What would a future web revival be like?

[Catonator]

Weird title. Explaining it will take a moment, so let me get straight to the business. The web revival, to me, is in trouble. Because it's not a real movement. At least to most people.

Sorry, sounds a little mean. But I'm willing to bet most of the younger users here are attracted more because of the "old web aesthetic" than actually using the internet the same way people would've back in the day. That's also what defines the nature of nostalgiabait sites like Bitview, Owler and Spacehey - it's a surface-level dip into the internet without actually forcing people to commit to using the internet in a slower and more methodical manner. It's a novelty gimmick vaguely dressed in 2000s internet, like this meme:



The only thing that looked like that in 2009 was my monitor after it fell off my desk and broke.

Anyway, my point is, for the web revival to actually become a reality, it needs to grow its own identity and culture beyond "hey, remember neocities?," a point which I've seen a few others echo here in response to some of the sites I listed above. I think there is a definite desire for a lot of people to leave social media and instead use something more human-friendly and sustainable like forums, but I don't think the people who aren't either nostalgic about it or excited about this old internet trend because of its aesthetics (the 'I was born in the wrong generation' folk, if you will) are willing to jump back to old sites as easily.

I've been prototyping around with an idea based on Mastodon: a forum system, where each forum is self-hosted and limits its discussions to whatever topic the forum owner wants, but you can transfer your account from one forum to another and thus jump around from forum to forum a little more easily. But it's only my guess on how the web revival of the future could be.

Therefore, what do you think the web revival of the future would be? What kind of forum or - for the lack of a less dodgy term - service do you think would combine modern amenities with the nature of how discussions used to work online the best? And perhaps, do you think such an idea would take flight at all?

[ajazz]

trying to be careful here because i don’t want to come off as overly hostile, but i think your analysis of the current state of things is pretty wildly off the mark.

Sorry, sounds a little mean. But I’m willing to bet most of the younger users here are attracted more because of the “old web aesthetic” than actually using the internet the same way people would’ve back in the day.

i will first fully concede the point that subcultures need to pay attention to the way that their aesthetics are commodified by hegemonic power, but i don’t really think that mainstream tech is really trying to do that with the web revival yet, and i think that is because web 1.0 aesthetics are just uniquely difficult for silicon valley to co-opt. for better and for worse, they’re usually wildly irregular in structure, often deliberately hostile to mobile devices, and unfriendly to advertisers. furthermore, the diversity and irregularity of web 1.0 aesthetics was more than just superficial - it is a huge part what made “surfing the web” into a perpetually compelling and novel activity, and it is a large part of what silicon valley and the web 2.0. paradigm intentionally suppressed in an effort to appeal to advertisers. wanting to build spaces that emulate web 1.0 aesthetics is a totally valid reason to want to participate in web revival, and i don’t agree at all that younger people being motivated that means in any way that we’re in “trouble”.

but even beyond that, i also think you’re bizarrely confident about your (at least in this post) totally unsubstantiated theories about why younger folks are attracted to the old web and how they’re engaging with it. a huge number of the most extraordinarily motivated contributors to indie web spaces are younger than me - a person who was already a small child during the days of web 1.0 - so their engagement with it cannot be tied up with nostalgia, because many of those younger people were born after web 1.0 was long dead in the ground. it doesn’t seem to me that they are just doing a “surface-level dip.”

if you want to actually know why young people are participating in the web revival, you can just ask them - or better yet, read their about pages. the reasons i typically see are the ones you’d expect from anyone of any age: distrust of social media companies, desire for a more personally-curated online presence, and freedom from algorithmic pressures. there are highly-paid teams of the most talented engineers and behavioral scientists in the world dedicating billions of dollars a year to pressure children into surrendering to the mainstream social media paradigm. the fact that any of them have independently decided to start posting on esoteric forums and making neocities shrines to their ocs in spite of that - in not-insignificant numbers, no less - is not an indicator we’re in trouble. if anything, it means we’re in an extraordinary growth period.

The only thing that looked like that in 2009 was my monitor after it fell off my desk and broke.

wholeheartedly agreed, and that’s not a bad thing. there are plenty of technical, social, and structural aspects of that era that are best left in the past. the web revival is not, and should not try to be, a perfect replication of the internet circa 1998-2009. this is why i personally prefer cj the x’s term “web 1.5” to “web revival,” because it drives home the fact that we’re creating a synthesis of old and new.

