From The Superhighway - an indie web newsletter

[ajazz]

hey all! started this project a while ago, but i'm just getting around to posting it!

in september, i started a project called From The Superhighway, which is a monthly newsletter that provides curated recommendations from the indie web! every month, i write about several interesting projects that i find surfing the superhighway, and i also include a featured interview with a notable artist, developer, or contributor to the space - including folks like the baristas down at 32bit.cafe and His Majesty himself, melonking!

the thing that inspired me to create it was having convos with irl friends about the indie web - whenever i'd find something and share it with them, they were always astonished and surprised that cool things still exist on the internet outside of social media. of course, that's not big news to present company, but it underscored for me that there was a need for an outlet targeted at folks who weren't already aware of what was happening on the frontiers of the digital world, and the reactions to FTS have been overwhelmingly positive so far.

for november i interviewed catarinha, the mind behind the hand-drawn choose your own adventure game i-land. i'm putting things together for the december issue, but i'm always open to recommendations from anywhere - especially for potential interview subjects i could talk to in the future! looking forward to hearing what y'all think

[Turboblack]

I think that this is a very good idea,
and the more interesting projects there are, the better.
I also need to talk about something ))) that's why the magazine exists,
and other projects, such as hosting, we are slowly gathering a decent community.
We are growing. There are very few new cool projects on the Internet now.
That's why I sincerely wish you good luck.
It's a lot of work to mine and write about what you've mined.
I've seen it for myself

[wodaro]

I just read your most recent newsletter, what a wonderful project! I had actually never heard of i-land before and it looks so cool    thank you for sharing!! immediately signed up and subscribed to the RSS feed. I think having more places to share cool sites/artists/etc is always good!!  I agree with Turboblack, it's a lot of work putting together something like this, so thank you! I'll be sure to go back and read the other two issues, and stay posted for December's ^^

[BlazingCobaltX]

Exciting to see! I will subscribe through RSS. And an interesting idea to have a webring for patreons of the newsletter.

[ajazz]

hey folks - just dropped issue 4! i covered vertex meadow (an application that transforms 2D images into editable 3D environments), and interviewed max bradbury - an game dev that makes bite-sized and emotionally evocative games in the bitsy engine. you can read it here! (i also talked about gifypet but i figure nobody here needs an introduction to that lmao)

[Melooon]

you can read it here!

This was an enjoyable issue! I always think it's interesting how there is so much overlap between web revival culture and indie game making culture, yet they are also so separate! I always wonder if its to do with the nature of a traditional game (being a solo, encapsulated experiences) verses a website (being a never finished, linked experience) ~ Iv always wanted to find ways to bridge that gap; so its good to see interviews with people who work in both worlds.

I wonder if in a distant post-browser world, people might buy access to web worlds in a steam like store where you download a per-website micro browser... thats both dystopian but also interesting as a way that web crafters could make a living like game designers do.

[ajazz]

This was an enjoyable issue! I always think it's interesting how there is so much overlap between web revival culture and indie game making culture, yet they are also so separate! I always wonder if its to do with the nature of a traditional game (being a solo, encapsulated experiences) verses a website (being a never finished, linked experience) ~ Iv always wanted to find ways to bridge that gap; so its good to see interviews with people who work in both worlds.

you're right that the overlap has been pretty big - a lot of the folks i've stumbled upon have presences of some kind in the game dev world. a lot of the work of designing a meaningfully "explorable" and highly-interactive website is basically the exact same kind of work that indie devs have to do, just with a different input paradigm (and, of course, the need to target arbitrary display sizes)

I wonder if in a distant post-browser world, people might buy access to web worlds in a steam like store where you download a per-website micro browser... thats both dystopian but also interesting as a way that web crafters could make a living like game designers do.

maybe this is a big enough topic for its own thread, but my view is that the future of the web is for creative communities and projects to become pay-to-access (or at the very least pay-to-sustain), because the alternative - being sold as the product and being served ads - has proven so wildly unsustainable and destructive. itch.io is already pretty far along the path of making this sort of thing possible. there's vanishingly little in the way of slapping an i-frame in there and going to town (at least as far as i'm aware).