares about.
Funnily, the walled garden often gives people the impression that it is not walled but in fact infinite. I‘m always shocked at how many people don‘t realize how little information is accessible on the internet anymore. Yes, as soon as you need something that isn‘t faddish/of the immediate current moment (especially if you‘re not trying to buy something), the internet fails. There is so much useful info that is extremely difficult to find online these days.
> I‘m always shocked at how many people don‘t realize how little information is accessible on the internet anymore.
Any millennial or nerdy Xer with a good memory would tell you what the deal is. We were the first ones who came of age online, and saw what the Internet was like when it came to prominence. Now, our libraries, town halls, and weird gardens are all ash. Try to surf like you did in 2010 and all you'll see is spam; the filters work in reverse now. Log in to what "social media" is these days (after filling in your phone number and uploading your driver's license) and it's just cable TV with some extra widgets.
I think the point is that passively feeding your content to a profit engine actually limits your opportunities vs a modicum of agency over how you want to share your knowledge and experiences. If you honestly don't care about anything beyond your tiktok feed, that's fine, but there is interest out there in a longer time envelope of cultural production.
Sometimes. I stumbled across somebody’s 20+-year-old collection of deep musical analyses of early Chicago songs. That same material on Twitter/Facebook/Discord/whatever is going to be inaccessible.
I'd be interested in a link. Live At Carnegie Hall was my paper-writing music in college. I discovered later that I don't much care for it when I don't have anything else occupying my mind. I'm unsure if it's because there isn't really that much to the songs of if I'm missing some nuance and complexity that makes them worth another listen.
Ironic you post this because I just rediscovered a 20yo blog post that I remembered reading, re-read it again and found it very motivating and inspiring and submitted it.
I’m somewhere in the middle on this. These communities are real, and the value of the content shared by users is real.
On the one hand, I prefer the old open web. On the other, I can’t deny the existence and value of these walled gardens. The wall doesn’t erase the value, even if I strongly prefer there wasn’t a wall to begin with.
To your point, discord comes with downsides, and does raise questions about the longevity of the content. Most of the old web disappeared too.
I think that in order to have any hope of returning to something more open and public on a wider scale, it’s necessary to understand why these communities are thriving on discord. I don’t have the answer to that question, but I suspect that the wall is actually a benefit to some.
This is always multiply determined, but part of the answer is that Discord and these other walled gardens are subsidized by VC funding with the expectation that at some point they'll turn on the garbage compactor and squeeze out the juicy value.
As sibling comment got at - the wall is a benefit because it's how they can justify raking in large investments to burn through while loss-leading for up to a decade (or two! just look at Google) before turning the screws on the user. If they just turned the screws without a wall their users would flee and they'd go under. With a wall, their users are stuck in by network effects, FOMO, etc.
I have been doing so for a long time, but man, hosting costs are rising, and they really don't give me much storage to host community functionality at all. :|
Consider caching to reduce hosting costs. If you are patient, consider static site generators. The latter made running a website so much simpler. There is virtually no maintenance left to do.
...these things still exist. They are not surfaced by search engines, because they are too small, and no companies are paying the search engines to do so. Most people stay inside their social network bubbles and never look at regular websites outside them.
TikTok is probably the easiest way for any average person to put content on the internet. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are still more intimidating than "point phone and hit record". Because it is so easy to put something on TikTok more people than every are posting things to the world (not just to friend/family groups) than ever. The content I comes from people who range in age from teenage to retiree, from every country, profession, and economic group. TikTok also has a discovery mechanism that gives every video a chance to get at least some views. I've seen videos that only have a dozen likes of a clutch of 5 robin eggs growing up and flying out of the next, videos on how to start a diesel locomotive, and marketing videos from a Chinese factory where "Roger" promotes his LED signs using English spoken in different American regional accents. My favorite videos recently are from "deeptok" (which, ironically, has gone pretty mainstream) of supremely obtuse, absurdist, random stuff like mulch wizard: https://www.tiktok.com/@patrick.lllll/video/7358144823108373...
Seems interesting but seems like tiktok dosen't like me. I clicked the link and all i got was some terrible hyper localized content youtube won't even recommend . But it's good to see newcomers to get chance . The search seems awful i search some stuff in english and it showed me unrelated content. How is it dethroning youtube ?
Search on TikTok is really not good. The only way is letting the algorithm do its thing and soon it’ll show you content that interests you (which is content you liked or spent more time watching etc.).
It has no interest in offering you exactly what you want, it wants to maximize your time “hoping” the next video will be very good, which eventually happens (if you sunk enough time).