Anyway, my point is, for the web revival to actually become a reality, it needs to grow its own identity and culture beyond “hey, remember neocities?,” a point which I’ve seen a few others echo here in response to some of the sites I listed above. I think there is a definite desire for a lot of people to leave social media and instead use something more human-friendly and sustainable like forums, but I don’t think the people who aren’t either nostalgic about it or excited about this old internet trend because of its aesthetics (the ‘I was born in the wrong generation’ folk, if you will) are willing to jump back to old sites as easily.

i am very confident that this is a total misunderstanding of the actual reasons why it’s difficult for people to jump into the web revival, and the reason i’m confident is because i’ve talked with many, many people irl about the current state of the mainstream web and the available alternatives.

first, a lot of people just straight up don’t know that the web revival is occurring, largely because silicon valley has corralled us onto five websites that are heavily policed and filtered by algorithms designed to contain their users. those that do - especially if they’re professional creatives or community-focused hobbyists - have platforms and networks that they’ve built up on mainstream social media platforms, and cannot in good conscience just give all of that up so that they can make a hand-coded blog or fanwiki. furthermore, the technical barrier to making even a simple, text-only website for most folks is not trivial for most folks, and because silicon valley (and hardware manufacturers) have abstracted away a lot of the inner-workings of networking and computing from the end-user, digital literacy is also at a truly dismal low (i frequently run into people who cannot zip and unzip files! working professionals!).

the fact that these immense barriers exist and that web revival spaces like this are not only extant but in many cases actively thriving is something to celebrate. i apologize if i’ve come off as harsh here but i really chafe against this kind of pessimism - i know you ended with what is in theory a productive question:

Therefore, what do you think the web revival of the future would be? What kind of forum or - for the lack of a less dodgy term - service do you think would combine modern amenities with the nature of how discussions used to work online the best? And perhaps, do you think such an idea would take flight at all?

…but to even ask it this way is to totally misread the situation. talking about the “future” web revival like this very heavily implies that the current one has “failed,” which is a deeply strange thing to say unless you thought that mainstream discontent with social media would automatically make people flock to the indie web in droves. obviously not, for all the reasons i’ve stated. it’s going to take work, lots of technical cooperation (i’ve seen very promising stuff going on over at 32bit.cafe lately), and individual initiatives to educate your friends, colleagues, and loved ones about how they can reorganize their digital lives in order to get to a point where we can present the web revival as a viable alternative space for artists, writers, hobbyists, etc. i do not think that cause is well-served by conversations that start with “[The web revival] is not a real movement.”

[xixxii]

hmmmmm, it seems like you have a pretty narrow definition in mind of what the "web revival" is or should be, although i'm not 100% sure; maybe it would be helpful to elaborate a bit on what you think it means! or what you mean by it in the context of this post. it's hard to have a discussion about the future of the web revival if i'm not sure what you're talking about when you say "the web revival" !

because it is already real; there are lots of people doing lots of different things that could be called web revival right now!    most of them aren't on melonland!
it seems like only some of them count as "real" aspects of the web revival to you, but i'm not sure which ones! is melonland "nostagliabait" like spacehey? what makes something specifically "nostalgiabait" rather than "real" ? what would make your mastodon-forum NOT a "novelty gimmick"?

there are lots of sites and subcultures of the personal/small/indie/whatever you want to call it-web that aren't based on emulating geocities or nostalgia already, so in what sense is it that you feel "the web revival" needs to "grow its own identity and culture"?
indieweb and lainchan and melonland and lemmy and nightfall city and the tildeverse (for example) all already have distinct identities and cultures and aesthetics. (just because the culture(s) is not to your liking doesn't mean it doesn't exist!)
do you mean that there should be more points of interconnection between the various subcultures that are part of the web revival, or that the web revival should move towards a more unified/centralized identity, or that the web revival as it exists on melonland specifically should change.....?

this specific slice of the web, melonland, is a hub of activity for the subculture of web revival that is pretty focused around "hey, remember geocities?" aesthetics; but it is one small subculture, not the entirety of the web revival. it's not really representative of "the web revival" any more than it is representative of "the web". (there are 1000 more blogs listed on ooh.directory than there are total users registered on this forum!)

i am not very good at communicating tone over text, so hopefully this doesn't come off as rude or argumentative! i am genuinely curious to know what idea of "the web revival" you have in mind for this discussion is.

