What is the Web Revival?

November 6, 2023 3:32 PM

"The Web Revival is about reclaiming the technology in our lives and asking what we really want from the tools we use, and the digital experiences we share....The goal is to find what was best about the early web and what is best about new technologies and merge the two into a model for tomorrow; while kicking all the Zuckerberg's and Musk's to the curb so we can get on with our lives. The citizens of the web deserve more respect than to be boxed into cubicles, limited to 280 characters, studied and rebranded." (Melon's Thoughts, on melonking.net, via Web Curios.)

Browse the websites of Neocities (previously, 2013)

Read a web revival manifesto

Roll your own: Slap an internet bumper sticker on your site! Make a blinkie! (Both found on agentromanoffsir's tumblr, which offers additional tools for getting started.) Consider these guidelines for making accessible sites. Make your garden grow.

posted by MonkeyToes (34 comments total)

This is good. I’ve been having a lot of the exact same sentiments lately. Let’s take back our internet.
posted by omegajuice at 3:59 PM on November 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

One of the reasons I like hanging out here - it reminds me of "my web". :)
posted by drewbage1847 at 4:25 PM on November 6, 2023 [19 favorites]

I checked out Neocities after playing Hypnospace Outlaw last year. It is cool! Very much a "vinyl revival" sort of retro where it has niche appeal but isn't really going to revolutionize anything.
posted by grumpybear69 at 4:45 PM on November 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Everything after the blink tag was a mistake.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 4:48 PM on November 6, 2023 [10 favorites]

Is there a mefi web ring?
posted by phooky at 5:01 PM on November 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

Nothing about fandom? That's what trained a lot of us into Web design and development back in the days celebrated by Web revivalists.

2000s Teen Girl Internet was the bomb
posted by creatrixtiara at 5:11 PM on November 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

(looks at his personal Web site which has been updated on a nearly daily basis for 25 years)

I mean
posted by jscalzi at 5:17 PM on November 6, 2023 [35 favorites]

But have you written a manifesto jscalzi? You could get linked in hot pink on melonland.net if you do. I'm sure you could use the exposure.
posted by kaibutsu at 5:41 PM on November 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

You guys don't do everything at zombo.com?
posted by adept256 at 6:00 PM on November 6, 2023 [13 favorites]

Reminds me of a community I'm a part of, PoeTV, a video linking-and-discussion site that spun off from the long-defunct weird-site-mocking community Portal of Evil (which, thanks to its Prime Directive of never initiating contact with sites themselves, avoided descending into fascism like 4chan or Kiwi Farms, or having fascist spinoffs like Something Awful, and which itself has grown beyond mere mockery).

In fact, we could use some more members. (If there's any problems, the guy behind Poe Hosting runs it, so you can contact him via the email address there.)
posted by BiggerJ at 6:10 PM on November 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

See also: smolnet

I'm very very pleased to be seeing a backlash to social media and web 2.0 generally gaining traction even among non-nerds.
posted by signsofrain at 6:24 PM on November 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is something I've been thinking about for a while and it's cool to see others feel the same. I'm just torn between wanting to participate in these things and wanting to spend as little time as possible using computers and phones.
How can I find a balance between the two?
posted by donuy at 6:30 PM on November 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I say this about 5% in jest, and 95% in earnest: bring back webrings.
posted by tclark at 6:39 PM on November 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

They were never taken away, they were just given up.
posted by krisjohn at 6:46 PM on November 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Let's see.... Stop asking if I want to use your poorly designed, ad full, limited functionality spyware ap. I don't. I promise. I know it's there and you can f right off with that noise.

I don't mind your popup asking me to disable my adblocker. That's part of the game, fair play. But if it insists on it, you're not asking and I'm not going back to your site ever.


If something is paywalled, and it shouldn't be, have the balls to slap that wall directly under the headlines. Not as a surprise halfway through the second paragraph.


Don't slideshow articles. No. Bad tech design.


