Your experience with MelonLand and the indie web!

[dizzy]

hi everyone... first post! yay! 

lately I've spent a lot of time reading through forum posts and have become really intrigued with the indie web in general. it's such a distinct space from the 'corpo web' that I thought it  would be worth looking into. so I'm writing a paper about it :D particularly on writing and rhetoric over here. it's way different than what we're used to on places like twitter or  instagram or all that stuff.

one of the most important parts of doing research is probably getting firsthand accounts, so id like to ask you guys about your experience with the indie web. if you have no idea where to start, you can try thinking of some of these questions:

how/why did you join MelonLand or the indie web?
is there anything you've noticed about MelonLand or the indie web that's different from the modern/corporate web? what about comparing it to the older web like what Geocities was originally? why do you think that?
bonus points if the answers relate to the way people communicate... :3

you dont have to answer all or any of these of course, but I would just love input on what it's been like living in this corner of the internet. if you're extra-motivated to talk about this stuff, we can totally chat outside of the forum too!

I'll start with mine:
I used to get youtube videos occasionally about the indie web and Neocities, and everyone had such cool sites that I wanted to try for myself! I would spend hours websurfing, jumping from site to site and taking time to appreciate how each one was crafted. I loved learning about things I had never even heard of, or things I would have never seen otherwise. I started learning about the web revival movement while surfing through webrings, eventually found the MelonLand webring, and now I'm here!!!
I really like how easy it is to connect with others in the indie web. most users have walls or chatboxes on their sites, and the forums on here make it really simple to yap your ear off about whatever you want. I think that it feels more personal than the corpo web probably since these kinds of sites tend to be more genuine and informal, so a lot of people talking in them can be informal in their writing too. it's like having a regular conversation with no pressure. :P

[Nael]

Nice topic!

How/why did you join MelonLand or the indie web?
I never left the "web" in general, I made my first site back in the Geocities era and simply never stopped heheh c: Joining MelonLand was a natural continuation of what I was already doing.

Is there anything you've noticed about MelonLand or the indie web that's different from the modern/corporate web? what about comparing it to the older web like what Geocities was originally?

I was a kid when Geocities was on it's golden era and I barely spoke English back then so please keep this in mind. As far as I recall Geocities didn't have a social feature like neocities does, nor any huge forum of sorts where people could congregate about building sites in general. It reminds me of being an artist before the golden era of DeviantArt, of course people were making art before it but communities were small and centralized. Today you can make a neocitie...neosite? and instantly start connecting to others with similar interests.

Corporate web forces you to use your real name and some social media go as far as to punish users from using fake names, I would say corporate web is a bit like your front porch, anyone can see it and they probably will even if they don't want it, someone may be driving in your neighborhood and they will cross path with your house and see it. I don't want to link my 200k words fanfic, "dark" art and furry memes on my social media because I don't trust people's judgment, someone will see it and possible do an entire moral judgment on me based solely on what I like. I think when it comes to corporate media the feeling I have is "why would I post it?" while on indie web the feeling is "why NOT post it?" since we are all here to share the stuff we enjoy even if it's silly, I won't judge your bugsbunny X gandalf fanfic if you don't judge my shrine to pepsi even if we don't understand each other because we are both aware that the indie web is for that and respect generates respect.

I believe communication in the indie web(that includes foruns like MelonLand!) is more free and honest because people are not afraid they will  be judged for it and even if they are, it will hardly have an impact on their offline life. Of course you can use this anonymity to be an absolute bastard but most people on here simple choose to be genuine about what they enjoy and that is so great.

Corporate web rewards you for being a douchebag, you can post a mean comment on somebody's harmless video or picture and see the amount of liked go up while in the indie web such behaviors won't stand because there is no like button to begin with and because being polite is an enforced behavior.

[torrent-empress]

Nice topic!

How/why did you join MelonLand or the indie web?


Is there anything you've noticed about MelonLand or the indie web that's different from the modern/corporate web? what about comparing it to the older web like what Geocities was originally?

I'm... officially old (30) but the indieweb is pretty cool, although it lacks a little bit of the cool stuff that geocities did just because the nature of the web has changed. One of the things that I remember is that websites did used to be co-run sometimes by a few people and people would post submissions they got (like fanfiction or whatever) obviously this was more bc there weren't centralized repositories for this stuff, but I think the indieweb revival is a little more individualistic.... which is a bit of a problem sometimes.