[Melooon]

This falls into the trap that I see too frequently of people devaluing the power of aesthetics 

Aesthetics are not a window dressing or a trick! They are a fully formed language and way of thinking; aesthetics are a culture, and an action and an activity all in one. When cultures end, its not their politics, or there technologies or their religions that survive; its their aesthetics. For example: think of the Ancient Egyptians, I bet its their aesthetic language that you think of first, like their buildings or writing or tombs ~ even if you can never understand what those things really meant to their creators, you can aesthetically communicate with their way of thinking.

Aesthetic design is an expression of a deeper personal truth for an artist, its an exploration of their connections to the world and the things that matter about the world to them. Its the flow point between the internal and the external. For many people Spacehey is that kind of space, its an aesthetic playground and a place for personal rediscovery and reinvention.

In many web revival spaces, people tend think that, for the web revival to matter it needs to acquire some sort of underpinning of politics or technologies, to justify and validate its existence. This idea is absolutely false The day the web revival tries to adopt technology or politics is the day it will die ~ its almost the only movement that respects and honors the value of aesthetics and the power that design and art can have in peoples lives, and that's the most important thing to foster!

Additionally I've said it before, but the name "web revival" is quite different from "bringing back the old web"; the "revival" part is modeled on the Folk Revival, and is about recapturing the spirit of the past and reviving it into something new ~ Iv never found direct recreations of 90s sites to be interesting, what fascinates me is what that era of the web means to people, whether they lived in it or only know it as an aesthetic ~ both are just as valid!

On top of all that; right now, I feel that honoring aesthetics is a counterculture action ~ in an era were companies have no aesthetic value, and everything is flat minimal design intended for ease of programing; valuing aesthetics is actually one of the most radical and non-corporate things you can do.

All that is to say; I can see your passionate, and that's super and you should make your forum login system ~ and if its good and secure, we might even use it here! However, I think you have a bit to learn about humanity, art and the meaning of aesthetic spaces ~ you don't need to fight to justify the worth of things you love, simply loving them is proof that they always mattered in the first place. 

[Catonator]

Alright, fair enough; I'll admit that I probably worded my post a little less carefully than I could've. Sorry about that.

I'm not saying that the web revival is failed, in fact the fact that people are making their own sites and learning how to manage servers and post on forums is proof enough that it has been successful. I'm very happy that it exists at all! But, I have a small nagging fear about how the web revival will be, say, 10 years from now.

Contrast it to the synthwave trend, which ran from the late 2000s to the mid 2010s, and pretty much died before the 2020s. I wasn't born in the 80s, but I still enjoyed the music and visuals that came from that trend. But towards the end of the 2010s, I felt that the concept had ran its course and moved on to make and listen to other kinds of music. Aesthetic trends come and go, and there's not really much one can do about it.

So here's kind of what I was attempting to say before. I - emphasis on "I" here - worry that the web revival has attached itself too much to the aesthetics of the old web, when it can be (and is) so much more. The amount of freedom and meaning the internet has lost over the years has been truly staggering, and I'm very glad that some of it has been brought back. But, the interest in the old internet's look (be it neocities or early web 2.0 stuff like bitview) will most likely eventually run its course and people will find something new and fresh to be excited about. Will the web revival survive that, or will people lose interest in maintaining personal pages and forums with it? I hope not about the latter.

So the right way to word my question would've probably been, what would the future of web revival look like? I'm sure it will evolve eventually, as all things are always - frustratingly - moving. I'm only me, and I have a fairly limited understanding of the entire internet, so I can only think of what I've seen before. I'd like to hear if anyone else here has thought about the future and what it might bring, since it's always a fascinating topic to me.

i do not think that cause is well-served by conversations that start with “[The web revival] is not a real movement.”

