It’s Time To Go Back to Web 1.0

Who is "we"?
Technoactivists can't even get people to use free software when it works and there's like five of us over here in AP land.
Who is out there willing to create a movement to go back to navigating an page index or a webring? In what universe? Multiple governments freaked out about TikTok because the data was going to the bad spies they didn't like and they STILL couldn't get people off TikTok and into anywhere else.
I mean, if you have a time machine I'd happily blow up Skynet and tell 90s communication scholars that they were right about every single thing they were saying about search engines and algorithmic content, but that genie got out of the bottle, regained his freedom from the kindly street rat-turned-prince with his third wish and is halfway through Disney World by now.
- For a lot of people it's not even "going back". They are either to young to have experienced the old web or did but bounced of it. There is a sizeable group of people out there, who went online for the first time not despite facebooks privacy invasive profile building but because of it.
  Lemmys default web UI doesn't have a endlessly loading newsfeed. That's a intentional design decision to help users spend less time on the platform. Because spending to much time on social media is bad for your mental health. So having friction points is a good thing.
  Except the competition doesn't do that. So what is your average social media addict to do when they hit a friction point? They won't close the browser. Instead they will go back to the commercial platforms.
  Some people like junk food. But creating addictive social media yourself isn't a good option either
  
  You're not wrong.
  The biggest caveat I'd have is that social media with a friction point is still bad. The negative effects of the whole thing are fundamental to the types of interactions it fosters. Even purely direct messaging applications can and will generate a lot of the same results.
  And I would even argue there was no Web 1.0. Back in the webring days I was already in IRC and Usenet was a thing. The only reason it seems healthier from a distance is that fewer people were doing it. Get back to that tech with the same user counts we have now and you have the exact same thing. Just with more ASCII art and fewer AI filters, I guess.
- Hey I'd love to read sone of those 90s scholars you're talking about. Any suggestions?
  
  Oh, man it's been ages. I'm talking being in high school and having teachers talk to me about this. And then being in uni and having it be a thing people argued about.
  I do not have any of the papers on hand or even remember the authors or names. The idea that algorithmic searches would create a bubble of self-selected media and erode a sense of shared reality isn't new, though. We're talking mid-90s here. People were arguing this about Altavista.
  
  I wasn't around back then, but people like Oscar Gandy and Dan Schiller were open critics of personal data and centralization. Maybe that gives you a good lead.
  
  Sherry Turkle’s book “Life on the Screen” was an amazing read back in 1997
  The blurb:
  Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet is a book not about computers, but about people and how computers are causing us to reevaluate our identities in the age of the Internet. We are using life on the screen to engage in new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, politics, sex, and the self. Life on the Screen traces a set of boundary negotiations, telling the story of the changing impact of the computer on our psychological lives and our evolving ideas about minds, bodies, and machines. What is emerging, Turkle says, is a new sense of identity—as decentered and multiple. She describes trends in computer design, in artificial intelligence, and in people’s experiences of virtual environments that confirm a dramatic shift in our notions of self, other, machine, and world. The computer emerges as an object that brings postmodernism down to earth.
  A good look at the sociology and psychology of the early internet and how it has potential to impact in both positive and negative ways.
  
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1021871/ffeed46818908c91/

I've recently found the indieweb, from their website:
The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”.
We are a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.
- Check out personalsit.es too - a wonderful collection of small, independent websites curated under the banner of personal websites. A lot of tech people there, but some other little nuggets too.
  There’s also the indieweb webring which is a great old-school way to discover more sites on the indie web.
  
  Thanks, those are awesome! I'll be adding my own site to both
  
  Those are great links. Thanks for posting them! Gonna give them a look.

Link us your website then.

y'all know that web 2.0 includes things like lemmy, right?
- Yeah, from what I remember of what Web 2.0 was, it was services that could be interactive in the browser window, without loading a whole new page each time the user submitted information through HTTP POST. "Ajax" was a hot buzzword among web/tech companies.
  Flickr was mind blowing in that you could edit photo captions and titles without navigating away from the page. Gmail could refresh the inbox without reloading the sidebar. Google maps was impressive in that you could drag the map around and zoom within the window, while it fetched the graphical elements necessary on demand.
  Or maybe web 2.0 included the ability to implement states in the stateless HTTP protocol. You could log into a page and it would only show you the new/unread items for you personally, rather than showing literally every visitor the exact same thing for the exact same URL.
  Social networking became possible with Web 2.0 technologies, but I wouldn't define Web 2.0 as inherently social. User interactions with a service was the core, and whether the service connected user to user through that service's design was kinda beside the point.

