Today I learned about the “Indie Web”, a sort of web revival of the early internet days when everyone made personal websites and linked to each other rather than using the handful of big corporate sites.
People seem to be either self-hosting their websites or using a hosting service like “neocities”. The result appears pretty authentic to the late 90s/early 00s: a wide range of polish, very niche and specific interests, page visit counters, guest books, chat rooms, random little games, etc.
It’s tempting to get into. I figure that this might be something that would appeal to a lot of people on the fediverse too, so I thought I’d share. Here are some random pics of people’s websites:
Neocities is the main host/discovery tool that people use, though there are other hosts out there, like NekoWeb.
If you wanna find smaller sites like this, Marginalia Search is a great place to look. Neocities also has it’s own search function
I’ve even seen a couple communities here on Lemmy have Web Ring links in their sidebars. So check those too (community moderators, do more of that. I think it’s rad!)
Some other things to check out that are tangentially related are:
The Gemini Protocol - an alternative to HTTP, that’s more text heavy, but full of hobbyists doing cool stuff. There are personal sites, forums, Microblogging platforms, etc. I really like Lagrange Browser, because it’s easy to use and looks really nice.
Protoweb - basically a really fancy version of the Wayback machine. If you install the standalone Retrozilla version of Protoweb, it’ll more or less work right out of the box! (If you use linux, it runs perfectly fine on Wine) It’s neat to be able to browse the web and see what ot used to be like, before the Predominance of social media.