...Yeah. I'll need to be more careful from here on out. Sorry.

first, a lot of people just straight up don’t know that the web revival is occurring, largely because silicon valley has corralled us onto five websites that are heavily policed and filtered by algorithms designed to contain their users. those that do - especially if they’re professional creatives or community-focused hobbyists - have platforms and networks that they’ve built up on mainstream social media platforms, and cannot in good conscience just give all of that up so that they can make a hand-coded blog or fanwiki. furthermore, the technical barrier to making even a simple, text-only website for most folks is not trivial for most folks, and because silicon valley (and hardware manufacturers) have abstracted away a lot of the inner-workings of networking and computing from the end-user, digital literacy is also at a truly dismal low (i frequently run into people who cannot zip and unzip files! working professionals!).

Yes. It's also I think why Owler, Spacehey et al. are drawing a lot of attention, which I don't see as a very good trend. More on that below.

Technical barriers can be ripped down with some new ideas and development. Most of the tech related to server upkeep is still mostly unchanged from the 90s. Perhaps the internet should work on finding some new solutions to making hosting and server management, as well as joining new communities easier, which is kind of what I was getting at with the mastodon-forum concept. Who knows. Hoping to see developments along that axis, since corporations are moving their own deployments to the cloud instead.

So far sites like this are channeling old methodologies with old technology, which I don't think needs to be the case necessarily. A forum could look like Discord (even if that would be a little sad) or feature auto-updating, or a WYSIWYG editor on the same page as the thread and be self-hosted for example, which might be a way to bridge the gap and let some of the people who want more freedom to jump over to the personal web.

it seems like only some of them count as "real" aspects of the web revival to you, but i'm not sure which ones! is melonland "nostagliabait" like spacehey? what makes something specifically "nostalgiabait" rather than "real" ? what would make your mastodon-forum NOT a "novelty gimmick"?

In retrospect, nostalgiabait is a strong word... perhaps I shouldn't write forum posts while listening to grunge albums, my tone seems to get out of hand. Anyway, I don't think Melonland is a novelty gimmick. This place has a purpose and its own community dedicated to it. Spacehey and Owler meanwhile, to me don't seem to have much other value than reliving memories of 2007. Or pretending than you were around back then. They don't really have anywhere to grow, other than where Myspace and Twitter/X are today. It's not as much taking inspiration from something old to mold your own creation as it is just doing the same thing again. Something something definition of insanity.

But in my experience, they are the spaces that have gatehered the most attention on social media, which I fear may lead users to think that nostalgia is the only value web 1.5 may have.

hmmmmm, it seems like you have a pretty narrow definition in mind of what the "web revival" is or should be, although i'm not 100% sure; maybe it would be helpful to elaborate a bit on what you think it means!

Probably true... The web revival to me is simply people making their own sites for discussion or sharing instead of using massive platforms and hoping the algorithm doesn't cast them aside. The personal internet has never lost its potential! I just feel like the new wave of personal web hasn't used even a fraction of it, and I really want to see more of it. That part makes me wonder about how far it will have grown over time.

Aesthetics are not a window dressing or a trick! They are a fully formed language and way of thinking; aesthetics are a culture, and an action and an activity all in one. When cultures end, its not their politics, or there technologies or their religions that survive; its their aesthetics. For example: think of the Ancient Egyptians, I bet its their aesthetic language that you think of first, like their buildings or writing or tombs ~ even if you can never understand what those things really meant to their creators, you can aesthetically communicate with their way of thinking.

Absolutely! It's just that, well... aesthetics are also contemporary. The look of the site in which I'll talk to people online in 2034 will inevitably be very different than the one I talk on in 2024. The reason there is a revival in 90s aesthetics is because 90s aesthetics went away, and it feels like a breath of fresh air to bring them back now.

But what you gain from having your own site and forum is way more than just aesthetic appeal. The excitement of 90s looks will eventually go away, and if the personal web goes away with it, it's a massive loss. I hope it won't happen, and I hope the personal web can change with the times instead of being bound by the times.

Whoops, this reply became really long. I will now wrap it up before any more replies come in... I can't really recall the last time I've been excited about something like I am about this new frontier of the internet, which also amplifies my worries about it. Living in the moment is still a little hard for me. Looking back at what I wrote now, I spent like 4 hours on the initial post and I think I ended up losing my own train of thought while editing it down since there's about 4 different ways it goes.

Sorry if the post still seems unintelligible... these are questions and thoughts I've had floating around in my brain for about 2 years, and it's taken me a very long time to find a way to ask them from people who are genuinely invested in reviving the web. Don't worry, I don't think clarifications or criticisms of the way I think are harsh. It's just a part of learning. And I still have a lot of it to do, I think...

