Is melonland and the web revival in general still active

[mightytuniek]

hey so i recently joined the web revival movement and for some reason i see that there aren't many recent posts here or videos or anything about web revival. is this dying or am i just delusional

[BlazingCobaltX]

I wouldn't say you're delusional but you may have unrealistic expectations. The web revival is about slowness: Things are done with deliberation and intention. The idea of instant replying and 24/7 activity is kind of antithesis to that. On this forum it can easily take a few days to get a reply on your thread - that is a feature, not a bug. Long replies are preferred over short ones, which means that there's more time spent on reading people's replies and writing your own.

Take your time to explore the forum, reply wherever you want, and then come back in a few days and see what happens.

[Tommie ΘΔ]

Still very active!! The forum is a nice, slow place though, so instant gratification isn't what we're about. Web revival itself is still thriving as well, at least from what I can tell.

Sometimes it can take a few days for someone to reply to your post, but that just means people are busy living their lives outside the web And that's totally okay!! But yes, we're all still pretty active around here. It's not as big as social media but we've got a fun group of regular posters on the forum

[jensen]

I'm new-ish to the forum and somewhat web revival. I'd have to agree with the replies above, if you consider that web revival is a fight against social media then by nature it is quite slow. Forums have always been like this, it's nice to take some time to collect your thoughts and write them down. You also have to take time to read what people are saying rather than it being beamed into your eyes as fast as possible. Enjoy the time it takes to do stuff, I find it really relaxing and it puts me into a good mood! 

[Skykristal]

It very much is alive. But I feel like you my be comparing it to big platforms, mainstream social media which has constant flow, constant content, constant everything. In comparison, small spaces seem "dead", but they're just slower and slightly different in use.

However I agree that is has its ups and downs in terms of activity. Depends on time, on season.. on a variety of things. But that's normal.

It's cozy.

[Melooon]

Metrics wise; the forum itself has been stable for the past two years despite the fact a lot of effort has gone into pushing for quality over quantity in posts, on top of adding account approvals and Monday closures to slow growth - you can see at the bottom of the stats page! - The traffic on my own homepage has been doubling every year since 2020, and TamaNotchi was just kicked off our analytics system because it exceeded fair usage due to high traffic 

However all of that is sorta beside the point because as the others say ~ slow media is the goal!

I'd also add that metrics are an inaccurate way to identify an active culture because metrics are actually the aftermath of culture. A culture is really made from infrastructure and mood; for example the TicTok app is infrastructure, and the desire to post there is mood ~ what you might see as success on TicTok (high views?) are actually the byproduct of a micro-culture ~ often by the time you see a TicTok video, the active creation within that micro-culture is over and your views are only part of its memory; however it all happens so quickly that people mistake the metrics for the culture.

The web revival exists in a much slower timeline; creating a site can take years not seconds; and the aftermath results can take even longer; the fact that so many people idolise the creations of geocities, 20 years after it went inactive shows just how big that gap can get    So the question really should not be "how many post are there", the question is "how much infrastructure is there to help people build sites, and how excited are people to add things too their site" - figure that out and you'll have some idea of how active the culture is

[wolfkitty42]

At least from my perspective, it's pretty lively. I think measuring activity for web revival is a little tricky because most of it takes place independently on people's
sites. I have an IRL friend (who is really cool, by the way!!) and we chat a lot about our websites and our thoughts on the internet's future. That's enough to convince me that it's active, not to mention scrolling through the tabs on Neocities and Nekoweb that show when a website has updated. (There's a lot on there!)

[villain]

I think the others have covered what my first instinct response would have been, but its worth talking a little about what can make the web revival feel "dead" - there are a LOT of inactive or no longer updated sites on neocities, some even sitting around in the most popular/special sauce section right at the top. It's also quite frustrating to go on a site and find that the homepage has been completed but all the links in the nav lead to 404s or links back to social media. But!! Once you find active sites that still get updated, usually those people are more savvy about keeping their links up-to-date as well and you can find plenty to browse through. Also, you may enjoy learning how to use RSS feeds - many web revival sites use RSS to keep visitors up to date on new additions. Having a feed to check or browser addon that gives you a push notification when there's something new to look at might help the web revival feel a little more alive to you! But yes, certainly we're a little slower paced around here, but in my opinion the web revival is growing faster than a couple years ago when i first got involved - you just have to learn what to look for.

[mightytuniek]

hey thanks to everyone for their replies!

i agree that as i am fresh from the web 3.0, i might not be yet adjusted to the different flow.

it's great to see some assurance!

