Web Revival !webrevival@lemm.ee

A movement focused on capturing the creativity and openness of the early Internet.

We aren't here to watch Big Web burn (we have plenty of communities for that) but to find positive ways we can make the Small Web better.

Elsewhere in the Fediverse:

• !digitalgarden@lemmy.world
• !retronet@lemmy.sdf.org
• !fediverse@lemmy.world
• !fedigrow@lemm.ee
• !nostalgia@lemmy.ca
• !2000snostalgia@lemmy.world
• !journaling@sh.itjust.works

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Small Technology are everyday tools for everyday people designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

Small Tech is…

• Personal
• Easy to use
• Non-colonial
• Private by default
• Zero knowledge
• Peer to peer
• Share alike
• Interoperable
• Non-commercial
• Inclusive

It’s likely most Hackaday readers could recite a list of problems with the web as it exists here in 2024. Cory Doctrow coined a word for it, enshitification, referring to the shift of web users from being the consumers of online services to the product of those services, squeezed by a few Internet monopolies. A few massive corporations control so much of our online experience from the server to the browser, to the extent that for so many people there is very little the touch outside those confines.

Contrasting the enshitified web of 2024 with the early web, it’s not difficult to see how some of the promise was lost. Perhaps not the web of Tim Berners-Lee and his NeXT cube, but the one of a few years later, when Netscape was the new kid on the block to pair with your Trumpet Winsock. CD-ROMs were about to crash and burn, and I was learning how to create simple HTML pages.

The promise then was of a decentralised information network in which we would all have our own websites, or

Flashpoint Archive is a community effort to preserve games and animations from the web.

Internet history and culture is important, and the web is evolving at such a rapid pace that what might be commonplace today could be obsolete tomorrow. This project is dedicated to preserving as many experiences from these platforms as possible, so that they aren't lost to time. Since December 2017, over 200,000 games and animations have been preserved across more than a hundred browser plugins and web technologies.

In addition to our preservation efforts, we also provide a highly flexible software package for reliable navigation and playback of preserved content. Among the software that powers Flashpoint is a fully-featured launcher that acts as a frontend for the collection, a proxy that tricks games into thinking they're running on the live web, and a sandbox that allows for secure playback of plugin-enabled content - all of which are open-source software.

The project was originally

Escargot is a new service that makes old versions of MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger work again.

We are focused on a total revival of the MSN Messenger and Windows Live experience. Our sister project NINA is focused on the revival of AIM/AOL/ICQ services, and supports your Escargot login.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/21859865

I would classify him as a user interface researcher obsessed with excel/spreadsheets.

The Gemini protocol is brutally simple, which makes it just about too useless for apps, tracking, and commercial purposes. Gemtext, the format for Gemini pages, is very basic; with about half as many features as markdown, it's barely a step above plain text. As a result, Gemini is a small universe of blogs and personal sites.

Its simplicity makes it easy for people to create compatible clients and services for it. It's self-hosting friendly and there are also hosting services, like smol.pub and some pubnixes.

Of course, you'll need to get a Gemini browser or visit a Gemini-to-web proxy to access it.

In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.

The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.

I just heard about RetroAIM. Which is a way to use AIM (AOL Instant Messanger) in the modern day, running your own servers.

Somewhere between the late 2000’s aggregator sites and the contemporary For You Page, we lost our ability to curate the web. Worse still, we’ve outsourced our discovery to corporate algorithms. Most of us did it in exchange for an endless content feed. By most, I mean upwards of 90% who don’t make content on a platform as understood by the 90/9/1 rule. And that’s okay! Or, at least, it makes total sense to me. Who wouldn’t want a steady stream of dopamine shots?

The rest of us, posters, amplifiers, and aggregators, traded our discovery autonomy for a chance at fame and fortune. Not all, but enough to change the social web landscape.

But that gold at the end of the rainbow isn’t for us. “Creator funds” pull from a fixed pot. It’s a line item in a budget that doesn’t change, whether one hundred or one million hands dip inside it. Executives in polished cement floor offices, who you’ll never meet, choose their winners and losers. And I’m guessing it’s not a meritocracy-based syste

Manifesto for a New Web

This is a set of three core commitments derived from the practical experiences of the Yesterweb staff after two years of community organization. They concentrate what we have learned and how we operate into a general template that can be applied to any community at a foundational level. We propose these commitments as the basis of unity for those individuals or groups who wish to move in the same direction, while allowing a diversity of focus, interests, and missions. They are neither rules nor guidelines: they are expectations that are upheld by all participants, to the best of their ability, who believe in building a new culture for the web.

1. The commitment to social responsibility and partisanship:

Safety and self-defense are a basic necessity of any community, which includes the recognition that it is impossible to accommodate all people in the same social space due to the inevitability of antagonistic beliefs. Diversity of opinion is

The Small Web movement is a growing community of individuals opting to step away from the dominant, corporate-driven web, commonly referred to as Web 2.0, the Big Web, Big Tech, or the ‘core’ web. Instead, many are exploring a more decentralized and personal part of the internet, known as the Small Web, Indie Web, the Personal Web, the Old Web, Web Revival and the Peripheral Web (these terms are often all used interchangeably, though, some have similar but different definitions. Hover over each of the terms to learn their definitions). The concept of the Small Web stands apart from terms like the dark web or deep web, and focuses more on the ownership and nature of the online spaces people use.

The Core Web/Web 2.0/Big Tech/Big Web (more terms you will come to find are often used interchangeably) represent the mainstream internet most people use daily, centered around platforms like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit. These platforms are part of an ecosystem controlled by large

this new year offers many echoes of a moment we haven’t seen in a quarter-century. Some of the most dominant companies on the internet are at risk of losing their relevance, and the rest of us are rethinking our daily habits in ways that will shift the digital landscape as we know it. Though the specifics are hard to predict, we can look to historical precedents to understand the changes that are about to come, and even to predict how regular internet users — not just the world’s tech tycoons — may be the ones who decide how it goes.

Across today’s internet, the stores that deliver all the apps on our phones are cracking open, the walls between social media platforms are coming down as the old networks fail, the headlong rush towards AI is making our search engines and work apps weirder (and often worse!). But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent. We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that

The Web Revival is one name for a wider internet-based movement! The name itself is derived from the Folk Revival of the mid-20th century. The Folk Revival promoted a feeling of humanity, creativity and equality at a time of rapid mechanisation; whereas the Web Revival promotes these values in the face of the rapid digitisation that surrounds us today.

The Web Revival is about reclaiming the technology in our lives and asking what we really want from the tools we use, and the digital experiences we share. The Web Revival often references the early Internet, but it's not about recreating a bygone web; the Web Revival is about reviving the spirit of openness and fresh excitement that surrounded the Web in its earliest days.

The Web Revival is not one single movement, but a loose collection of ideas and groups that fall under many names, such as:

Some other names related to the Web Revival:

• Wild Web - Punky freeform, zine crafting, art homepages and chaotic sites - Such as

So after making my Neocities site I decided to explore other people’s sites (which Neocities makes very easy to do with its site directory), and I discovered the web revival movement: a whole world of old web enthusiasts who were just as tired as I was of social media toxicity. It felt so awesome to freely express myself in my own space and to see others’ creative spaces as well! As I spent more time online exploring personal sites and less time on social media, I felt my mental health improve.

There have been studies done on social media’s impact on mental health, which I won’t get into too much here. I’ll just say that one of the reasons the web revival is going so strong right now is because people know that too much social media is bad for their mental health. The constant need for validation, the comparing yourself to others’ carefully curated selves, the everyday exposure to bad news and negativity, and the corporations trying all they can to shove targeted ads in your face