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Despite being active on the web for more than twenty-five years, I had never heard of Olia Lialina. A net artist, professor, and archivist, Lialina has written extensively about the web-that-was. In the mid to late 1990s, she created the art piece "My Boyfriend Came Back From the War". Stark, high contrast white-and-black images and text playing out across frames, the art piece (to me) echoes the sorts of ideas and techniques I'd see in twine-based hypertext years later.
Olia Lialina: My Boyfriend Came Back From the War
As a researcher with the One Terabyte of Kylobyte Age archive (which holds GeoCities sites "built and abandoned by amateur webmasters between 1995 and 2009), Lialina is in a unique position, sitting on what could well be the largest archive of GeoCities sites outside of the Wayback. And as an artist and amateur webpage creator herself, Lialina has seen designs coalesce, colours harmonize, and the enthusiasm associated with those days, with the creation of something innately personal, slowly fade away.
Their emergence was accidental, their time was short, their value and influence were downplayed, they were erased or hidden.
Nowadays, we are advanced and clever. So many personal sites I see use WordPress or Wix, some hot new JavaScript framework, or static site generator, along with the application of some sort of theme. These abstractions, we've been told for the last decade and a half, free us from the drudgery of page-making; making a site is complicated, error-prone, Un-Fun, and anyway, are you sure you even want to do that?
Danish researcher Ida Engholm in her 2002 paper “Digital style history: the development of graphic design on the Internet” wrote, “Web design has become an aesthetic phenomenon in its own right and with its own means of expression.”
A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across "From My to Me" deep in a Twitter search. Something like serendipity. In the weeks since, I've read it over and over. She writes from a position of lived experience, and with what is clearly unvarnished love. She sees your arguments that the pages we used to make were ugly. She sees what people were writing even twenty-five years ago. She singles out David Siegel in particular: in 1996, about the time I was putting my "Domain" in GeoCities' TimesSquare neighbourhood, Siegel wrote in "Creating Killer Websites" of pages like mine, saying, "at worst, noisy backgrounds and interminable waits for sound files make these sites unbearable. At best, they are nice white sites with color-coordinated icons."
For a while, I would have agreed with him. I certainly remember going to the nascent texture-generation sites that would let you move some sliders and generate a tileable, textured background, or making my header text be image-based to ensure it would "look right". Copperplate Gothic Bold!. And all my filenames were 8.3 or less, because that's what DOS, and Windows 3.1, allowed. I remember the green-on-black of my initial design, the spinning skulls. I wish I remembered the URL. I'd love to see it again.
But after that, after my earliest sites, when I was keeping an online journal on altern.org and then on vanity domains owned by online friends from Virginia and Singapore, I tried to keep up with the designs the cool kids were doing. I was utterly unsuccessful, hopeless with graphic design, falling back always on some sort of minimal default: mostly text, and tasteful (I hoped) colours. It was the best I could do. And I've seen my sites since. The best of them still hold up, in a minimalistic kind of way.
But you know what? So what if they didn't. A design you pour your heart into is great. A design that ticks all the Material Design guidelines takes us far away from the web of the possible, that web where we make things because we're impelled to, where it looks good to us and that's good enough, where nobody's heard of Lighthouse, and where we're making things by hand, stealing from our favourite sites as we go.
Do ISPs even offer hosting anymore? My first ISP was a mom and pop in a little office a block or two away from the nearest 7-11. The lady who ran it looked haggard. Harried? Maybe both. She seemed middle aged-to-old, but she probably wasn't any older than I am now. I remember she had big streaks of grey hair. A disapproving frown. As a developer now, I get it. And my parents went with me to sign up, since I was fifteen at the time, and couldn't sign anything legally on my own. I made a page. "[winter]'s Corner of Reality". If you ever find it deep in the wayback, you'll know it's me. The index page says "Written in the VI Editor". Was I using it in Windows 3.1? The shell at the ISP? Anyways, I was an insufferable nerd even then.
I had an emulation page. A nethack page. I even converted a copy of the 3.2 guidebook to HTML? Well done, former self. While at this point I'd moved past GeoCities, which probably only occupied a year or so of my life, I was clearly taken: anyone can make a website. That seems like fun. I'm going to channel my enthusiasm online.
More damaging for the history of the Web was the ignoring of personal home pages and their authors in “how-to” books.
