[samcgraw]

> You can still set up your tiny quiet corner on the web, do your own things, and connect slowly with other people

This is exactly what I've been after with my side projects. Thanks for the encouragement to continue even when things are slow-going, makes me remember it's a feature not a bug.

[zerojames]

The IndieWeb is a nice corner of the web where you can find people with whom to chat about tech, the web, and many other things! https://indieweb.org/discuss

[kokanee]

huh I clicked around for a while and I like the vibe but I can't find any directory or feed of pages/projects to explore; it looks like it's all documentation and chat rooms for developers. Is there a way to browse the indie web as a consumer rather than a developer?

[manuelmoreale]

Unfortunately, the indie web is very, very dev oriented. That’s because people who care about having personal websites are more often than not developers and they like to talk about development. And as a result of that you get a ton of web related content.

But there’s also something else. As mentioned in another post I maintain a list of weird links you can browse at random if you want to do some browsing https://theforest.link/

I try to include sites that are “different” and I also try to avoid having too much dev oriented content. But I warn you that you might stumble on some weird content.

[16bitvoid]

> As mentioned in another post I maintain a list of weird links you can browse at random if you want to do some browsing https://theforest.link/

Out of 6 random tries, all were dev oriented and none were what I would consider weird. 3 out of the 6 were websitehowto.com and the other 3 were developer blogs. Perhaps it was just poor luck, but I don't see how websitehowto.com, a "5-page guide to start a Wordpress website", really fits.

[manuelmoreale]

So there’s some 1800 links in there and it’s possible that some might have been expired and then squatted or redirected to some crappy websites.

I just run the experiment and out of 6 clicks I got:

- a site no longer online - a personal blog on neocities - another blog on blogspot - a dev oriented personal site - another neocities website - a site dedicated to home networks

Again, unfortunately most indie web is also tech web, there’s no way around it.

[JohnFen]

I just wish there was some way to have a web site open to the public without having its contents used to train AI models. That threat has basically removed the web as a means for me to share and connect with people over common interests.

[BudaDude]

Honest question, why does it matter? If we exclude ClosedAI, wouldn't an open source LLM trained on real web data benefit everyone?

[JohnFen]

It matters a great deal to me because I think that LLMs present an unacceptable societal risk. I want nothing to do with helping to improve them, even a little, because I view that as harming people.

Whether or not it's open source (and whether or not it's OpenAI doing it) doesn't affect the problems I have with it.

[austhrow743]

How do you square that with regularly commenting on an easily crawlable website?

[manuelmoreale]

The slowness and small scale it is definitely a feature and not a bug.

You have time to actually interact with other people, you can engage with them at a more personal level.

I have slow email interactions that have moved from emails to actual mails where messages take weeks to arrive and it’s glorious.

It’s also an extremely kind environment, at least it is for me. It’s the entire opposite of most social media.

[samsquire]

I would love to hear about your side projects, do you blog about them?