💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 5-20.gmi captured on 2024-08-25 at 00:18:40. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Last January, I started a neocities page to get back into web development. This is a bit of a lie: I have two domains, one for my personal site, one for my big project. I'm proud of these; all the HTML and CSS are hand-written. I've dealt with CMSs only in a professional capacity; I don't want to work with those in a personal capacity, in part because I believe the "content-ization" of the web has been a deeply negative force. Look around at all the websites you use on a daily basis. They're all different, but they feel the same, don't they? And there are static site generators to make things easier if you don't like CMSs. I get that a certain sort of person likes these. But I want to be writing in the medium. I'd rather write HTML (or, here, gemtext) directly. What's possible drives things forward. CMSs and static site generators restrict the possible, or at least make certain things harder.
But that said there was a period of about a dozen years (say, 2003-15) where I didn't write a lick of HTML. Prior to the pages above, the last site I made was on my departmental webspace when I was a grad student in the early 00s. I wish I remembered the URL. I faintly remember the design, the frameless sidebar navigation that if I was good, would have been done with divs, but in all likelihood, was probably done with tables.
That said, it was mine. It wasn't beautiful, but I made it. How many things have most people made online in the last decade? For most people, I'd wager that it's very little.
At The Verge, Mia Sato writes about how Google, through its style guide and tools like Lighthouse, has had an outsized impact on the direction of the web over the past fifteen or twenty years. SEO has always existed: early on (I wrote my first webpage in ~1996-97) it was Known that you should have meta tags and use alt text on all your meaningful images - yes, the latter was a thing, even then! And while this was early days, SEO was alive and well, driving the direction and ideas behind more corporate pages, trying to ensure pages would be placed high in every search engine.
Because at that time, there were many, many search engines - these days, at least in the west, at least for your everyday web user, there's Google, and that's really about it. Sit down, Bing, nobody cares about you. But in the late 90s wild west there was Yahoo!, Lycos, Alta Vista, Hotbot, and many others. You couldn't target just one engine. Each had its own algorithms, preferences, blind spots. There was still heterogeneity on the open web.
This changed, of course, with Google. What a boon to the ruiners. Now instead of having to care about the placement on a bunch of search engines with 3-6% of the market share, they only have to care about the big guy. And we're all paying for it.
We're paying for it because making webpages stopped being a thing that people did, because the essence of that activity (writing either about yourself or the things that you love) got swallowed up by the corporate web as well. People pissed and moaned about the state of amateur web design in the 90s, but there was an enormous variety - your GeoCities rainbow vomit, minimalistic pages, image-heavy pages that mimiced computer applications or magazine pages. There was a time when you'd search the web for Tori Amos or the X-Files and the top hit would be some amazing fansite, rather than Yet Another Subreddit. But things changed. The act of creation was, intentionally or not, slowed. Ordinary people got swallowed up.
Here, we were told, here's a form. What's your name? Your interests? Where do you live? We populated this as we were asked. It wasn't as featureful as making our own pages, but it was easier, and that's something. Plus, this site has all my friends from real life. Maybe I don't want to show them what I've been making online for years. I don't want them to know me as winter. To them, I'm just [redacted].
When the creation died, the old web died. Oh, it's still there - people still write blog posts and make websites, but it's become a much rarer activity. Who cares about having a personal homepage anymore? Weirdos, right? More than Lighthouse or any style guide, it was the end of creativity on the open web that pushed us towards this haze of "Best USB-C Adapter Reddit 2024". And that's a shame. Because I think that the web of today, while vastly more useful in terms of being able to do things for everyday life (google the name of your nearby pharmacy on your phone, hit "call"), is a lot less interesting than what we thought it could be, at an aspirational level, twenty-five years ago.
That's part of why I started a neocities site last year. Because while I had a pair of domains that serve a very specific purpose, there needs to be a place online for the things that are not necessarily useful, for things that just...are. Things that are dumb, or weird, or cringe, or whatever. I haven't written fanfic in a quarter century - my Buffy fanfic was under a username I mercifully used once, under a dead email address - but I dipped my toe back into those waters a bit, just a little bit, late last year. And what I found (AO3) was more of what I've come to hate about the modern web: centralization, contentization, sludge. Why does everything have to flow through a central hub? It was a joy, honestly, when you went through someone's writing (whether that was fanfic, or literary, or whatever), and really connected with it. Part of that, I truly believe, was finding it on their site, which they made for strangers to serendipitously stumble upon. It felt like something shared between the two of you. And now that's gone.
I think it can come back. Not fanfic on GeoCities or Angelfire sites specifically, but the act of creation and sharing. I think it'll take a radical examination of who the web is for, and how things are presented. The web-of-info, the web-of-searches, can and should still exist. But the more I think about it, the web-of-people is its own space. How do we get back to making things again? How do we share what we love with strangers, with no one in particular?
Gemini is a wonderful experiment in that. I don't know if that was ever an explicit use case, but I've been writing here for a year and a half now, and in that time have had way more communication with people (via my RTC and TC emails) than I've ever had on the smolweb. I've had exactly one email to my smolweb-specific gmail. Maybe a half-dozen guestbook entries in the last year-and-a-bit. Every two or three months on average. The community here is imperfect, quiet, but good; on the smolweb, it feels even more like screaming into the void, even on (arguably) its central site.
It's been gently suggested to me in the past that what I'm after is long-since gone, that what I'm chasing is the faint echo of a vanished time. I don't believe that. And just as Gemini emerged from the Gopher community, addressing various shortcomings and serving as an intriguing bridge between Gopher and the web, I'm curious to see what will emerge from Gemini, from the smolweb revival. We don't have to be stuck with HTTP(s) and the Bullshit Web forever. I don't think neocities is going to be 90s nostalgia/faux-nostalgia until whenever it closes its doors. But I do think the participants will define the direction. Put enough people together in a common place, and something interesting will always emerge.