[GaryBluto]

I was just thinking to myself about how much the internet was lacking in self-important esoteric gibberish. I am unsurprised to see it came from the same person as "A Website to Destroy All Websites".

I am especially befuddled by all the comments stating "This is how the web used to be!"; no it wasn't, and I can only imagine those who think so collate their view of web history purely through what others say on Mastodon and Twitter (who in turn probably constructed their view of the time from the twelfth or so chinese whisper down the line of various blogs and manifestos).

[vintagedave]

I feel this is a slightly cruel comment. It’s a website of creativity, very well executed. Also, if you read the text, it is right.

Some of the presentation (such as the inverted / mirrored square) is pure art. In an admirable sense: art.

While I get the commentary — that bit reminded me of House of Leaves which has been criticized for the same thing — there’s a real human behind this, who obviously cares deeply about the issues they’re communicating about (and has the skill to do so quite incredibly.) Sometimes I wonder, in the ease of critique, what it’s like for the anonymous person on the other end, and I don’t feel good here. I feel like your comment doesn’t quite account for the humanity of someone else, nor of someone doing something with passion.

[derangedHorse]

> Sometimes I wonder, in the ease of critique, what it’s like for the anonymous person on the other end

Here's a better look at how the "anonymous person on the other end" sees things [1]:

> “i’m always polite to chat gpt so it remembers me later ” you are going to die from water-poison-related typhoid in the Great American Megadesert after a particularly nasty heat surge evaporates the rest of the drinkable rations. you will be buried in the sand.

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/strange.website/post/3m33mnmcyys2t

[Biganon]

Yeah they do sound insufferable alright.

[boca_honey]

>someone doing something with passion.

I'd agree if the site covered some history, shared recipes, or even just ranted about the author's favorite movies. But this guy is just trash-talking the entire internet.

"the website has changed. it twists facts to fiction, reality to rubbish, gold into dirt." ... and so on.

If you're going to be cruel, you might get some cruel feedback.

[boca_honey]

Exactly. Have you noticed that most of these 'weird web' sites don't actually talk about anything besides the web itself? Every other 'indie web' site I stumble upon is just about the indie web.... or worse, just a list of links pointing to other similar sites.

There’s no real value here. No new info, no original content. Just clunky web design and rants about 'social media bad.'

That’s not how the web actually was. Everyone used to bring something to the table, instead of just talking in circles about the table itself.

[manuelmoreale]

You are clearly not browsing enough of these “weird web” sites if that’s your take. Or the only ones you’re clicking on are the ones that are posted here on HN.

Try search something on https://wiby.me for example and then tell me if all you get are people writing about the web.

[boca_honey]

You might be right. Almost all the 'weird web' stuff I’ve seen was through HN posts, so I got the idea that it was all just meta, edgy rejects with Bluesky accounts.

I spent a couple of hours on wiby.me browsing sites at random and it was amazing. Thank you for that.

However, 95% of the sites there haven't been updated in 15+ years. In fact, none of the 20+ sites I found through the 'surprise me' feature had any updates since the late 2000s (though I’m sure some out there have).

It gives me the impression that this 'let's get the web back' movement is mostly nostalgia. Culture happens where it happens, not where it should happen. Today, that place is unfortunately a walled garden controlled by corporations. I hope that changes, but judging by these websites, that change isn't happening yet.

[manuelmoreale]

> It gives me the impression that this 'let's get the web back' movement is mostly nostalgia. Culture happens where it happens, not where it should happen. Today, that place is unfortunately a walled garden controlled by corporations. I hope that changes, but judging by these websites, that change isn't happening yet.

So I think the overall situation is a bit more nuanced than that. I am someone who's very much in the "let's bring the old-school web back" camp but I mean that in a conceptual sense. I strongly believe that the web would be, overall, a much better place if people were all tending to their own websites, interacting with each other via email or forums. It's a slower, more deliberate way to exist in this digital space.

But all that doesn't imply we also need to ditch modern tech and go back making sites with FrontPage and table layouts. And it also doesn't mean we can't have "modern looking" websites. The two things can coexist.

At the same time, there are people who like the 90s web aesthetics, but they also spend their time posting shit on Instagram. That's just nostalgia and personally I don't care about that part.

I do know for a fact that it's possible to get the good parts of the old web back. I know it because I experience it daily. I have a blog that's powered by a modern CMS. Yet it has no JS, no tracking, no fancy features. People can get my content via RSS (and a lot of people do), they can leave a message in my guestbook, they can poke around my blogroll and they can click around and be redirected to other blogs run by people who, like me, believe a better web is possible. I also get emailed daily by people who simply want to connect in a way that feels more authentic.

That's the part of the old school web I want back. But it's also a part that never went entirely away.

> Culture happens where it happens, not where it should happen. Today, that place is unfortunately a walled garden controlled by corporations.

You're right which is why I genuinely believe that in the context of the web, not having a presence on social media and having a personal site instead is today's counterculture. And we need more people to embrace that.