Personally I actually came from corpo tech! I used do work as a corporate User Experience designer and I do genuinely love technology (fun fact I learned!!! Most UX professionals barely use technology and don't play video games  ) kind of sucks..... When i went into tech there was hardly people who loved technology left... just a bunch of dorks looking for their next 100k job which is partially why the internet sucks so much now.

hi everyone... first post! yay! 

lately I've spent a lot of time reading through forum posts and have become really intrigued with the indie web in general. it's such a distinct space from the 'corpo web' that I thought it  would be worth looking into. so I'm writing a paper about it :D particularly on writing and rhetoric over here. it's way different than what we're used to on places like twitter or  instagram or all that stuff.

I'm soooo interested in this paper - also I checked out your website and I love your pixels!!!

[Dan Q]

how/why did you join MelonLand or the indie web?

I've always been part of the "indie web", even before the term first appeared about 1997. But I can trace my journey back even further than when I made my first pages in around 1996:

Prior to the popularisation of the Internet and the Web, I was active on a variety of dial-up bulletin boards (BBSes), including acting as co-SysOp/SysOp on a couple of them (if you're not familiar with BBSes, their history, and its influence on community-building in cyberspace, I highly recommend Jason Scott's comprehensive documentary!). BBSes were somewhat centralised compared to the "indie web", but they were still, without a doubt, fiercely independent: each an entity unto itself and with its own personality and culture.

This experience clearly influenced my ideas on what the Web could be. I absolutely bought into the promise that the Web was a force for free speech and democracy, and that we were moving towards a point at which anybody - and everybody - could and probably would someday have an the very least a "home page" (of the traditional sense).

So I started launching sites around 1996 and starting blogging (although I didn't call it that, either) in 1998. And then... I didn't really stop. There was a big dip in my bloggy output in the early 2000s - hey look, I've got a graph! - and a couple of smaller ones later as I occasionally experimented with centralised social media... but the inevitable and gradual enshittification of profit-making centralised social networks was frustrating to me.

Plus, before long I was discovering that my personal Web presence was beginning to provide value in longevity. My blog predates Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube... and there's no reason to believe that it can't outlive those services too (it existed both before and after Google+!), so long as I live long enough to see their end... and I've already seen changes to every one of those services to show me that a centralised social silo doesn't have to completely die to become... well... useless. So why would I trust one of these services to be the primary home for the things I put onto the Internet? So over the noughties I transitioned to a solid POSSE model: my site is the single primary source-of-truth in my life, and where I choose to syndicate things to other services... that's a convenience for other people: I duplicate my vlogs to YouTube, but I see that as a temporary state of affairs - if in another 20 years a different service makes more sense, I'll syndicate there instead... but my site will remain the "official" copy.

I came to Melonland only very recently. I've skirted around the edge of it for a while, read threads occasionally, but eventually decided I should be more... I don't know... "chatty" with other folks who treat the Web as an artistic canvas and who share my dream of a Web 1.x Renaissance!

is there anything you've noticed about MelonLand or the indie web that's different from the modern/corporate web?

The independent Web has artistic personality, in a way that the corporate web squashes dead.

Over time, big social media silos converge on the optimal design for locking you into their walled garden, for providing the simplest and blandest possible experience for everything, for taking a dull and broad brush and applying it to everything. They do this because they crave the currency of attention, which allows them to be paid by advertisers and to maximise the amount of behavioural data they can collect from you.

The trend is towards cleanliness, simplicity, and uniformity. The focus is on the underlying corporation. The criteria for success are engagement, SEO metrics, and revenue. The insidious nature of this approach infects the creators on these platforms too: YouTubers tell you not to forget to "like and subscribe" because the ones who don't get pushed to the periphery of a window of discovery, which in turn narrows over time as the platform optimises for maximal engagement for the widest possible audience. The mainstream of each filter bubble is uplifted by the algorithms and visitors become more and more tightly-funnelled into the same pigeonholes, unable to see the artistry that comes from dissent.

Whether countercultural or merely individualised, the indie web instead puts personality and humanity at its centre. Because their metrics for success are different from the corporate Web, creators can make exploratory choices that step outside the corporate norms. Don't want your logo always in the top left and the top right is for a login form or search box? That's fine, you can lay things out however you like. Don't care about SEO because your space is for you first and foremost and for perhaps those who surf through serendipity second... that's great! Ignore the "best practices" that Google tries to insist you use and just do your own damn thing. The indie web embraces the fact that the Internet belongs to all of us: a true commons that everybody can speak in, not the curated town squares of the social media silos.

what about comparing it to the older web like what Geocities was originally? why do you think that?