Was just talking with a coworker about how with the rise of server-side rendering we’re finally technologically back to Web 1.0
- Lol we talked about that back when Google implemented dynamic rendering
- Yeah that stuff bugs the shit out of me. It’s like people just discovered they can send HTML to a browser.
  Skipping that whole loop would be far more efficient but it’s not cool to do that any more.
- Right??? Like it's 1995 all over again.

I'm not a web dev but was chatting with a friend who is, lamenting web 2.0 for pretty much the same reasons as OP. He's like "2.0?!? Where have you been? It's all about web3 and blockchains." Now where was that comfortable old rock I had been hiding under again?
When the www was in its infancy, I thought there needed to be a standardized way to classify content. Something Dewey Decimal System-ish I suppose? But it would need to be easy for casual content providers to use, since the only way it could work would be in at a grass roots, decentralized level where each provider would be responsible for classifying their own content.
Perhaps there could be tools like expert systems that would ask you a number of questions about your data and then link it up appropriately. It could usher in a golden age of library science!
But then everyone went fuck that. Search engines.

Well, we're totally doing this and it's working quite alright if you ask me.
"We" have been battling giants and absolute war machines for decades and...we're still here, right? Open source software is running 90% of servers, and driving the innovation faster than ever. It's supporting their shitty techbros empires and letting them live their wicked dreams just because the anarco-communist principles put freedom as the centermost value of all of this. Isn't it?
All the while, aren't we totally enjoying our small web world already? As many of us have pointed in the comments? We won't cure tiktok adrelin addicted kids by inviting them into a webring. And I don't think I even want them in before they're cured anyway. Prohibiting greedy capitalist from poisoning our children isn't our technological endeavour. We fight back, protect ourselves, and prepare the world after. But it's a bigger problem than the fediverse, isn't it?
Anyway, I propose we selfhost a lot of good stuff and get kids addicted to robbing giants, waddaya think? Yar

Honestly the hardest part of doing this seems to be settling on what we're going to call it. Ironically, it is difficult to search for and discover sites following this philosophy precisely because they are so decentralized and independent and nobody's even using any common terminology for it. I've heard variations of this called Web 1.0, Small Web, Indie Web, Nostalgia Web, Old Web, Retro Web, Analog Web, Free Web, Libre Web, and dozens more terms even more vague and difficult to remember off the top of my head. "Small Web" seems to have the most traction from what I can tell but discovery remains such a hard problem to solve, especially without falling into the same traps that led us here.
- To me, the hardest part seems to be - how do you keep your small web from being infected by AI slop? Currently the slop spammers aren't focusing on these small web rings and web 1.0 communities. But if they did start to become popular, the AI slop would inevitably follow.
  Perhaps such sites need to run on a 100% no-advertising model. Individual hobby sites or those supported by subscriptions and donations only. That would cut out most of the vast, vast majority of the slop. AI slop currently can't produce content that people are actually willing to pay to subscribe to. If sloppers can't bring in revenue via ad impressions, they won't have any incentive to create slop AI 1.0 sites.
  
  Honestly escaping AI slop may be the hardest part of any situations (nevermind just the small web) soon if this anti-human distributed-denial-of-service attack on our awareness continues the way it's going. There will always be spammers with little to lose and more to gain, even if it's not financial gain they're after there can be benefits to simply increasing the level of noise in an environment, whether it's to hide something else they're doing or to weaken opposition to some goal.
  
  The bots and scrapers are most definitely going after anything and everything - I’ve got about 10+ bots trying to scrape my site every day according to my logs. Quite honestly it shocked me considering I do zero SEO and it’s mostly random shit on my site.
  There’s stuff being developed - ai robots blocklists, ai tar pits, poisoning the images and other media.
  It’s a pita to implement a lot of this however, just for a small personal site.
- I imagine a solution could be the same one from Web 1.0: webrings. Find one site on one and you’ve found a lot more interesting, curated ones as well.
- Genesis web

I've said for years. We need web1.5.

@macstainless
[waves hand]
Call on me!! Call on me!!
Why not just make it 1998 and bring back Web Rings?
Problem solved
- Web Rings were freaking awesome. I've recently discovered the Small Web tool from Kagi and it's basically a modern version of a web ring. It's pretty slick. www.kagi.com/smallweb if you're interested.
- I've already seen people bringing back webrings

At least we have the tildeverse
- I'm embarrassed how I forgot about the famous ~

It's called gopher and you don't used