[rchaud]

people have never posted weird shit on Instagram. Pinterest maybe, but not Instagram. I have been on it since the early days. It is either milquetoast "pics from my vacation" or influencer garbage. Even normal people do not post there anymore because Meta has flooded the feeds with a 100:1 ratio of ads and influencer material relative to friends' posts.

[rchaud]

> However, 95% of the sites there haven't been updated in 15+ years.

You just explained why those sites are amazing. The pressure to update sites is what starts the slow descent into personal op-ed oblivion. These are sites, not blogs. The bloggification of the web is what made sites suck.

https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/

[manuelmoreale]

Some people in 2026 are still updating sites the old school way: https://brisray.com

Ray's a great example, he even has a lovely page about webrings: https://brisray.com/utils/webrings.htm

Was very happy to have him as a guest on my series if you want to know more about the story of his site: https://manuelmoreale.com/interview/ray-thomas

That said, I don't entirely agree with the point of the article you linked.

What made the web suck was money imo. If the incentive is to keep posting to get views and those views are translated into money, then yeah, there's no incentive to keep things static. But on today's web, blogs aren't the only option. Plenty of people prefer to have digital gardens, which I think are a lot more close to old school sites.

[dandelionv1bes]

Haven’t seen Wiby before but it’s fantastic, thank you.

[manuelmoreale]

My pleasure. Will throw a few more links your way, just in case you want to keep surfing:

[0] https://wildwild.directory [1] https://cloudhiker.net [2] https://theuselessweb.com

[peterldowns]

Haven't updated it in a while but here's my attempt at bringing something to the table, you might find it interesting. https://freezine.xyz/

[rozap]

Both things can be true. It's true there's a whole circle jerk around complaining about how the web used to be better, and the much of indie web movement is just talking in circles about this phenomenon.

It is also true that Facebook and its ilk did destroy huge swaths of the online community. Example: I'm a automotive tinkerer, and online forums used to be a rich source of information, community, crazy builds...people actually creating stuff for the sake of creating. All that is gone now and the purity of an open space to put creative pursuits has been infiltrated with perverse engagement incentives, ads, algorithmic curation and the like.

I get what you're saying, but it doesn't mean that OP is wrong even if you find it exhausting.

[GaryBluto]

You've captured my thoughts better than I could. It feels very much like these projects are cargo cults. The strange (and always off-feeling) attempts to recreate badly-written Geocities websites (out of all the aspects of the 2000s internet to recreate, why such a narrow and dull target?) that are posted here feel very much like how the Melanesians built fake airstrips and conducted pseudo-military drills to attract "cargo", which is in this case is a confused and distorted concept of the "old web".

[iammjm]

It seems like literature suffers a similar fate: it feels like at least 50% of all non-fiction books are about writers trying and struggling to write their next book. Unable to create something interesting and/or worthwhile, we naturally fallback into some meta-bullshit

[noduerme]

What's wrong with some retro-lite doom bait?

When I was a kid in the 80s there were fake 1950s diners everywhere, with jukeboxes and malt machines, bubble gum music and greasy hamburgers. They were a cheap nostalgic simulacrum of something not originally all that special. That was because there were still a lot of people alive who were teenagers in the 1950s and wanted to show their kids or grandkids something kinda-like the world they grew up in. It drifted further and further from reality along with the people who inhabited that world, who grew old and died. Now we just have faux 50s diners and a lot of old movies to look at.

[supriyo-biswas]

Apart from the sibling comments that makes some excellent points, the commercial aspect of any endeavor will almost always coexist, or in some cases, overshadow the "artisanal" aspect that the "indieweb" people seem to be going for.

Even if we completely deleted the Internet and started from scratch, or any other technology for that matter, enterprising people will want to use the technology to deliver some sort of value to society in return for goods and services. This is both a good thing for the people in question, as they can be paid for something they love doing, addresses previously thought of use cases (such as online shopping or video streaming, in the case of the Internet) that people would be willing to pay for, and leads to commercial exchanges with many positive downstream effects (internet providers laying infrastructure, companies investing in software, and associated employment for many people).

Certainly, I owe all of my jobs and many of the friendships that I continue beyond their meatspace boundaries, precisely because the Internet and commercial services on top of it that enabled it to happen.

Without this aspect, the Internet would likely be left in a niche, which makes it far less useful to most. This is the primary reason why projects like Gemini, etc. will not have much success, because it is intentionally designed to be not useful to most people; and guess what? You can always make plain HTML/CSS websites and set up a Matrix server for your buddies to talk to; you don't need a new protocol and sing praises about the indieweb to make this happen.

[asukachikaru]

His portfolio / blog site is aesthetically my favorite blog of all time out there.

https://henry.codes/

[akoboldfrying]

Agree. It reads like something an LLM would generate in response to the prompt "Edgy dystopian gloom about the state of the modern web" if you kept replying "Edgier!" until it made everything lowercase.

[TeMPOraL]

Nah, LLMs do a better job. This is clearly human.