[Melooon]

aesthetics are also contemporary

Well sorta! I do understand your worry ~ Things can be timeless and temporary; Aesthetics go though cycles of discovery, loss and rediscovery (in fact just about everything goes though those cycles) ~ For me, having been working with 90s inspired web design for nearing ten years now, its not fresh at all! However it is still a great touch stone to build from because 90s design was in flux; it had a lot of unknown potentials, so I'm still enjoying exploring those potentials.

I do agree if your only goal is to relive feelings from the past, then it will be a very short lived experience; its fine to start there, but you've gotta move into the realm of reinvention and new creation as part of that process for it to be meaningful.

I don't wanna be preachy, but it comes across a little like you're looking at the web revival on quite a surface level; and you're worried about a lack of depth that you cant see yet; but I assure you, as someone who's been in it for a long while; depth is something you learn when you stick with a hobby or art

The fear I have is that I wont live long enough to explore all the possible routs I can see tangling their way out of that simple core idea of returning to the starting point of the web and seeing what paths we didn't take!

The web revival will not survive, it will run it course and be forgotten and found again However the web will go on, and people will continue to make cool doodads! The goal of anything, is not to live forever, but to live for a while ~ aesthetics and movements included!

[wygolvillage]

I wouldn't worry too hard about poseurs.


The people who are only in it for the aesthetic aren't the ones immersing themselves in the subculture, they're the ones making memes about returning to 2009 and commenting "I wish the internet was still like this </3" under "webcore" screenshots.

The need to learn a new skill to "participate" in web crafting means the gate keeps itself (unlike, say, goth, where there are constant reminders to babybats to actually listen to the music). While there's certainly a lot of people who upload an about me and a manifesto page to their 90s aesthetic site and then don't know what to do next with their site, I think the fact that many people are willing to try and learn a different mode of living online is itself a success even if they're not "true believers". I dunno!

I see Web Revival less as a wide sweeping social movement that will change how everyone uses the net, but rather a set of values to improve your own online life, that will find you if it's right for you. The things that my subcultural identity in the Web Revival have done for me have improved the way I engage with things online and gave me a lot more creative drive; I'm an overall happier person than I was before I discovered it. It's more personal, an identity that encourages you to tend to yourself online. But if you come in expecting a "big movement changing the web as we know it" and then find a weird little community of hobbyists doing things that make them happy you might react like OP did.

[arcus]

Ideally, there would be more use of ActivityPub. But first, there needs to be more variety with the software available, and easy to understand documentation to make it more accessible to encorage adoption.

Is your ActivityPub project inspired by or a fork of Mastodon?

But, the interest in the old internet's look (be it neocities or early web 2.0 stuff like bitview) will most likely eventually run its course and people will find something new and fresh to be excited about. Will the web revival survive that, or will people lose interest in maintaining personal pages and forums with it? I hope not about the latter.

The Geocities aesthetic has been popular on Neocities since it started, so over ten years ago now. I can see the general aesthetic and various other nostalgic sites lasting for awhile for a number of reasons:

• Small GIFs have low file sizes.
• Free website hosts will likely stick to low filesize limits, to save on costs.
• Younger generations will keep making personal sites in waves, who want to experience something they missed out on.

So far sites like this are channeling old methodologies with old technology, which I don't think needs to be the case necessarily. A forum could look like Discord (even if that would be a little sad) or feature auto-updating, or a WYSIWYG editor on the same page as the thread and be self-hosted for example, which might be a way to bridge the gap and let some of the people who want more freedom to jump over to the personal web.

Check out Discourse, NodeBB (it has ActivityPub support,) and Knockout. They are modern takes on forums. 32-Bit Cafe have their own forum running Discourse, too.
 

