This place being something of a journal, I make no promises that the posts will always be about photos or photography. Truthfully, I’ve never been great at organising my interests into neat online siloes. I’m worse still at expanding them into areas where people might actually connect to them. Mostly, I just post into the digital void. I’m guessing that’s a common experience online.

Sometimes, I reflect on the way the web has changed over the years. I began my online journey sometime in the mid-80s when I connected to a local BBS called Nexus, hosted at a nearby library. It was exciting to hear the dial-tone and plop the phone onto the kludged-together modem that someone in the Amstrad Computer Club had made. The idea that you could send an electronic message and receive one in return seemed magical.

There was a sense of geekish community in those early days. I was never especially tech-savvy in the sense that I could write code or talk about Unix systems, but I was certainly an interested party. I count at least part of the 90s as fledgling internet days, as people colonised online forums, used IRC, and built the content of the web eagerly via personal home-pages and niche interest groups. Back then, it seemed as though anyone could build a web-site by learning just a little HTML. Nowadays, it’s an exclusive activity and you need a degree…

Where are we now?

Despite big parts of the Unix-driven early web still underlying the modern web of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and slick social media platforms, the web of today is mostly a mundane junk-show of companies selling personal data, in your face advertising, enshittification, AI-powered bullshit, and venture capitalists looking for the next big thing so they can swindle more people. I understand that some are looking to rebuild the personal home-page boom of the 90s, but that time is now gone. That culture was fleeting, and no amount of modern CSS fudging can remake the joyous time that so many people felt when they built their first home-page back then.

Honestly, I don’t feel like I quite fit into this new modern web. There’s too much shouting and too much corporatism. There are too many people trying desperately to market their shit to whomever will listen, without offering any genuine communication in return. And social media platforms and communities are only considered successful if they feature tens of millions of users talking endlessly about themselves. Here’s a tip: those billionaire platform owners are only interested in profit, influence, and selling your data.

What happened to those small online communities? What happened to the tiny online discussion forums where the same small bunch of socially awkward nerds gathered weekly? An online community is now only considered successful if the user-base blows out into the millions and I think that’s sad. It’s as though the capitalist idea of growth at any cost has infected us so deeply that our online communities must reflect it, otherwise they’re unprofitable failures.

The web of today is definitely not representative of the exciting web experience I remember. The early web was constructed from more noble intentions to connect people and spread information globally. Back then, people were happy to have special and weird online usernames. Going online in the 90s wasn’t like being offline but with Subscribers and Followers, it was like entering a different world where you could be anonymous and exercise your strange alter-ego and talk about shit you liked without expecting Likes and Follows. Self-centred billionaires have a lot more trouble selling your weird username to advertisers than your real name and personal data! Why else do you think Google waged the nymwars?

Finding the old tribe

Even though we can’t go back to earlier times, there are still people out there dedicated to the idea of the small web. Some of them, like omg.lol, offer simple hosting and other services. Places like tilde.club even open up the Unix-based structure of the web to offer personal home-pages. And if you want to deep-dive into resisting the corporate web and the march of AI into every aspect of our lives, you can find more info at Indieweb.

I’ve also started curating a list of links to small web and indieweb resources. You’ll find sweet little search engines, free static site hosting, minimal and little-known blog platforms, and more!

I’ve written something of part 2 here.