It's not just nostalgia

[Daniele63]

A thought I had for some time (sorry if it's not super cohesive.)

I think very often when the Indie web is discussed, a word thrown a lot is nostalgia.
Sometimes people say those communities only exist because of that nostalgia and that we're just trying to relive le "good ol days".

But I think that if a lot of us are embracing old web / older styles is not nostalgia, it's because it's just better than the bloated, impersonal garbage we have in the 2020s. I've never had so much fun on the web than I had by creating my website, participating in forums, or discussing in antiquated chatting protocols and chatrooms, why should I give that up? I never experienced the days of GeoCities, but I appreciate what it is on a fundamental level: a collection of personal websites where I could glimpse what a person thought about, their ideas, their passions, and I appreciate forums for offering true freedom and data ownership.

Even the old Web 1.0 style to me is more stimulating and appealing than the flat, AI-ridden websites that all look the same.

To make an analogy with the real world, I can be in love with an architectural style from 300 years ago, that doesn't mean I'm personally stuck in the past and refuse to move on, why must I embrace Brutalist architecture if it looks horrible and makes me depressed? Some things were just better before.

There's nothing wrong in preferring an older visual style for the web, especially when it's still so young, yet tech bros will shame you if you build anything that doesn't look like the other 1 gazillion Wordpress sites or AI slop that exist. Do you see the problem?


So for me the Indie Web is not about being stuck in the past, it's about creating a better present/future, we're just embracing parts of the past because they were great things. I can like an old chatting protocol like IRC not because of nostalgia but because it's superior at what it does to bloated alternatives like Discord.

I'd like to know, what do you think is the role of nostalgia in this movement?
And, what do you think of people calling websites like this one nostalgia-bait?

[Noah_S]

If it was only nostalgia there wouldn't be so many young people here

[lakes]

Well, I think nostalgia still plays a role in it for a lot of people, myself included. But I can acknowledge that and still say part of why I'm drawn to it is as a way of distancing myself from big tech. After all, I was gradually getting into FOSS before indie web stuff & now I'm on Linux, use a bunch of messaging protocols instead of just Discord, etc.
I don't think everything modern tech does is bad to be clear. Things like better sandboxing, adding built-in adblockers & tracker blockers to browsers, etc are all good things. And as much as I hate cryptocurrency, sometimes it's useful if you just wanna keep your purchases private (like a lot of DIY HRT guides tell you to buy cryptocurrency for example), depending on how you go about it. But I think a big part of why people are here is that big tech isn't doing as good a job pretending to serve its customers anymore. For example, corporations didn't have to push smartphones into everything when they were 1st built. They just marketed them and people wanted to buy them for better or worse. Now it's like they're trying to push LLMs into everything AND some news outlets are even trying to make Flock Cameras in the USA into a culture war issue despite it being something pretty much all US citizens agree is bad. I think the idea that you could force the public to adopt a technology in places where it was utterly useless or worse than useless was NFTs, but I could be wrong.

[Dan Q]

@Noah_S has hit the nail on the head.

Nostalgia

Me? I am nostalgic about the old, old Web. Even back to the point at which it was, objectively, a bit shit: I'm talking about the time when the best browser would never run more than four simultaneous connections (try downloading an image gallery like that!), when we used directories because search was no good yet, when there was no CSS and even images and tables didn't have 100% support, when there were no debuggers so if something didn't work you just had to keep tweaking it and refreshing until it did... even then, there was something magical about the Web as a platform, and I loved it.

It hit its stride in under a decade and it felt like everybody who was anybody had a homepage. Some of us even had "weblogs". And creativity ran rampant. Despite the confines of the limited elements, even-more limited CSS, and yet-more-still limited browser compatibility... people did absolutely amazing things. Webcomics like Argon Zark showed us how a new medium can provide new storytelling opportunities. Innovators leaned into fledgling audio technologies and brought us something that would nowadays be called a "podcast" but back then didn't yet have a name. Forums and chat rooms were vibrant and lively and fundamentally human. And for a generation that grew up with computing being a lonely, isolating experience, it was incredibly freeing and liberating to find "your people" everywhere you looked.

The Indieweb

When I started doing Indieweb things... and, if I'm honest, I've probably always being doing Indieweb things, even before the word existed... and when I started hearing about "web revivalism" and the "smolweb" and so on... I expected it to be... well... I expected it to be full of old farts like me! Nostalgic luddites, fighting against the faceless insincerity of the big social networks by sticking to our guns like we always had: making stuff that reminded us of when the Web was fun until, gradually, we became outdated and irrelevant and the Web died.

But that's not what I found. I was absolutely gobsmacked to discover that these Web revivalist spaces... are full of young people! Sure, there's older folks like me (and plenty much older still), but the movement is alive and buzzing with the vibrancy and energy and optimism and idealism of a generation that were too young to remember the early Web.

That gives me enormous hope. It makes me so proud to be part of something that's got the potential to live forever. The Web is ours. It belongs to us: the humans who live on it. It does not belong to the corporations. It does not belong to the governments. It certainly does not belong to the robots. It belongs to real, living, breathing humans with whom you can make a genuine connection regardless of distance. It belongs to the artists and the poets and the diarists and the musicians, to the videographers and the hobbyists and the explorers and the collectors. And, crucially, it belongs to young and old alike.