[xixxii]

ahhh, i think i have a better grasp on what you mean now!

i definitely agree with melon on this point:

The web revival will not survive, it will run it course and be forgotten and found again However the web will go on, and people will continue to make cool doodads! The goal of anything, is not to live forever, but to live for a while ~ aesthetics and movements included!

nothing lasts forever! i think an important part of being online now and into the future is accepting that things don't have to last forever.
the web revival is what it is right now because that's what people want it to be. if people lose interest, that's fine! it isn't a thing that can or should exist independently of what people want or need from it.

i don't think there will ever be Literally Nobody making personal websites, though, and as long as people are making websites as a hobby, they'll find ways to clump together and build connections with each other over their shared hobby. that's how people are.

personally i think better interconnectedness and more sociability lies ahead! maybe it'll look like reinventing the wheel and a new cycle of social medias will bloom. but currently the main thing that i think is missing from the personal/indie/small/etc web is communication and connection.
i think the future of the web revival will have more webrings with forums and email lists and chatrooms attached, more events (in person AND online), more communal sharing of technical resources like servers and hosting, and more weird funky ways of surfing the web!
alternative search engines, directories, and stumbleuponlikes are already here, but i think they'll be even more so as time marches on.
i think the future ought to (and probably will) hold more willingness to actually engage with people where they are - less dramatically swearing off social media and more effort put into building bridges between different parts of the internet. posting things that are useful and weird all over the internet & not just in isolated hermit bubbles on the margins, fostering pleasant hobbyist communities in places where people are already gathered online, that sort of thing.

i think that the usefulness of personal websites is more obvious to people now than it has been in a long time! everybody is noticing that search engines are useless, and free generative ai tools has really ratcheted up the quantity of spam everybody is seeing on a day to day basis. human-curated links are extremely useful and valuable for everybody, as are big community message boards where you can ask people to help you find things. there is a growing contingent of people who want/need access to other people's websites. you don't need to be an architect or a city planner yourself to benefit from a bridge someone else has built for you!

probably in the future people will be nostalgic for squarespace templates and smooth css animations, and teenagers will be exchanging code snippets for "accept cookies" and "subscribe now" popups, and youtubers will be exploring the decaying husks of vrchat and facebook the way they do with dead MMOs, and the 30-somethings will be griping about how inaccurate and cringe the teens' ironic shrines to patriotic midjourney spam are.
oh, i bet people will be sooo nostalgic for google glass and hoverboards and we'll all be crotchedy oldtimers going "nooo nobody used google glass stop iiiiit!!  "

also, i think more people will probably get into small self-hosted servers powered by little solar panels like low-tech magazine! that's something that feels to me like it's almost easy and doable but it's just not quite there yet.

[Semper]

I've found this conversation to be very helpful. Though @Catonator has received some pushback on their original post, I am thankful for them sharing their concerns, because I was myself becoming a bit perplexed on what the Web Revival was or was on track to becoming. Now I understand better that first and foremost it is an art movement, per what Melon has said, and I think that is great.

Art movements have an important place in any wider movements around them, and the art speaks to what is happening materially or emotionally at the time. My more informed interpretation now that the Web Revival asks us to be more deliberate on how we are using the internet and how we are existing on it, through the crunchy and unrelenting aesthetics that demand that you embrace the bright colours, or a desktop screen, or incongruent design with each page in a site being its own unique world. It doesn't want us to forget ourselves, and in fact bring ourselves, as individual humans with our own tastes and thoughts and feeling, to the forefront rather than being lost in the samey platform timelines and profiles.

I also appreciate what both @Melooon and @xixxii have said about the Web Revival not existing forever, and how that is not a bad thing. I was only present for the tail end of one particularly popular indie web /neocities community closing down in 2023, and I think a lot of people who are now spread across Melonland and 32bit Cafe and any other small community that has sprouted from that original community's end are nervous about any future community deaths. But death isn't scary in the digital sense. Geocities has been preserved through the Internet Archive and Neocities has risen from those ashes with new fail-safes such as open source code.

I wonder what a new Web Revival would look like, and I agree with xixxii that it will likely morph and grow into something those of us at the beginning of this art movement will not recognize, or recognize in ways that will leave us scratching our heads in confusion. I even see some people today nostalgic for when AI art was the weird uncanny valley, almost dreamlike, smear concepts of the alien queen from the Alien franchise appearing on an episode or Seinfeld or at a Pride Parade, or older prompts like "Secret Horses."

Anyways, this was a long way for me to say that I now know how to engage with this community, and I look forward to future discussions on websites as art projects, and how those art projects break our conceptions of how a website should look or act, with more intention building behind those choices.

[Cobra!]

I don’t necessarily see the web revival as literally recreating the old days, which is the impression I get from the original post, but rather recreating the spirit of the old web, but using new technology and knowledge.

