1w ago

Anyone here heard of the "indie web"?

Like the title says. I just heard about it a few days ago from YouTube. It sounds really cute and gay, but I was wondering if it's just nostalgia bait or if they're actually achieving some sort of community over there. Also, whether there are a lot of leftists there or if they tend to get pushed out. Is it still up and thriving or did it peak a couple of years ago?

And uuuuh... if you made a cute lil website of your own, can I see?

9 comments

I won't be posting my own site here for opsec reasons, but I've met a fair amount of fellow commies and anarchists in the 5 years I've used neocities. It's not really social media, but there's a small community and one of the most frequented sites there has a bunch of marxist 101 resources which is pretty neat

can you provide some more context? or are you just asking if people have created their own wesbites? you can find a lot of stuff on neocities
- Yeah, I'm asking about neocities websites mostly. I got curious after watching this youtube video. (Hopefully the bot puts up a safer link).
  I've heard that it can also be called the small web or the old web. Basically just a small group of people making their own HTML and CSS websites, the most popular ones made from scratch. Rather than relying on google
  for search results, you just keep clicking links to reach new websites like people did roughly 20 years ago. For those that haven't experienced that before, it's like going down a wikipedia rabbit hole, but fun and not just a way to procrastinate on finally writing that paper, pogchamp.
  
  I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
  yewtu.be
  inv.nadeko.net
  yt.artemislena.eu
  piped.video

neocities definitely has a lot of queers and commies, the decentralised nature of it makes it hard to assign a certain "vibe" to the overarching thing but it's seemed nice and inclusive to me. clicking through them is quite heartwarming. I'm working on my own atm but also overcoming a long standing hatred of web dev so it's slow going lol, maybe I'll post on here when it's more finished.

Yea I've spent a lot of time developing stuff in the gemini community back in 2021 and 2022. Most of the sites I like to read are at least semi-technical or art related, but yea it's a nice cozy loose community of sorts I guess. Pretty much everyone is at least sorta leftist which is nice. Here's a few random sites you might find interesting to browse:
https://100r.co/site/home.html
https://eli.li/
https://cadence.moe/blog
https://sloum.colorfield.space/
https://www.paritybit.ca/
https://idiomdrottning.org/
or if you happen to be interested in tabletop rpgs
https://www.prismaticwasteland.com/
https://www.mindstormpress.com/
One of the ways these communities actually form or stay together at all is via "web rings" which literally just means a bunch of people join a list of similar sites and then on their site somewhere they link to the list and or to other sites on the list. For example: https://webring.xxiivv.com/#random
You can also find search engines and pages that attempt to categorize lots of these sites. Here's two search engines:
https://searchmysite.net/
Sites need to be manually submitted (and I think approved) to be added to the search index. For example a search of "plan9" will show articles written about the novel plan9 operating system which tend to be a lot more interesting and passionate than if you searched that on google or whatever. However, you can't really use is to like figure out your local bank's hours.
https://marginalia-search.com/
This is another interesting search engine, but it takes a different approach. Instead this one indexes most of the internet, including wikipedia and so forth, but highly prioritizes results that tend to be more "hand-made" rather than corporate.
- I remember encountering gemini a long while back and downloaded a client or something for it. I wanted to get into it but didn't really know how, I wasn't even aware of the web ring sites.