It kills me when people say "the internet isn't fun anymore"

[oldmurray34]

I dunno, it's a tricky situation we are in as a society. We collectively are extremely malleable and if one stops exerting effort to stay on an individual path, they have greater and greater chance to go with a flow into one of those traps we have around us, birthed by a for-profit anti-human system. You know, getting addicted to internet outrage, algorithmicaly chosen shows, short form content and so on. You get oversaturated by a very "cheap" source of funny brain chemicals, that asks zero effort form you, getting used to this lack of friction in your media consumption and, well, fun overall. People like that are not really missing an old internet, but just a new source of effortless fun.

In my opinion there is no other way, but to regulate your life to force it to be more fulfilling, like no binging, no social media and such. We are all collectively under attack by the powers that be, in that regard, and there is no option but to "lock in" and change yourself, your habits into some form that leads you towards making your life more interesting or whatnot

[deadkraker]

Feels like people don't know how to just like... look for interesting things anymore.

i remember one streamer i sometimes watch did a thing where he asked chatgpt to find him funny obscure websites and i had to just kinda pause the vod cus it genuinely pained me on a deep level that he didnt just? search for them himself?

like it was hard to hear him talk about the internet being boring and missing old web while also unaware that IT HASNT GONE ANYWHERE! this is still here! the old stuff is also still here! and its not hard to find when you know where to look but nobody is taught these things anymore!

its sad because I know so many young people in particular want to express themselves openly on the web. the popularity of strawpage, CRRD and any other website makers is a clear sign of that. people WANT to make their own digital worlds and they want to fully express themselves but they aren't given the tools to do so and it makes me angry on their behalf.

I'm also relatively new to indie web and i know how much i for the longest time wanted spaces like these where i didnt have to worry about big corps nuking my art or my opinions off of their platforms because of whatever bs reason, but i just didnt have the basic tech literacy needed to learn about these things.

[TheFrugalGamer]

There are a lot of good points here, and they give me an idea: for those of you who are still on some social media sites, have you ever posted about your small web findings and/or websites? I feel like eventually the big tech companies wouldn't like it, but it'd be an interesting way to spread the word about the non-corporate web. I used to have my personal website linked in my Instagram when I was there, but I doubt it brings any traffic now because I haven't logged in or posted in forever.

It almost makes me want to spin up a social media account somewhere with the express goal of highlighting different fun stuff on the web. But then, there are also others who want the small web to remain small, and they have valid reasons. Maybe it's a terrible idea, I dunno. Thoughts?

[mortaki]

But why not just use links? Thats the whole point of the world wide web! Ne everything needs to be available on a search engine. I've been curating a list of links on my website, and I like to post links for stuff I think people will find useful! That's how you get people to know that something exists is by seeing it.

Link collections and directories are good, but how often did you find them prior to joining the indie web? For me, at least, I never did. In fact, it was very rare to find people linking to things that weren't on some form of social or mainstream media already.

When I say "find", I wasn't just referring to search engines. As someone that fairly recently came into the indie web scene, it was incredibly hard to discover anything interesting by any method. I had never encountered a link to a neocities or nekoweb site until I made my own. I had never even realized fanlistings and link directories existed. The indie web was incredibly hard to break into in the sense that it happened by pure chance. I saw a random youtube video by a creator I had never seen before that waxed poetic about neocities and I pounced on the opportunity. After that, the internet opened up by a significant margin. Suddenly, I was finding cool stuff all the time. And trust me, it was not lack of effort that made it so hard to find fun things prior to me getting into neocities. Simply put, no one outside of this very niche part of the internet is linking to anything that interesting.

Even something like the Wayback Machine, which I did know existed, is kind of opaque and hard to use. I wasn't old enough to know about geocities, so had no idea that I could have started there. The thing about a huge archive like that is that if you don't know exactly what you're looking for, it's hard to find it. And again, trust me, I TRIED. But a lot of the old web uses language that I'm simply not familiar with or has been replaced with more updated slang or what-have-you. Going to random sites just as often took me to websites up right now but a year in the past as it did take me to Amazon in 2009.

In short, it IS hard. You do HAVE to already know what you're looking for when you go searching. Even with links and things. Word of mouth in this case gives us much more mileage, in my opinion, if we're looking to help people stuck in social media hell.

[rolypolyphonic]

This makes me think that having variety on the internet is just as important. [...] Another thing is the feeling of having to keep up with new things.

Yeah, I definitely agree with the latter, the 'FOMO' feeling people get of not seeing new things is a problem. I don't think even a lack of variety per se is the issue, it's that if you're 'logged in' all the time you won't be able to appreciate that variety in the first place. I think the main problem with mainstream social media isn't just the content that gets posted in such places but the way they encourage people to be online all the time, to the point where it's a habit to be so. Even people who leave mainstream SNS to be part of the 'indie web' may eventually find it boring or repetitive even though there are  more indie websites than a person can reasonably engage with in their lifetime if they struggle to drop the habit of needing to get on and look at stuff several hours a day every day.

