posted july 17 2023
i think it's a mistake to only rely on nostalgia, i think it keeps us from moving forward. don't take any of this too seriously btw, i'm young and have a poor memory. my main nostalgia is for oekaki and petsite forums anyway. i can't say i miss orkut but the feedless socialization was kinda nice. the days of farmville-likes and stuff. but i digress.
there's no going back. not only because nostalgia is fake yadda yadda but because we have tasted from the fruit of knowledge, so to speak, for better and for worse. we have new and different (and by some measures better) tools, hardware and software, and we have new and different habits. we've had what, over a decade of blogging and microblogging and timelines, that cat's long out of the bag.
personal websites and capsules are all fine and good but the relationships and fast communication of often pointless but still valuable bullshit is more or less impossible in these static slow paced public spaces, while instant messages and mailing lists are private spaces. there are no memes in gemini is what i mean.
cohost is at a better spot for being mostly free of the threat of enshittification and other trappings of mainstream social media. but the thing about an alt web is that it's by definition not mainstream. i can't get all my friends into this nerd shit (complimentary), and that's not me digging on them. they sure couldn't get me to join instagram or bereal or whatever. if we all ditched socials and turned towards forums we wouldn't all be hanging out on the same spaces either. but couldn't that be a good thing? i guess twittter et al rely on being 'where everyone is' but i don't care about everyone now do i.
so anyway that's a ramble. i don't like the terms 'oldweb' or 'revival'; i think 'small/smol web' is somewhat better, i've thought about 'personal web', it seems that i've more or less settled on 'alt web'. honestly i think the core might be on the _web_ part (ironic given this is gemini) but the key thing is we're in a very app-y era, it's a very limited mindset. nothing that hasn't been said before here, we've all read olia lialina's from my to me [1].
a while back i saw a tweet (bad start). "what did people even do online before social media" and the quote retweet (yikes) read "for a brief moment we had websites". i think that's kinda it for me. what i wanna keep in mind yknow. web as in connections between nodes, site as in a space.
idk. there's a lot of the twin evils of utopianism and despair on alt web spaces (bringing with them Too Damn Much metacommentary) and i'd like to avoid being / coming across as either of these things. it also can't be overstated how much i'm just some guy.