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The Birth and Death of the Yesterweb Forum Reveal Two Important Truths
When I started out in geminispace, I decided to make myself a website as well. It had been a while - not since I'd made a website, since I keep a professional site for myself up to date, but since I'd made a website that wasn't exclusively professional, or project-related. Something more personal. I suppose something like this gemlog.
When I started out, I was looking for some HTML resources. I wanted to make a simple, clean site - pleasant colours, a little CSS to make things easier to read, that sort of thing. And around then, poking around neocities and seeing what Google would give me that wasn't outright SEO bait or spam, I found sadness' site.
There's a particular segment of people for whom personal webpages imply a particular aesthetic. Pixelated images, garish, dithering artifacts, that sort of thing. And sadness, the alias of a woman now in her thirties, seemed to be someone around to whom the adherents of this aesthetic flocked. Her site is retro, in a way that carefully hews to expectation. It has all the right accoutrements of a particular kind of 90s website: shrines, a webring, an About page, a chatbox. Themes. In a way, her site represents a distillation of the GeoCities aesthetic. And while there are a lot of aesthetics from that era (the unstyled, text-only academic web; the magazine layout-style web; the artsy, made-in-Paint Shop Pro web; the "Apple ][ green text/Tandy orange text" web; ...), people always seem to come back to GeoCities. I mean, I get it. I had a page there, for a couple of years. But I never quite got the allure because the vast majority of GeoCities pages were kinda dreck, and I absolutely include my own in this.
But sadness, and sadgrl.online, tapped into something. To be clear, the small web revival (and neocities in particular) predates her site by years. But while neocities attracted, and continues to attract, people in a scattershot way, sadness pulled them in with a very deliberate pitch:
And it all grew. To the point where they had a Discord too, and then that was too much. Then the web ring was too much: it had hundreds of sites, and apparently chuds were promoting it as a way of "improving the SEO of your site". And finally, the forum was too much.
I don't know - you see it in software projects, so why not in social tech projects, too? Promise everything, put together a promising demo, and then split once you realize the level of work and nuture involved to keep things going. It's probably human nature, but sad to see it play out in something as meaningful as a movement towards a more personal internet. I hope that everyone involved on the admin side of things can step back, take a realistic look at what they did right and wrong, and think very, very hard the next time they want to do something similar to this.
Because this, the core promise of the Yesterweb, is to make the impersonal personal again. When we daily have to twist Google to traverse a web so thoroughly full of shit we can't breathe; when we have to add "+reddit" to our search phrases; when our search results are nothing but pages of shit SEO spam and LLM-generated garbage sites, the promise of actual websites made by actual people about things they actually love? That's powerful.
So, yeah: when you throw your hands up, when you say, "shit - turns out this is hard!" - well, I don't have a lot of sympathy. As any active forum admin knows, community is a lot of hard, thankless work. You're invisible until people want something. It's hard to scale more admins, and inter-personal drama gets magnified.
But the good news is, it doesn't actually matter. Anyone with a web browser and a text editor can make a webpage. All the rest - webrings and forums and Discord - all that's just a distraction from what you should be doing. Go out, make a website, update it regularly. Find something you love and write about it. Find interesting sites and write in their guestbook. The personal web is smaller than it used to be, but it's still big enough. Forget webrings and manifestos and gatekeeping. Go out and make the web a little bit better.