If your video automatically scrolls with me, well, I won't say what I think about your soul. But make it easy to close. I scrolled past it because I don't care.

Remember when the Internet mostly thought fascism was bad and queerphobia a reason to shun someone? Yes, that. I approve.

jscalzi? Daily blog? Hey guys, I think we have Cory Doctrow infiltrating our forum!
posted by Jacen at 7:11 PM on November 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Remember when the Internet mostly thought fascism was bad and queerphobia a reason to shun someone?

Nostalgia is a powerful drug.
posted by adept256 at 7:22 PM on November 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

Nostalgia is a powerful drug.

Gods yeah. It was way harsher to be a marginalised person online in many ways. Especially when there was so much victim-blaming of the "well you shouldn't have reacted to the trolls" variety.

See also: the Boyzone years of this website.
posted by creatrixtiara at 7:28 PM on November 6, 2023 [13 favorites]

I was with them until I saw this:
... kicking all the Zuckerberg's and Musk's to the curb ...
Can't we have the old things, but with correct grammar?

More seriously, this is something I can get behind, even though it's hard to see how it will make much real impact.
posted by dg at 7:36 PM on November 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

If you want the actual old web simply start playing around with lynx...
posted by jim in austin at 7:45 PM on November 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

The Future of RSS is Textcasting[*]

It’s a proposal to build, using technologies we already have and understand very well, a very simple social media protocol that is completely agnostic about what editor you use to write your posts and what viewer you choose to read it. Writer/authors would have more control over styling, links, media enclosures, etc., and readers would have more control over how and where they consume it. It’s decentralized social media, but without the need to peer through ActivityPub or anybody else’s API and squeeze our toothpaste through its tubes.

Anil Dash: "In what substantive ways would this be different than, say, starting a WordPress blog?" :P
posted by kliuless at 9:41 PM on November 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

... protocol that is completely agnostic about what editor you use to write your posts and what viewer you choose to read it. Writer/authors would have more control over styling, links, media enclosures, etc., and readers would have more control over how and where they consume it.
So, CSS?
posted by dg at 9:48 PM on November 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's a question of incentives. I'm all for "reclaiming" the internet but, there were reasons for why the new one took over and they need to be addressed. If you want to put up your own personal site/blog, it's never been easier (Tumblr, Wordpress, etc). If you want to have a community, those take time and energy to moderate - where does that come from? And the need grows with the size as well. If we want them to be free at the point of use, it begs the question of what kind of funding model should be used.
posted by ndr at 11:00 PM on November 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

Very much a "vinyl revival" sort of retro where it has niche appeal but isn't really going to revolutionize anything.

If your vinyl isn’t revolutionary, how are you even listening to it?!
posted by rickw at 3:49 AM on November 7, 2023 [13 favorites]

If your vinyl isn’t revolutionary, how are you even listening to it?!

Cartridge mounted in a very precise and fast CNC, obviously. Turntables are so mainstream.
posted by Dysk at 5:08 AM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

If the result is eliminating Wix sites, I’m in.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:37 AM on November 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

This seems in the same style - many of you probably know Louis Rossman, he is a big right to repair and consumer rights guy mostly on YT. So most recently he has taken a pro-adblocker stance , and started promoting an app called Grayjay, designed to help follow creators independent of platform.

Within the last few days he has been under the gun, not clear if he has been completely banned from YT or what, but either way sucks for him and screw you YT.
posted by Meatbomb at 6:56 AM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

"In what substantive ways would this be different than, say, starting a WordPress blog?"

Early 2000s Teen Girl Internet was originally based on GreyMatter and Movable Type. Handcuffed HTML, plenty of tables and IFrames, layouts that changed every few months, CGI-BINs and FTPs aplenty.

WordPress was relatively new. It was in PHP - a whole other scripting language and system as far as we were concerned. Not really that user friendly, especially for changing themes on the fly.