[Tehrinny]

I feel like a lot of people are leaving the major social media platforms due to well *gestures to the dumpster fire*.

The safest place to go, to be perfectly honest, is backwards, in order to move forwards. If you have your own place on the internet, you can make it exactly as you want.

In recent weeks, my entire D&D group ditched facebook and meta and moved entirely to discord. Probably better for us honestly. <3 A lot of people they know were doing the same. We were discussing this, and everyone got really excited about making websites. One of my D&D friends and I have been chatting about our sites as we're working on them. I got him to start using Neocities.

The nice thing about having a website as your main platform is that it's as consistant, reliable and customizable as you want it to be. The bar to entry being technical skill isn't TOO high, but still high enough for the average person to not see the point in it (if they didn't do this thing in the past).

Personally, being someone who was really involved in personal sites, pixel art, art sites, small forums, and just this general cute personal side of the web back in the late 90's and 2000's, I'm THRILLED to see comebacks of the kind of layouts I used to make. I still have to learn the new lingo the kids are using (I say that jokingly <3). But like... it's like waking up back into a reality where the internet was a more colorful and creative space.

Though the thing about this space, back then even, is that it moved SLOW as stated. Sometimes your updates would involve changing your layout only and your website would go months without major updates. That was considered the norm. Forums were where we chatted and they moved slowly. The only way to talk about things quickly was through messengers like AIM, MSN, and then a bit later, Skype.

[Corrupted Unicorn]

Slow is the name of the game when it comes to the web revival. It's much like art: yes, there's people who can churn out art related to the Popular Topic of the Social Media every day, but if you ask me, the best pieces of art are the ones artists take their time with. 

Time is a precious commodity and experiencing more things in a short span doesn't necessarily mean you're investing your time better.

I think it'd be a good idea to take your interest in the web revival as a chance to experience things on the Net differently.

[azalea]

there was a time on the internet when forums were dominant around 15+ years ago where the expectation was reasonable for things to be fast in terms of replies, but these days not so much. it's a double-edged sword; it's a constant reminder of the state of how things are in the current day and age but there's also a sereneness to it. with smaller, quieter (but still active) forums, you get to see more familiar faces and you start to feel like you're lost in the crowd, if that makes sense.

sorry for the rant, but that's my pov.

[milo]

Lately I've been browsing forum communities to hang out in and if the last post is within a couple days I consider that pretty active lol.

I'll even get turned off if the forum is a bit "too active". The thing I like about forums vs other forms of social media is that I can actually keep up with conversations. In discord chats or comment sections, the conversation moves so fast and the previous replies are drowned out so you kinda feel lost if you're just popping in. On a forum, conversation moves a lot slower and you can take your time soaking in previous replies before being given the chance to say what you want to say.

[wygolvillage]

In my opinion, the web revival feels pretty stable. It's slow, but that's a good thing. Having a ton of activity and unprecedented growth can cause niche subcommunitues to implode (I can think of a few adjacent projects that have experienced this)

Every time I check the forum and the specific boards I like to check up on, there is a new crop of fresh posts to enjoy. By forum standards that's great! (Ask me how I know, I tried to run a Proboards forum once and it died off quickly)

I remember once when I was new to Neocities and the subculture I found a blog post someone wrote where they observed that subcommunities of Neocities tend to crop up and then die off in a cycle after about 6 months. I kind of wonder if that's still true statistically (or if it ever was) since it's been around two years (!!!) since I first saw that random blog post and I have seen Melonland thriving throughout that time without a real down period tbh

[Melooon]

I have seen Melonland thriving throughout that time without a real down period

ML is a strange example because as the operator and designer of it, I treat it like a mini startup, but without the investors, or the capital or the milestones of a startup In other words, I treat it really seriously and invest real time, money and effort into developing it and building features like a genuine startup would; but instead of aiming for profits or growth, I aim for stability, cool posts, a nice atmosphere and giving people room for experimentation and fun!

That's possible partly because its donation supported; but largely because it's an art project, and within the scope of art projects scale does not matter. One single interesting topic, or everyone page or community idea can be as important here as a million user accounts on a for-profit site. I'd consider ML a success whether 10 or 10,000 people use it, because the value is in the humanity which remains equal. Growth is not a goal, so we can add features that organically evolve from community needs, and because goals in general are not the point, even downtime can be considered a feature (e.g. Mondays)!

I'm not sure that's a viable or realistic way for other web communities to exist, but it has been an interesting experiment so far