Hope and pride

Every single time I find a personal website belonging to somebody born after, say, 1997 or so - somebody who was younger than seven, or not even born, when Facebook was invented, I guess! - it makes me feel hopeful for our future. Not just our future as Netizens (a word popularised in about 1995 and that I'm not willing to let go of!)... but our future as a species. Because standing up for a space that we all share - a space that transcends borders and brings us together, and that we shape together - is a fundamentally hopeful activity. It says "no" to the people who want to profit off our attention. It says "no" to being pitted against one another. Instead, it says "let's build something together".

And that's just fucking beautiful.


So a huge thank you to every single one of you that's young enough that you don't remember the Web the way I do... but punk enough to bring it back anyway. I love the Web you're creating.

(Wow, this got all mushy and sentimental. That wasn't what I intended when I started typing! Sorry!)

[rnottelovesowls]

my theory with modern tech is that corporations don't want us to have any fun. that's why the big tech products' customization options are only, "pick light or dark mode. now pick an avatar and wallpaper. now here's an emoji keyboard. take it or leave it." and where's the fun in that? where's the whimsy? the heart and soul? the only modern tech product that seems to have any "whimsy" in is it LLMs... and we all know how much people love those...

i don't know what changed. did the whole tech world collectively decide that colors other than black, white, and blue are only for kids? they're so boooooooring. it's a far cry from the classics of microsoft plus!, after dark, frutiger aero, and clear colored game boys. remember the flying toaster screensaver? remember the underwater windows 98 desktop theme? i believe that's what indie web netizens are most concerned about: they just want technology to be fun again. because if we aren't living to have fun, then what are we living for?

[lakes]

my theory with modern tech is that corporations don't want us to have any fun. that's why the big tech products' customization options are only, "pick light or dark mode. now pick an avatar and wallpaper. now here's an emoji keyboard. take it or leave it." and where's the fun in that? where's the whimsy? the heart and soul? the only modern tech product that seems to have any "whimsy" in is it LLMs... and we all know how much people love those...

i agree, but i won't say it's completely lost. there are a few new-ish customization features like for example, a lot of browsers have added the ability to add vertical tabs instead of horizontal ones. people attribute this to zen browser, but i think vivaldi was the 1st to have this feature. some open source android apps also still let you choose a color for your theme, but even then it's limited to like, 1 color + dark/light mode and that's it.

[KeyJayHD]

I do think nostalgia plays a large part of the zeitgeist surrounding IndieWeb. Personally what drew me into it was less the look and more the intent around decentralized control over ones own web presence. I've been self hosting and have been a filthy sailor for a while now and the more that I sink my time into social, the more I begin to see how much I hate it and how sick it's been making me. Honestly it's insanity at this point; constantly refreshing each feed expecting something to be interesting or different enough for me to stay even longer than I should. More times than ever before, I just get pissed on some reactionary content that was planted there for my engagement; hook line and sinker.

Personally I will say though that I am more of a fan of aspects of modern design (not the blocky structured lifeless crap that has proliferated the web) and I tend to try to lean more modern though still trying to learn and make things interesting. But after browsing many sites through places like NeoCities, even though I know in the back of my mind that, "My god, this is a mobile compatibility and limited bandwidth nightmare" or "I'd probably never do this for a client", I also can say that with many sites I've run into there, many are visually interesting or stunning in their own sometime incredibly cool ways! Even with some of the more simple interesting ones they'll make me right click -> inspect with me asking, wait, how the heck did they do this and lay this out? While not always practical, still can be very interesting to learn from.

All in all, I think the goal of ones personal IndieWeb is...I guess to make the web that you want to live in, however way you want to make and experience it, and not let anyone tell you how you are supposed to experience and enjoy it. You can be nostalgic, you can be modern, you can be super retro, you can give the finger to mobile devices entirely, heck, pump up your site with full BMP images with free floating gifs everywhere for all I care and throw every modern web design convention out the window. Point is, It's yours Doesn't mean I'll like it or all of it, but it deserves a voice none the less.

[Dan Q]

a lot of browsers have added the ability to add vertical tabs instead of horizontal ones. people attribute this to zen browser, but i think vivaldi was the 1st to have this feature

Actually, vertical tabs predate Vivaldi by fifteen years! To the best of my knowledge they were first implemented in a browser with the same founder, though! Vertical tabs first appeared in... Opera 4.0 in the year 2000.

Look, I spun up a Windows XP box and used it, by way of demonstration. Look at my tabs down the left-hand side:

(In fact, while the forum was sleeping I wrote a whole blog post about the history of vertical tabs and why they're so great, inspired by your post!)

[lakes]

Actually, vertical tabs predate Vivaldi by fifteen years! To the best of my knowledge they were first implemented in a browser with the same founder, though! Vertical tabs first appeared in... Opera 4.0 in the year 2000.

Look, I spun up a Windows XP box and used it, by way of demonstration. Look at my tabs down the left-hand side:

(In fact, while the forum was sleeping I wrote a whole blog post about the history of vertical tabs and why they're so great, inspired by your post!)

Damn! I guess it was because I didn't even know Opera existed at the time and thus didnt really experience it for myself. But it makes sense because Vivaldi is supposed to be like older versions of Opera except using Chromium.