Link collections and directories are good, but how often did you find them prior to joining the indie web?
[...]
You do HAVE to already know what you're looking for when you go searching. Even with links and things. Word of mouth in this case gives us much more mileage, in my opinion, if we're looking to help people stuck in social media hell.

I will be honest, even on mainstream SNS there's a lot of pages where people share 'weird websites' or other online tools and novelties, and many of these pages are not obscured. In fact, even the corporate algorithm itself will throw such things in front of people, and these link-sharing posts can get hundreds to thousands of likes and comments regularly.

The thing is that your average joe is neither just 'lazy' nor 'ignorant', it is that they are just flat-out not interested. They may go 'woah cool, let me bookmark that thing' and never return to it because they'd rather the easier manner of engagement that comes with scrolling on a timeline.

Now I'm not saying that every person discovers these things easily from SNS, but I suppose my point is I'm not sure I understand what alternatives are being suggested if 'sharing links and directories' is not enough and 'search engines' is not the alternative either. What do you mean by 'word of mouth'? How is that different sharing links and directories?

That aside, I don't think indie/small web alternatives being too 'hard to find' is really the main problem if we're talking about people's SNS habits in general (not denying it can be a problem for some individuals). Connected to what I said above, I believe the 'problem' is that in most cases, a person who is not already critical of/dissatisfied enough to leave mainstream social media (which most people are actually not) and who are used to or outright prefer the way corporate social media is structured will simply not care about the alternatives even if they discovered them more easily. Even the vast majority of people who moved to indie alternatives and the 'small web' already had some gripe with how mainstream SNS work as a common motivating factor.

[littlelum]

The thing is that your average joe is neither just 'lazy' nor 'ignorant', it is that they are just flat-out not interested. They may go 'woah cool, let me bookmark that thing' and never return to it because they'd rather the easier manner of engagement that comes with scrolling on a timeline.

I think that this is important. The vast majority of web things (and non-web things) I share with people I know give the exact same reaction. They acknowledge that it's interesting and good, but don't have any interest themselves, so they never engage with it. I should know, because I've done the exact same thing with stuff I don't have an interest in. I've had friends with interests such as Pokémon and Persona and football and cars, but I've never felt the need to dive deep into those because they showed me interesting things about them. It's something everyone does, not just the average joes (to them, we are also "average joes" from the perspective of their fandoms).

[mortaki]

The thing is that your average joe is neither just 'lazy' nor 'ignorant', it is that they are just flat-out not interested. They may go 'woah cool, let me bookmark that thing' and never return to it because they'd rather the easier manner of engagement that comes with scrolling on a timeline.

It's a good faith argument that assumes that if someone complains about social media that they're interested in finding an alternative. I think assuming people prefer "easier engagement" is kind of inherently calling them ignorant and lazy, even if that's not your intention. Certainly, human brains prefer easy tasks over hard ones, but I think most people are self-aware enough to realize that doesn't make for a very fulfilled life and try to seek something else out. Not everyone, but the sentiment that the internet "isn't fun" wouldn't be so prevalent if this wasn't the case, I think.

Now I'm not saying that every person discovers these things easily from SNS, but I suppose my point is I'm not sure I understand what alternatives are being suggested if 'sharing links and directories' is not enough and 'search engines' is not the alternative either. What do you mean by 'word of mouth'? How is that different sharing links and directories?

By word of mouth I mean talking to people. Specifically to people you know and are somewhat close with, not followers or randoms on the internet. Actual conversations about the advantages and hardships of making a personal site or using the indie web to web surf or whatever else. It's different than links or directories in that you would be directly solving a problem that someone you know has and be available for further questions and guidance. There's more trust involved there and they are less likely to get lost, stuck, and frustrated, which in turn makes them less likely to give up. Community is kind of the missing element when it comes to the internet. Things like public discords and forums I feel are much more helpful than a list of links. Knowing someone in the "in-group" is much more encouraging than going in blind. You're not going to change a culture with an isolationist mindset. I feel pretty fervently that we need to be the ones reaching out. It's not helpful to see someone struggling with this and write it off for assumptions about their character or situation. I tell all my friends how much I love coding my website. I have active campaigns to get them to make their own. I make promises to be available for assistance should they need it or to help them find assistance if I'm not competent. That might seem like a lot to offer, but that's why you start with people you already like and want to spend time with. We gotta start small.