Sometimes it's unclear how something started. I remember browsing the web well before I ever made any websites, using my mother's 386 at her office at the university, finding websites via Webcrawler, and using an early version of Netscape. And I remember how I got started with web design. I had a "For Dummies" book on creating websites. It covered the very basics: the structure of a page, how to create headers, lists, links. HR tags to break things up. My everyday browser for a year or so was actually Lynx: I dialled into a community freenet. 2400 bps! It was slow. It was monochrome. And it was just fine. It was amazing. There was possibility, and there were no maps.
Webmasters and their production were an easy target. Professional designers, evangelists – they all took the opportunity: ridiculing, discrediting, alienating, exposing clean styles and templates, usurping the right to make design decisions.
My father, and my grandfather, when he was still alive, used to tell me stories about loading up a box of cards for the mainframe. Giving it to the (in my grandfather's words!) "nerds in the computer room", and getting the output the next morning. For that year, until I got a 486 capable of running Windows 3.1 and Internet Explorer 3.0, I would write my page, verify that it looked fine on my monochrome monitor. Check it at school the next day, on the library computers that had Netscape. Figure out any fixes. Make them at home. My own nightly batch cycle.
Repeat.
I still have, by my count, three websites (personal, project, small web), all written in the traditional style: browser open, text editor open, make some changes, save and reload. No JS frameworks, no static site generators. My HTML might suck, but it's mine. And it is, largely, just HTML. I used to have some JavaScript for Google Analytics, then got rid of it. I have a little CSS so things have nice margins and look good on mobile. But that's it.
I built a website for my project probably seven, eight years ago. At that time, it had probably been a full decade since I'd made an actual website. Then, after that, my personal/professional website, for my writing. And I remember while doing so, seeing something of a division:
But most people don't want to learn. Or so we tell ourselves now. It used to be that in the forest of the old web, you'd figure something else, because, well, what else are you going to do?
Lialina writes that, "users hijacked the first home page of the browser and developed this concept in another direction. A user building, moving in, taking control over a territory was never a plan. It was a subversive practice, even in 1995."
I've spent years wondering if that moment in time, the amateur and distinctly non-commercial web, was nothing more than a lucky accident. It seems inconceivable now, in the age of Meta and Google, that corporations could have taken so long into reshaping the web from something we visit to see things made by others, to a delivery mechanism for pictures and videos in constrictive applications on our phones. How many of us had webspace on a dusty server sitting in the corner of a closet at an ISP, a small server room, a friend's basement?
With all respect, the personal home page is not a private expression; it's a public billboard that people work on to say what they're interested in. - Tim Berners-Lee
The shift came, of course, with Platforms, with their promise of building less, posting more. Posting what? Not code, not markup, not designs, but "content": posts, pictures, videos, songs (at least early on, in the MySpace days, until it was realized that monetizing other people's music wasn't easy). Then later they realized there was more interaction with posts inducing extreme emotions - cute animals, injustices around the world, you don't even have to say anything, just hit share!
Me is cheap, Me is easy to control, Me is easy to channel, Me is slave of its own reflection, Me is a slave of the platforms that make the reflection glossy. Me is data.
What I find fascinating about Lianova's writing, and this article in particular, is the way she makes very clear that everything that was being made at the time was in opposition to larger societal interests, and was therefore subversive. Design guides ridiculed personal sites. Even how-tos reminded you that your audience was small, may just as well be nil. But so what? The expectation of engagement, of readers, is a newer, is a fresher kind of hell.
Lialina is quick to deny easy nostalgia. People falsely remember WordPress as the golden age of hypertext; she points out it was the first platform to start to remove control over links. She references a presentation by Kate M. Miltner, entitled, "MySpace had us all coding" - Lianova, like me, remembers MySpace as a platform that fundamentally restricted how people could present their pages to the world.
I am grateful that she points this out, because this is exactly how I've felt about LiveJournal, despite being a user of that platform for almost a full decade. For many people, it was their first, and probably only experience with online journalling. You could tweak things, change the colours and styling around your page. But you didn't have full control; not a chance. You were still hemmed in by their base design, still discoverable (if you put your interests, which let's face it, we all did), still writing down your days in a platform that you have no control or ownership over. To an extent, this was true on GeoCities, and elsewhere. But you could always take your pages as-is, drop them on another server, and start over again. And we did this, often. My journal hopped, by my count, at least four or five times.
Chances are that the number of people who have ever heard about web pages made by people themselves is getting smaller every month.