The things I’ve seen newer personal sites on Neocities do with CSS and Javascript are pretty amazing and not possible back in the 90s/2000s!

We even see some movies and music do something like this as well, I’m not talking about nostalgia bait movies, but works that are clearly inspired by classics, but have a new twist to them.

I’m very much into the homebrew community nowadays, and I see similarities between that and web 1.5. People don’t try to recreate the older style of games 1:1 on these older systems (Though what we do make tends to be close, both due to the hardware and that the anti-consumer practices in newer games aren’t very desirable), but rather they apply techniques learned since those days to push these systems to their limit, and I like to say that includes me.

I don’t think the web revival community will necessarily “die”. It may have times where it’s small, but I can’t see it fully going away. The particular tools and websites we use might, but assuming Internet Archive and similar sites stay up, that won’t matter so much. Vinyl records and cassette tapes never fully died, but there was a time where the communities for them were tiny, but they kept going. We see this with VHS now, it’s not dead, but it’s not very big either.

When most of the big social media platforms eventually go down, many of its posts will likely go with them, as they require log ins to even view them.
With forums, anyone can read posts, and will continue to after the forum goes down as they’ll be archived, and to me, that’s all that matters. Things change, but we have the ability to snapshot what has been now, ready to be revisited at any time.

I’m digressing. I think even those who are getting into Neocities and the like for the aesthetic still need to learn HTML, CSS and sometimes even Javascript to get a site fitting said aesthetic going, and knowing that skill can only be a good thing, right?

[Catonator]

I don’t necessarily see the web revival as literally recreating the old days, which is the impression I get from the original post, but rather recreating the spirit of the old web, but using new technology and knowledge.

See... In my initial post I was complaining a bit about the fact that the most visible projects are kind of the opposite. I don't mean to generalize, but I still feel like just a bit of that old community feel is missing.

I had a long thought about this while going about my business this week and, to me, the old internet wasn't really about personal pages as much as it was about forums and interesting forms of writing. Many of my favourite sites aren't really quite as personal. I really loved reading Old Man Murray, the video game review(?) site of Portal writer Erik Wolpaw and Tim Schafer's writings on the old Double Fine site, which used to be more of a comedy newssite than the site of a respectable game company.

Or forums which weren't just about serious discussions about a specific topic, but also full of increasingly strange cultures that'd produce just about anything as long as it was funny. I feel like an old man yelling at cloud about this one especially.

Perhaps the isolation of social media still weighs on the shoulders of those who have left it, and it'll take some time to mend those issues and for more sociality to pop up again. Or perhaps it's weighing on my shoulders and I just haven't looked hard enough to find those places.

personally i think better interconnectedness and more sociability lies ahead! maybe it'll look like reinventing the wheel and a new cycle of social medias will bloom. but currently the main thing that i think is missing from the personal/indie/small/etc web is communication and connection.
i think the future of the web revival will have more webrings with forums and email lists and chatrooms attached, more events (in person AND online), more communal sharing of technical resources like servers and hosting, and more weird funky ways of surfing the web!
alternative search engines, directories, and stumbleuponlikes are already here, but i think they'll be even more so as time marches on.
i think the future ought to (and probably will) hold more willingness to actually engage with people where they are - less dramatically swearing off social media and more effort put into building bridges between different parts of the internet. posting things that are useful and weird all over the internet & not just in isolated hermit bubbles on the margins, fostering pleasant hobbyist communities in places where people are already gathered online, that sort of thing.

I sure do hope so! Some great strides being made there already, and I'm finally seeing some new internet inventions made by people that aren't from startups! There was some really nifty search engine besides yify that I forgot to bookmark annoyingly, but some methods of finding your way through sites that are actually worth reading are popping up. And so are webrings.

I see Web Revival less as a wide sweeping social movement that will change how everyone uses the net, but rather a set of values to improve your own online life, that will find you if it's right for you. The things that my subcultural identity in the Web Revival have done for me have improved the way I engage with things online and gave me a lot more creative drive; I'm an overall happier person than I was before I discovered it. It's more personal, an identity that encourages you to tend to yourself online. But if you come in expecting a "big movement changing the web as we know it" and then find a weird little community of hobbyists doing things that make them happy you might react like OP did.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not expecting Jonathan Funnytrousers, age 13, Tennessee, to singlehandedly destroy Mark Zuckerberg's entire life by setting up an Apache server that echoes a pure HTML document in his bedroom. I believe in this little niche. I'd just like to see it flourish even more.