Someone earlier in this thread mentioned not meeting people who complain about social media with scorn, and I think that's kind of the key. It's not just that alternatives are hard to find (even though they kind of are); it's also that sometimes people looking to join these spaces are met with hostility or other bad experiences that put them off of that particular group. Like imagine it's your first time on Melonland and this is one of the first topics you find? I'm not saying everyone is so thin-skinned as to be put off by just that, but would you not feel some type of way about it? It isn't a great impression to be made to feel like an "outsider", right? Especially when you really don't understand the space you're entering nor know anyone in it?

[mortaki]

It almost makes me want to spin up a social media account somewhere with the express goal of highlighting different fun stuff on the web. But then, there are also others who want the small web to remain small, and they have valid reasons. Maybe it's a terrible idea, I dunno. Thoughts?

The only social media I have is a tumblr and I've set it up so that it automatically publishes my rss feeds there. I did it this way because I don't actually use my tumblr very much and I didn't want to encourage using it either. I also sometimes interact with the neocities club community there, but mostly I stick to the discord and the forum.

People do have very valid reasons for wanting to keep the small web small, but I also feel that's part of the problem. We're cutting off a large group of people from discovering something fun and interesting. Personally, I feel like the solution is to make the indie web as a whole more resilient to coroporate fuckery and other sources of concern. I'm not sure how exactly this should be done as I'm just a silly writer with very little know how in any relevant area, but I imagine it would have to be something similar to what created the Archive of Our Own (aka AO3). The fanfiction community banded together to create something for them, by them, and then focused effort on getting access to what would best protect them from companies. In their case, it was mostly lawyers and servers for hosting, I believe.

AO3 definitely has their own issues that we shouldn't emulate, but I think the indie web would benefit from a sort of decentralized preservation effort. Like netizens letting their neighbors move sites onto their personal servers in little internet communes or something in case neocities or nekoweb is ever under attack. I don't know, I'm sure someone more tech savvy than me has more articulate solutions.

[rolypolyphonic]

assuming people prefer "easier engagement" is kind of inherently calling them ignorant and lazy

I don't think people necessarily choose what is easy because they are ignorant or lazy: I think many people choose what is easy simply because it is easy, and that is my point. Ignorance and laziness are not always the motivating factors behind choosing convenience, because convenience in itself is valuable for a lot of people.

When I say people are not 'interested', that is not a derogatory statement about other people having 'lesser' tastes, but a neutral recognition that a lot of the things we find valuable simply aren't what other people care about. Not everyone likes building their own website, or joining communities, or sharing their life/thoughts/work online, and all the other things that people in the indie web feel to be the 'point' of the indie web.

With that said, I wasn't really talking specifically about people who are complaining about social media, which may have caused a misunderstanding. I was talking about people who use the Internet in general, and the idea that 'the Internet isn't fun anymore!' because the 'fun' is condensed into obscure spaces instead of being everywhere.

Mainstream SNS is, put simply, still 'fun' to a lot of people. And among other things, it is also more convenient to engage with than a lot of 'indie web' spaces and convenience is something that is very valuable for many, in spite of mainstream SNS having its fair share of problems. I don't think it's automatically a negative reflection on someone if they prefer mainstream SNS to the indie web, and while I know the opinions of people on the indie web are not a monolith, I feel like a lot of people understate how the 'inconvenience' involved in engaging with the indie web is not a trivial hurdle for a lot of people, and it may not be a hurdle that a lot of people feel is 'worth' to surmount.

By word of mouth I mean talking to people. Specifically to people you know and are somewhat close with

Makes sense. When I think about 'sharing links' I was already thinking that that involves describing why people should check something out and what makes certain online spaces valuable or interesting, not just randomly posting a link in a post and going 'hey guys check it out' so I misunderstood why they were being spoken about as two separate things. I already do share a lot about small web spaces and other online communities/tools/etc. that people can use regularly as it is tangentially related to my actual job. I often find that people who end up not particularly caring about the suggestions or tools I share with them don't care simply because their priorities are different, not because they just don't 'get' it.

[kringle]

i think a big issue for it (as a lot of people are pointing out) is the friction between needing to educate your community on ways to access or participate in the indieweb. and then, how the average person will take that information and do basically nothing with it

  i think the only solution is to continue to educate the people around us on the tools available to them, even if they might not do anything with it at first. part of the reason social media and big tech is so ubiquitously in control of the modern online landscape is because people dont know how things work under the hood online. it's hard to comprehend why these small funny indie websites are good and important when you don't have the background knowledge to see these silly websites in the broader cultural lens. and the lack of knowledge deff helps them be, like, not invested enough to care.  

it's 100% an uphill battle but i think its one worth doing 



that said people who rely on generative AI for basic web-tasks ARE my enemy and it WILL be on sight.