And I'm grateful for this control, because things happened, in a lot of different ways. Offers of hosting. Domains that didn't get renewed. In one case, site-wide data loss (re-upload, done!). Getting LiveJournal data was fundamentally difficult. I did it, eventually, by running a Python script that pulled things so quickly it locked my account and I had to email support, and it was a whole thing. But I got my data, while it's not easily readable, I can find things with grep. People, places, things. If you own your data you can find things again. Remember things again. I'm amazed at what I thought to write down in the early days of the web. And I know there are things I didn't talk about, or did and then later took down. The painful truth, but a more complete truth, better than the fragments I have now, which are still better than what the platforms would leave us with, if they could, which is nothing.
Webmasters of the 1990s built homes, worlds and universes. But also, outside of intergalactic ambitions, they strongly pushed the concept of something being mine. The first-person possessive determiner “my” took on a very strong meaning – “my” because I build it, I control this presentation; my interests, my competences, my obsessions...
I miss personal websites not for the aesthetics, but for what they represent: a moment-in-time, a capsule made by someone purely because they felt impelled to. When you look at a website, you're seeing what's important to someone: their hobbies, a bit about them, whatever else. And also, in the way it's presented, we learn more about people: are they a minimalist? Do they care deeply about design? Are they just trying to get something up on the web? It's not just the content that has meaning, but the presentation, too. And unlike those early authors and design gurus (Lialina calls out Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen), I try to keep in mind that we don't have to stick to particular design principles, or even care at all. That by our participation in an activity that went against corporate ownership, user modelling, and surveillance, we participated in a kind of radical act. One larger than ourself.
Don’t see making your own web page as a nostalgia, don’t participate in creating the netstalgia trend. What you make is a statement, an act of emancipation. You make it to continue a 25-year-old tradition of liberation.
The personal web isn't dead. It's certainly declined. But getting a sense of its size, year to year, is difficult. I expect, but don't know for sure, that a lot of its activity is centered on Neocities, which has slipped into the "common host with discovery role" remarkably well. Sure, people still host quirky personal pages on their own domains, but they're in the minority. It was always easier to host at a site designed for it. Even now, I find Neocities easier than the host for my main/professional sites. Fewer clicks. The process is streamlined, easy.
As it should be. As it ever was. I remember it was easy enough in the 90s with the basic interfaces. If Neocities is the default, I think that should be celebrated. I go there and search and I find a lot of pages with staggering amounts of hits. Some in the millions. And some pages with (merely) tens of thousands are remarkably barren. Did they have a lot on them, once? Or have they just been around since the early days? (Neocities started in 2013)
Neocities claims to have over 600000 sites. To put this in perspective, at the tail end of GeoCities, in 2009, it had over 38 million. Lialina is right: in the shift from "my" - my website, my space online - to "me", an enormous amount was lost. We don't create, we post. We don't write, we pose. How many of us have ring lights? Know the best way to hold the best side of our face? We've been told there's an audience. That we should expect one. Here are your metrics. Your numbers are a representation of you.
As tech got better, it could've offered us more possibilities. Instead, it seems to ruthlessly optimize around a narrowing set of options. Lialina writes that the time of personal pages is over. In terms of an era, a zeitgeist, sure. But I think what's important is to look past the product, beyond the page, to the possible. In some sense, maybe I should be responding to this on my site on the small web. If the personal website is now niche, Gemini is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. But it's the act of creation, of response, that's important - what do we write about? What do we link to? What do we leave for others, to read and to find?
"There was no time in the history of the Web when building your home was celebrated and acknowledged by opinion leaders", Lialina writes, and she's absolutely right. Even here, in Geminispace - if you read any of the larger or more mainstream outlets that actually provide some space for discussion (think Hacker News and its user-generated submissions), it's a relentless stream of negatives. You can't have inline links! You can't embed pictures directly! The Gemini protocol is clearly wrong in 10 different ways!
And yet, if you spend time here, and put in the effort, it absolutely has the feel of the web of which Lialina was a part. I should know, because I was there too. Perfect is the enemy of good, the saying goes, and it's true. So I'm less concerned about what we can't do - whether at a protocol level, or due to design contraints, and so on - and more concerned about what can emerge when people actually _try_. We can't go back to what we had. But the present is untenable, too. How many of us love, truly love, what social media has become? What it's made us? Or how it's remade us?
In the absence of a perfect plan, do something. Write down your imperfect life, make things for people, and leave it all for strangers to find. The personal web was always about people. So whether it's here, or there, or elsewhere, get on with doing what interests you. Leave it for others to find, and believe that there are people out there that will find it, because they will, and understand that for some small number of people, for some vanishingly small number of people, it will be exactly what they need.