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

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