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:
I can kill a whole afternoon on https://wiby.me/.
this is probably going to become the normal internet again after the inevitable social media age verification laws get passed.
Can someone help me figure out how to find these sites and maybe where I can start one of my own? Is there an app I can download on my computer that helps me find this stuff or whatever
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.
I know Kagi has a ‘small website’ randomize visit feature:
The indie web never went away. The masses just concentrated at corporate slopsites.
This has been my favourite part of the internet for the past few years since i discovered it.
For those interested, most people make their sites on Neocities, as mentioned by OP - though I personally prefer Nekoweb. Both are great places to get started for free though, you can’t go wrong with either.
The basic HTML and CSS you’ll need to know is quite simple and fun to learn, so even if you don’t continue maintaining your site, I think it’s a really good creative exercise.
If you do get involved in the community, it’s a really fun way to get to know people, (whether like-minded or not so like-minded) and a great creative outlet!
My website isn’t as fancy as some of the indie sites I’ve seen, but it’s been a really fun thing to come back to on occasion and use as a creative outlet.
I’d love to see some other people here’s sites!
I really like your site! What did you do to get the guestbook up and running?
I embedded a guestbook hosted by Atabook - it’s hosted by the same people who own Nekoweb, but you don’t need to use Nekoweb to use it :)
Cause every night I will save your lifeeeeee
And every night I will be with youuuu
Awesome! I imagine the resources to learn html and CSS are so much easier to find these days. I haven’t done anything like that since Myspace.
Is there anywhere that people are exchanging tips and tricks for getting started? I’d rather not go to reddit (I saw that there was a subreddit when searching for these screenshots) unless I have to.
If you miss Myspace there is also https://spacehey.com/!
There’s some nice indie-web oriented tutorials I’ve come across on YouTube, but I started with the classic copy pasting from w3schools :P It also helps to use inspect element in your browser on the sites you like, helps get a better idea on how things work.
I’m too young to know what things we’re like in MySpace times but I can only imagine the resources have only gotten easier to find :)
OMG, I’d completely forgotten about guest books!
we are literally in it
Fuck yeah!!! Everyone should make a site like this! I’ve been having tons of fun with mine recently.
The indie, the Fediverse, the Gemini Protocol, and Protoweb (and Linux, of course) have made using the computer genuinely fun again.
@The_Picard_Maneuver I sometimes think that the next iteration of “The Indieweb” is “The Fediweb”', with all these sites hooking in to each other using ActivityPub.
WordPress and Ghost already do this, and I’m sure there are more, we just have to reach a critical mass.What would that look like? Maybe some sort of system where you could assign your site tags (e.g. star trek, linux, cats) and people could navigate by a relevant topic?
Webrings
Yeah, I could imagine it being like a web ring that automatically populates via federation instead of having some central site for the web ring.
@The_Picard_Maneuver Just to give one, rather niche, example…
I haven’t used Lemmy in a long time, but I’m assuming you can search for tags.
Try doing a search for #egcc - this account here will pop up, but if you’re lucky, so will @mancavgeek .
Congratulations, youve found my small, Fediversified WordPress site.
I picked a tag that pretty much appears on every post there (it’s the 4 letter ICAO code for Manchester Airport, where I do most of my planespotting), but there are also tags that identify the subject matter (planespotting, photography, AvGeek, etc).
Ghost does something similar, as well as Plume (RIP), WriteFreely, and others.
This would take WebRings and guest books to a whole new level, allowing 2 way communication between sites across a decentralised W3C spec.
It should be fairly trivial for the people running NeoCities and other cones to setup Federation on the back end, potentially bringing all those sites into Fedi at once.
Does that sound interesting?I’m not sure if I can search for tags. I just tried and nothing came up, but it’s also possible that the search function in the mobile app I’m using isn’t the full search.
Very cool idea though!
Oh hey Geocities, how’ve ya been?
Whenever I see something like this, I like to give a quick pointer to Gemini (the protocol, which has nothing to do with the AI): https://geminiprotocol.net/
Pages don’t have the unique html look and feel of individual web pages – everything is basically just text and maybe static images. But, it does have a small, personal feel. I don’t spend a lot of time there, but it’s fun to browse on a slow day.
Whoa, this is neat too. I could imagine some good use cases for this.
Ah, the old internet, when you’d get 25 MB of web space with your hosting account. At some point in time you could get a .tk domain for free, suddenly everyone had one. Plenty of the old pages didn’t even have css, but used HTML tables to format the site.
Reminded me of the old free
ml.orgSLDs which were all the rage for a brief moment. RIP Monolith.
Ah the good old days when XSS was a feature lmao
Oh yes. Been seeing fun things on NeoCities.
Revival? Mine never went away
Hey I do a lot with this!
I made stumbler for human made websites that have many indie/small web sites at https://neostumble.neocities.org/
And a banner ad style thing like the old ads from back in the day at https://j4yc33.neocities.org/stuff/BannerAds
Enjoy the small web friend!
I miss stumble upon:(
Me too friend… Me too.
That’s why I’m trying to rebuild it :D
Very cool! Banner ads are a must, lol
Side note: I’m not sure what terminology to use. I’ve seen “small web”, “indie web”, “intentional internet”. I’m not sure if they’re all referring to the same thing or mean something slightly different.
I use them almost entirely interchangeably 🤠