Back when Geocities and the like were at their heyday, the Web was primarily explored by surfing. Search engines were... not great, yet (I mean, they're not great now but for different reasons!), and so you'd curate a collection of links in your Bookmarks folder (or on your homepage) and you'd rely on the pages you visited to provide links to explore elsewhere. But when you did use a search engine... sometimes you'd find a gem! Because the results weren't great you'd sometimes find yourself on the second, third or fourth page, and who knows what you'd discover! You were looking for a song title based on half-remembered lyrics and by page four of Excite or Yahoo! you'd have discovered somebody's personal pages where they wrote a poem with some similar words and now you'd have clicked-on through their webring and spotted somebody whose username seemed familiar from an IRC channel you were in, once, and you're wondering if they're the same person when you get distracted by the timeline they've made of the pets they've ever owned and... what were you looking for again? Who cares.

Nowadays, the search engines drop people on the page they asked for... and that's it. Well, not even that: they drop people on the page they think is best, based on a variety of criteria that are often unfriendly to the pages of individual humans. Actually... not even that: nowadays they give searchers a crappy AI summary of the first page of results, often without citations, and nobody even gets to see the web design of the pages they're reading.

So nowadays some - not all! - individual creators go multiplatform. You can publish on your own site, but if you want the self-satisfied feeling of getting engagement with what you've poured your soul into (it's fine if you do: we're a social species!... it's also fine if you don't care!), you might also need to "pay the game". For example: my longer blog posts get crossposted to a Facebook page that provides a summary and a link back to the original. I don't like it, but there are people who read my blog who expect to find posts there or they won't see them.

So that's the difference today: independent creators are more-marginalised by search engines and need to work harder if they care about being "seen".

Wow, this turned into an essay, didn't it?

Oh, and also:

I'm... officially old (30)

You're only ever as old as you feel. I started writing HTML (just barely) before you were born, @torrent-empress! But it's all just a number, for real.

[Corrupted Unicorn]

I... kinda forgot how exactly I learnt about the Indie Web. But given the chance to make a personal website, I took it. Concept never even crossed my mind when I was younger, and it indeed sounded like a cool alternative to social media. More customizable, more personal... at least screaming into the digital void feels better when you can choose the wallpaper, right?

And of course, there's more people who think this way, and it's great there's a place where we can gather such as here 

I still feel there's remnants of years of social media here, behavior-wise. I have a tendency to reply to threads without reading them thoroughly, and short, disconnected topics and responses are more frequent here. As if social media taught us to scream loudly, but not to listen and build actual conversations together.

With that said, there's an evident feeling of "close community" here, and I'm not the only one. Maybe it's because the Indie Web is inherently smaller than the population of social media? Also means you get more genuine moments of connection here.

[wolfkitty42]

I don't really remember how I got into Melonland at all... And I barely remember how I got into the indie web! I definitely remember seeing indie websites circulate in fandom spaces, primarily Deltarune fandom spaces. For instance, I was really into Huecycle's AU Candleholder so I definitely remember that site! I also enjoyed ARG projects like Hometown Incidents or Sweepstakes (the fandom continuation, not the official heheh....) A lot of those args got me to start thinking more about different looking and feeling web pages and about the web as a medium for art.

I vividly after I really got into the indie web, I clicked an episode of LOVEWEB not really knowing what the whole show was about. It was their episode about independent websites! I paused when one of the websites popped up because I just had to sit there and be flabbergasted that Holy Shit, that's a blast from my past! I used to be in a discord server called ACDS, which I rejoined recently. I recognized the web ring and the user who made the site. It clicked for me that I had sort of been in indie web spaces for a lot longer than I had thought. Even if it wasn't as overt as Melonland, I have spent a lot of time in online places that encourage building community over the past few years. It was really interesting for me to think about how a lot of what I consider the Indie Web was lot closer to some of my past experiences than I had thought.

Ah... Discord is always in a weird spot for me. It's corporate, but I have met so many wonderful people and been in such a variety of communities in there. I never really know how to categorize it because of that.

[MrsMoe]

I first discovered Neocities from lurking on other people's accounts on Twitter and Tumblr. More and more, I started finding Neocities sites in their pinned or linktrees and I was always super impressed by the sheer depth of creativity and customization. Looking at their pages during this current era of cold corporate blandness was like finding a beautiful oasis in a horrible desert, so naturally I wanted in. And I definitely don't regret it!


I wasn't present for the Geocities era of the internet (or at least, not fully conscious. I was a wee baby), but it definitely is different from mainstream social media. Outside of the obvious customization and freer expression, I just feel like the indie web is so relieving because the pressure to make a hit post or tweet is completely gone. No one's fighting over each other to say the next witty comeback or start an argument to make themselves look intelligent, so that already lends the indie web to being a much more peaceful place. I also feel like it's a much healthier environment for artists because you don't have to stress about getting an algorithm to push your work within a limited time window. I've never liked how art in the modern web just sort of disappears when it's not new or relevant anymore, so I like artists having a reliable place to display all their work at once.