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My Geminispace wanderings have stared to share space with some reading into the thousand-named web nostalgia (web 1.0, web revival, small web, old web, ...) and I found an interesting article by Amy Hoy about the evolution of the weblog and its part in the destruction of the old, handcrafted web.
Her thesis - that it wasn't Blogger and LiveJournal that torpedoed the web created by the daily-ish creative routines of diarists/journallers/bloggers, but Movable Type - isn't true from my experience, but she makes a convincing argument that I think is probably true for some section of the larger life writing community. Truthfully, I don't know anyone, not a single person, who migrated to Moveable Type. My own scene bled into the nascent LiveJournal, slowly at first, gradually faster. This is probably due to the fact that most of the people I knew then didn't own their own domains, instead receiving/mooching space from someone else. So we got what we got, which was usually access to some rudimentary version of cpanel or just credentials to an FTP site where we could upload our files. Installing Movable Type (or the early PHP boards the domain owners among us set up for a few months or a year at a time) fell on the moneyed few. But the LiveJournal outmigration had the same effect as Hoy's complaint about Movable Type: we weren't making pages, we were writing entries; we were no longer webmasters, we were content creators.
When we were still writing down our days, it seems like a small distinction. But you take a step back and look at it: the text is yours, but embedded in something else. Something you didn't make. No pride in its creation.
I think my crowd skewed younger than that of Hoy's ("the Internet at the time was largely populated by academics, professionals, and college students"). I was in my late teens. I was sort of at the top end, a lot of us 14-16. We'd all previously made homepages on GeoCities. Angelfire. Learned the basics. Tended our gardens for years.
When jjg compiled his list of “web logs” in early 1999, there were only 23. That’s not a typo: Twenty-three, twenty-three web logs on the internet, ah ah ah.
In 1999 there were hundreds of us hand-creating and updating our journals, slinging HTML onto servers hosted at our local ISP, or in the back of some rack somewhere in New York or Boston. We were young. We were making our own community, well apart from the corporately curated links on Yahoo or elsewhere. We traded URLs on ICQ, we left guestbook messages with links back to our sites, we built up a community in the shadows of what articles like Hoy's take to be the official history. And honestly? Yeah, to the wider world, most of our sites were invisible. Dark matter. But we knew where they were, and so did our online friends; if we really fucked up, so did half of our high schools. Our sites becoming gossip as we listed our enemies. Our crushes. Our dreams.
jjg's list - retired (try them on archive.org)
We were invisible to search because search sucked and we were invisible to all the adult blogs because they didn't know us, we didn't know them, and shit, we didn't want to know them. They were old to us then. They'll be old to me now. Fifty or past it. Almost pensioners. How do you do, fellow kids.
It's weird to admit that, more than two decades gone since the height of our scene, I still remember all my long-dead URLs and those of my closest friends from that time, none of whom I've met in person, none of whom I likely will. I'm fascinated by what my brain considers important, how all the things I thought had heft have faded away. From the small web nostalgia and the explosion of neocities sites, I don't think I'm alone in this, either. For some people it's a fascination with an aesthetic that's now become retro. For some, pure nostalgia. But for others it's a desire to get back to the point when we actually thought optimistically about the future of the internet and the web, how they would break down barriers, connect people in all sorts of unforeseen ways, and generally act as an enormous positive force in our lives.
We actually thought that way! I remember the optimism and I miss it. Capital and corporate interest have a lot to answer for. A beautiful field, ablaze.
Hoy's right that ease-of-use and streamlining caused the abandonment of files for posts, pages for content, and in doing so inadvertently destroyed a community at its apex in the late 1990s. I'm just not convinced it was Moveable Type that did it. I think it's some combination of MT, of LJ, of DiaryLand, any offering that would take not just your choice but your creativity, limiting it to some prim set of colours, a Layout, a Theme. You know how you can always identify a WordPress site, a Blogger instance, a LiveJournal? That's by design. Your words; our brand (SIGN UP | login).
Also, read the EULA, they're probably not even your words. But anyway, back to Hoy:
There were no databases to configure. No scripts to install. No plugins, no security patches. There were no cookies. No iframes, no web-first scripting languages, no web apps.
Hoy's right. As with Gemini and gopherlogs and other such things, the ease of tech is part of the reason those forms flourished (though despite the uptick in popularity of the g-protocols, I wouldn't say they're flourishing). You didn't have to make a webapp; you didn't need to know JavaScript (just how to steal it); you didn't have to care about responsive layouts, or mobile-first, or scoring a 100 on all your Lighthouse categories. You sure as hell didn't have to worry about the next analytics meeting with business, who have some exciting ideas for improvements in Q4. You just had to sit down and throw some basic HTML into notepad and check it in Netscape for any obvious errors. It was simple. It was easy. It was lovely.
The good news is, you can always start again. Things have become harder and corporate interests would like you to forget that personal creativity is even possible, but you can open up a text editor and just write. That's what I did here in Geminispace, trapped in the sensation that I was shambling through my online days and something needed to change. All I need is PuTTY. A shell and vim. But even if you're not a command line nerd, there are endless options for hosting (gemlog.blue, midnight.pub and smol.pub...), and if nobody you know IRL finds your writing, well, all the better. Some people want a viewership. I sure thought I did. As it turns out, I was at my most free and uninhibited when there were only a handful of people I knew who would stop to read.
And if anyone from the old days reads this: hello, friend. I hope you're doing well.