The internet has always been made of weird little communities of hobbyists doing things. That's what made it good, and it's what I want to see more of. I hope to see and want to push the hobbyists find ways to take their weird little communities to the next level.

Ideally, there would be more use of ActivityPub. But first, there needs to be more variety with the software available, and easy to understand documentation to make it more accessible to encorage adoption.

Is your ActivityPub project inspired by or a fork of Mastodon?

Neither. It's custom for now. I'll be honest: I think ActivityPub sucks and is the wrong solution to a real problem. Getting a forum to work with ActivityPub is a giant pain since ActivityPub's idea is that you store the user and message data on the same server, and then send notifications to other servers about the fact that a message was posted related to another one on that other server. It's a mess and means that you never really know where you are and whether your interaction will even make it over. It limits you to building systems in a very Facebook-like way, and I think this is why ActivityPub isn't used a lot.

In a more ideal world (and in my plan) the threads and posts are stored on the server that hosts the community, and the only cross-server interactions are authentications, which'd probably create a sort of shadow profile on the other server to link the user's threads and posts to. Think of a classic self-hosted forum, but the login would work a little like logging in with a Google account, just without the miserable megacorporation. It's a lot easier for the user to understand and for the webmaster to manage. Obviously prospects of this being adopted are grim, but such is the tech world, and I want to try...

Some lousy solutions are definitely holding back the potential of decentralization right now in my opinion, but that's the beauty of it; it means that the internet hasn't reached its peak yet.

I don't wanna be preachy, but it comes across a little like you're looking at the web revival on quite a surface level; and you're worried about a lack of depth that you cant see yet; but I assure you, as someone who's been in it for a long while; depth is something you learn when you stick with a hobby or art

Undoubtedly. I really hope I find more great things on the information superhighway. And I suppose the fact that something doesn't exist yet just means that I get to make it myself, and that just because everyone else is doing one thing doesn't mean that I can't see or do things my own way?

[Cobra!]

See... In my initial post I was complaining a bit about the fact that the most visible projects are kind of the opposite. I don't mean to generalize, but I still feel like just a bit of that old community feel is missing.

I had a long thought about this while going about my business this week and, to me, the old internet wasn't really about personal pages as much as it was about forums and interesting forms of writing. Many of my favourite sites aren't really quite as personal. I really loved reading Old Man Murray, the video game review(?) site of Portal writer Erik Wolpaw and Tim Schafer's writings on the old Double Fine site, which used to be more of a comedy newssite than the site of a respectable game company.

Or forums which weren't just about serious discussions about a specific topic, but also full of increasingly strange cultures that'd produce just about anything as long as it was funny. I feel like an old man yelling at cloud about this one especially.

Perhaps the isolation of social media still weighs on the shoulders of those who have left it, and it'll take some time to mend those issues and for more sociality to pop up again. Or perhaps it's weighing on my shoulders and I just haven't looked hard enough to find those places.

Honestly, the thing I loved about the old web was the wild west nature of it and just exploring though web directories or web rings, or frequenting websites centred around a series I enjoyed. Social media has really centralised it, but Web 1.5 feels like the closest we can currently get to those days on the WWW, and it is fun to explore it now and again! There are also the Gemini and Gopher protocols which remain decentralised and feel even closer to the wild west web!

But the forums/writing side of the web is still very much alive.
I actually frequent several forums about specific gaming topics, and many there feel similar to us, that social media and Discord are ultimately bad for us, and it’s just good to provide a space away from data hungry websites and post things that feel more permanent.
Some of these forums are small, particularly ones dedicated to fairly obscure game series, but they’re seeing a little resurgence in activity lately. There was a time where on one, it was just me and one other guy posting at least one message a day on the shoutbox, just barely keeping it alive. Now I see around a dozen users occasionally post there, and it’s nice to see!
I also subscribe to a lot of blogs and web comics through RSS, which I subscribe to on Thunderbird, which starts up as I boot Linux every day. I get loads of updates on all sorts of things to the point I don’t feel like I’m out of the loop without social media!