(Years later I had a fairly successful blog on Wordpress.com and remembered just how nasty Matt of Automattic was to people who asked for basic things like print-friendly pages. Like "how dare you ask for accessibility when you're on a measly free tier" level nasty I've had a grudge against WordPress ever since. I still have to use it for work but God that left such a bad taste.)
posted by creatrixtiara at 8:10 AM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Anil Dash: "In what substantive ways would this be different than, say, starting a WordPress blog?"

From what I can gather in that proposal (textcasting.org), it calls for a set of standard features to make a more-opinionated RSS-ish thing so that writing can be created and shared more easily. RSS is an old standard — a modernized and opinionated version sounds fun to me. When billions are being spent to re-invent the wheel at Threads/Bluesky/whatever, why not give an open standard another shot?
posted by UN at 8:27 AM on November 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

If something is paywalled, and it shouldn't be, have the balls to slap that wall directly under the headlines.

You do realize that most of us had them eaten by Mr. T in 1997?
posted by mubba at 8:28 AM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

RSS is an old standard — a modernized and opinionated version sounds fun to me.

WTF does "opinionated" even mean here? A balkanized RSS?

For that matter, what does "modernized" mean? IME, "modernized" tends to be tech-speak for "does not work on anything more than two years old for no apparent reason."
posted by Thorzdad at 9:14 AM on November 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

I'll put in a plug for the Reclaim Hosting crew.
posted by doctornemo at 10:33 AM on November 7, 2023

They stole our revolution. Now we're stealing it back.

With apologies to Danny.

More seriously, making the web work for humans instead of capital concentration is a good thing. I'm not entirely convinced this manifesto-thing gets at the heart of the matter: the web being more than a tool of expression or an aesthetic, but one of internetworking between and among people and information.
posted by majick at 11:34 AM on November 7, 2023

WTF does "opinionated" even mean here? A balkanized RSS?

For that matter, what does "modernized" mean? IME, "modernized" tends to be tech-speak for "does not work on anything more than two years old for no apparent reason."

The author of the proposal had a role in creating RSS as we know it, years ago. The words you object to are mine, not his. Maybe I don't describe his proposal in the most eloquent way but yeah, whatever I guess.
posted by UN at 1:40 PM on November 7, 2023

Speaking of 'the old web', nice to read the author mentioned above wrote about his contributions to RSS on his 29 year old blog.

What to do about RSS?
Saturday, September 2, 2000 by Dave Winer.

RSS is a simple XML-based syndication format started a little over a year ago. It's become a popular format, supported by thousands of news sources, both amateur and professional. There are serious developers and companies investing in RSS-based technology.

And now that it's caught on, it's getting heavily political, which means it's also getting more interesting. I'm right in the middle of this. What you read here is partial, it represents one viewpoint, there are others.

How RSS got started
In December 1997 I was looking for a project to do with XML, to get some experience, and to see if there were other developers who wanted to work in XML, because that's the purpose of XML, to provide common formats to allow information to flow through different applications over the Internet.

The result was the XMLization of my news site, Scripting News, www.scripting.com. I wrote it up in DaveNet, and some developers showed interest. Josh Lucas did an application that delivered Scripting News in email. Vignette did a trial app to show their customers the benefits of XML-based interchange between content management systems.

Not much more happened between then and the winter of 1999, when we started getting random questions from people at Netscape about our format. They put up a trial app that read Scripting News in XML and rendered it in HTML. A few weeks later they came out with My.Netscape, a personalized news service, an "aggregator" that rendered XML channels in a format called RSS, in HTML, according to user selection. I don't know if they used our previous work as a model, let's assume for the sake of argument that it was a completely independent development.

My feeling at the time was a combination of excitement and frustration. I wished they had worked with us, we had gone first, and shared our ideas freely. Why not build on our work? Why not work with us instead of reinventing the wheel?

posted by UN at 11:12 PM on November 7, 2023